Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History [1 & 2] 2018025824, 2018039892, 9781440848506, 9781440848490, 9781440848513, 9781440848520

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Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions

Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions Faith and Culture across History Volume 1: African Religions to Hinduism

SUSAN DE-GAIA, EDITOR

Copyright © 2019 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: De-Gaia, Susan J., editor. Title: Encyclopedia of women in world religions : faith and culture across history / Susan de-Gaia, editor. Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, [2019] | Includes    bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018025824 (print) | LCCN 2018039892 (ebook) | ISBN    9781440848506 (eBook) | ISBN 9781440848490 (set : alk. paper) | ISBN    9781440848513 (volume 1) | ISBN 9781440848520 (volume 2) Subjects:  LCSH: Women and religion—History. Classification: LCC BL458 (ebook) | LCC BL458 .W5835 2019 (print) | DDC    200.82—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025824 ISBN: 978-1-4408-4849-0 (set) 978-1-4408-4851-3 (vol. 1) 978-1-4408-4852-0 (vol. 2) 978-1-4408-4850-6 (ebook) 23 22 21 20 19  1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. ABC-CLIO An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Alphabetical List of Entries

xvii

Acknowledgmentsxxiii Introductionxxv Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

xxxvii

Volume 1: African Religions to Indigenous Religions

1

African Religions

1

Introduction1 African Religions-in-Diaspora

3

Art in Africa

7

Body Art

10

Candomblé11 Female Genital Mutilation

14

Life-Cycle Ceremonies

16

Priestesses and Oracular Women

17

Rastafari22 Yoruba Religion

23

Ancient Religions

27

Introduction27 Athena29 Delphic Oracle

32

Diana33 Egyptian Religion

35

Eleusinian Mysteries

39

vi Contents

Gaia42 Gorgon Medusa

43

Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of

48

Homosexuality52 Hypatia (ca. 351–ca. 415 CE)

53

Inanna55 Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions

56

Mesopotamian Religion

58

Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess 62 ˘ Ninlil63 Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon

65

Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece

67

Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions

68

Sappho (ca. 630–ca. 570 BCE)

71

Shamans in East Asia

73

Sibyls77 Sun Goddess

78

Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia

81

Baha’i85 Introduction85 Divine Feminine

87

Education88 Gender Roles

91

Tahirih93 Women in Baha’i Scriptures

95

Buddhism97 Introduction97 Abortion100



Contents

Bodhisattvas101 Buddhism in the United States

103

Dance106 Dance of Tara

108

Engaged Buddhism

111

Female Divinities

114

Feminine Virtues

118

Funeral Practices

120

Gender Roles

122

Guan Yin

125

Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism

127

Mahayana129 Nuns, Theravada

132

Ordination133 Pajapati135 Prajnaparamita136 Sacred Texts on Women

138

So¯ka Gakkai

140

Tantra142 Tara144 Tea Ceremony

148

Therigatha149 Women in Early Buddhism

150

Women’s Buddhist Networks

152

Zen154 Christianity157 Introduction157 Abbesses160 Abortion161

vii

viii Contents

African American Women

163

Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious

166

Apocrypha168 Art, Modern and Contemporary

170

Charity173 Chastity175 Christianity in Africa

176

Christianity in Europe

178

Christianity in Latin America

180

Christianity in the United States

184

Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1430)

188

Clothing189 Education193 “The Fall”

197

Founders of Christian Denominations

199

Fundamentalism201 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

204

Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity

206

Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women

208

Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416)

211

Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood

213

Mary Magdalene (ca. first century CE)

216

Middle Ages

221

Ministers223 Missionaries225 Monastic Life

227

Monasticism, Contemporary Women

230

Monasticism, Medieval Women

231

Mormonism233



Contents

Mother of God

235

Mystics239 Orthodox Christianity

242

Pilgrimage243 Polygamy245 Protestant Denominations

247

Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History

250

Roman Catholic Women Religious

253

Saints255 Sex and Gender

260

Sophia263 Stigmatics265 Widowhood267 Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE)

271

Women in the Reformation

273

Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity

276

Confucianism281 Introduction281 Books for Women

282

Classical Confucianism

284

Confucian Revivalism

286

Cult of Female Chastity

289

Feminine Virtues

290

Filial Piety

291

Motherhood294 Women’s Changing Roles

296

Daoism299 Introduction299

ix

x Contents

Daoism in China

300

Goddesses303 Healers305 Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination

307

Wu Wei and the Feminine

310

Hinduism313 Introduction313 Aditi315 Bhakti316 Caste321 Dance324 Devadasis326 Devi328 Draupadi329 Durga and Kali

331

Festivals335 Fundamentalism338 Gurus and Saints

340

Household Shrines

343

Ideals of Womanhood

345

Lakshmi348 Marriage350 Matriliny353 Pilgrimage356 Prakriti358 Radha and Gopi Girls

360

Renunciation361 Sacred Texts on Women

363

Saraswati369



Contents

Sati370 Shakti372 Stage-of-Life Rituals

374

Tantra377 Vedic Hinduism

378

Yoginis383 General Bibliography

387

About the Editor and Contributors

395

Index 411 Volume 2: Indigenous Religions to Spirituality

1

Indigenous Religions

1

Introduction1 Activism (Native American)

3

Ancestors (Native American)

6

Arts (Native American)

9

Ceremonies (Native American)

11

Clothing (Native American)

14

Creation Stories (Native American)

15

Kinship (Native American)

18

Marriage and Social Status (Native American)

21

Matriarchies23 Medicine Women (Native American)

27

Nature (Native American)

30

Sacred Place (Native American)

31

Sacred Spirits (Native American)

34

Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures

36

Shamans in Korea

39

Women Warriors (Native American)

41

xi

xii Contents

Islam43 Introduction43 Coverings45 Diaspora48 Druze Religion

49

Education52 Fatima (605/615–632 CE)

56

Female Genital Mutilation

57

Feminism59 Hagar62 Hawwa63 Honor65 Ideal Woman

67

Islam in Africa

68

Islam in Europe

72

Islam in the Middle East

74

Islam in the United States

76

Marriage and Divorce

79

Maryam81 Peacemaking82 Pilgrimage84 Polygamy86 Prophet’s Wives

88

Purdah89 Qur’an and Hadith

91

Reform93 Saints, Sufi

95

Shari‘a97 Sufism99 Women’s Organizations

102



Contents

Jainism105 Introduction105 Female Deities

106

Jina107 Laywomen108 Monastics and Nuns

109

Ritual112 Judaism115 Introduction115 American Denominations: 1850 to Present

117

Ancient Judaism

122

Art124 Bat Mitzvah

128

Education130 Feminist and Women’s Movements

132

Festivals and Holy Days

137

Food141 Goddesses142 Hasidism147 Hebrew Bible

150

Holocaust153 Israel157 Judaism in Europe

160

Judaism in the United States

163

Kabbalah167 Lilith171 Marriage and Divorce

175

Midrash177 Mitzvah180

xiii

xiv Contents

Modern and Contemporary Judaism

182

Peacemaking185 Performance188 Priestesses192 Rabbis 194 Rosh Hodesh

197

Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE)

199

Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms

200

Sex and Gender

203

Shabbat (Sabbath)

206

Synagogue208 Women and Work

211

Paganism215 Introduction215 Druidry217 Eco-Paganism218 Heathenry220 Magic222 Paganism224 Priestesses and Elders

226

Reconstructionist Paganism

227

Ritual229 Seasonal Festivals

231

Wicca234 Prehistoric Religions

239

Introduction239 Burials243 Crete, Religion and Culture

245

Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe

249



Contents

Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures

251

Neolithic Female Figures

253

Sacred Script

256

Shamanism257 Upper Paleolithic Female Figures

260

Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices

265

Shinto269 Introduction269 Amaterasu Omikami

270

Feminine Virtues

272

Filial Piety

273

Founders of New Religious Movements

275

Kami277 Kinship and Marriage

278

Priestesses281 Shamans and Ritualists

283

Shinto Weddings

286

State Shinto

287

Tenrikyo¯289 Sikhism291 Introduction 291 Art and Performance

292

Feminist Issues in Sikhism

295

Guru Period

297

Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles

298

Sikh Scriptures and Women

303

Spirituality 305 Introduction 305

xv

xvi Contents

Art and Performance

308

Astrology 312 Deep Ecology

313

Divination 316 Drumming 318 Ecofeminism 321 Goddess Spirituality

326

Green Funerals

330

Healers 331 Kirtan 334 Meditation 335 Pilgrimage, Goddess

337

Radical Women’s Spirituality

338

Sex and Gender

343

Sheela na gigs

347

Spiritualism 350 Spirituality and Gender in Social Context

352

Syncretism 356 Women of Color

358

Yoga 363 General Bibliography

367

About the Editor and Contributors

375

Index 391

Alphabetical List of Entries

Abbesses (Christianity)

Astrology (Spirituality)

Abortion (Buddhism)

Athena (Ancient Religions)

Abortion (Christianity)

Bat Mitzvah (Judaism)

Activism (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Bhakti (Hinduism)

Aditi (Hinduism) African American Women (Christianity) African Religions-in-Diaspora (African Religions) Amaterasu Omikami (Shinto) American Denominations 1850 to Present (Judaism)

Bodhisattvas (Buddhism) Body Art (African Religions) Books for Women (Confucianism) Buddhism in the United States (Buddhism) Burials (Prehistoric Religions) Candomblé (African Religions) Caste (Hinduism)

Ancestors (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Ceremonies (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Ancient Judaism (Judaism)

Charity (Christianity)

Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious (Christianity)

Chastity (Christianity)

Apocrypha (Christianity) Art (Judaism) Art and Performance (Spirituality) Art and Performance (Sikhism) Art in Africa (African Religions) Art, Modern and Contemporary (Christianity) Arts (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Christianity in Africa (Christianity) Christianity in Europe (Christianity) Christianity in Latin America (Christianity) Christianity in the United States (Christianity) Christine de Pizan (Christianity) Classical Confucianism (Confucianism) Clothing (Christianity)

xviii

Alphabetical List of Entries

Clothing (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Confucian Revivalism (Confucianism) Coverings (Islam) Creation Stories (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Crete, Religion and Culture (Prehistoric Religions) Cult of Female Chastity (Confucianism) Dance (Buddhism) Dance (Hinduism)

Education (Christianity) Education (Islam) Education (Judaism) Egyptian Religion (Ancient Religions) Eleusinian Mysteries (Ancient Religions) Engaged Buddhism (Buddhism) “The Fall” (Christianity) Fatima (Islam) Female Deities (Jainism) Female Divinities (Buddhism)

Dance of Tara (Buddhism)

Female Genital Mutilation (African Religions)

Daoism in China (Daoism)

Female Genital Mutilation (Islam)

Deep Ecology (Spirituality)

Feminine Virtues (Buddhism)

Delphic Oracle (Ancient Religions)

Feminine Virtues (Confucianism)

Devadasis (Hinduism)

Feminine Virtues (Shinto)

Devi (Hinduism)

Feminism (Islam)

Diana (Ancient Religions)

Feminist and Women’s Movements (Judaism)

Diaspora (Islam) Divination (Spirituality) Divine Feminine (Baha’i) Draupadi (Hinduism) Druidry (Paganism) Drumming (Spirituality) Druze Religion (Islam) Durga and Kali (Hinduism) Ecofeminism (Spirituality)

Feminist Issues in Sikhism (Sikhism) Festivals (Hinduism) Festivals and Holy Days (Judaism) Filial Piety (Confucianism) Filial Piety (Shinto) Food (Judaism) Founders of Christian Denominations (Christianity)

Eco-Paganism (Paganism)

Founders of New Religious Movements (Shinto)

Education (Baha’i)

Fundamentalism (Christianity)



Alphabetical List of Entries

Fundamentalism (Hinduism)

Honor (Islam)

Funeral Practices (Buddhism)

Household Shrines (Hinduism)

Gaia (Ancient Religions)

Hypatia (Ancient Religions)

Gender Roles (Baha’i)

Ideal Woman (Islam)

Gender Roles (Buddhism)

Ideals of Womanhood (Hinduism)

Gimbutas, Marija, and the Religions of Old Europe (Prehistoric Religions)

Inanna (Ancient Religions)

Goddess Spirituality (Spirituality) Goddesses (Daoism) Goddesses (Judaism) Gorgon Medusa (Ancient Religions) Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of (Ancient Religions) Green Funerals (Spirituality) Guan Yin (Buddhism)

Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women (Christianity) Islam in Africa (Islam) Islam in Europe (Islam) Islam in the Middle East (Islam) Islam in the United States (Islam) Israel (Judaism) Jina (Jainism)

Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures (Prehistoric Religions)

Judaism in Europe (Judaism)

Guru Period (Sikhism)

Judaism in the United States (Judaism)

Gurus and Saints (Hinduism) Hagar (Islam) Hasidism (Judaism) Hawwa (Islam)

Julian of Norwich (Christianity) Kabbalah (Judaism) Kami (Shinto)

Healers (Daoism)

Kinship (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Healers (Spirituality)

Kinship and Marriage (Shinto)

Heathenry (Paganism)

Kirtan (Spirituality)

Hebrew Bible (Judaism)

Lakshmi (Hinduism)

Hildegard of Bingen (Christianity)

Laywomen (Jainism)

Holocaust (Judaism) Homosexuality (Ancient Religions)

Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism (Buddhism)

Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity (Christianity)

Life-Cycle Ceremonies (African Religions)

xix

xx

Alphabetical List of Entries

Lilith (Judaism) Magic (Paganism) Mahayana (Buddhism) Marriage (Hinduism) Marriage and Divorce (Islam) Marriage and Divorce (Judaism) Marriage and Social Status (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions (Ancient Religions) Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood (Christianity) Mary Magdalene (Christianity) Maryam (Islam) Matriarchies (Indigenous Religions) Matriliny (Hinduism) Medicine Women (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Monasticism, Medieval Women (Christianity) Monastics and Nuns (Jainism) Mormonism (Christianity) Mother of God (Christianity) Motherhood (Confucianism) Mystics (Christianity) Nature (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Neolithic Female Figures (Prehistoric Religions) Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess ˘ (Ancient Religions) Ninlil (Ancient Religions) Nuns, Theravada (Buddhism) Ordination (Buddhism) Orthodox Christianity (Christianity) Paganism (Paganism)

Meditation (Spirituality)

Pajapati (Buddhism)

Mesopotamian Religion (Ancient Religions)

Peacemaking (Islam)

Middle Ages (Christianity) Midrash (Judaism) Ministers (Christianity) Missionaries (Christianity) Mitzvah (Judaism) Modern and Contemporary Judaism (Judaism) Monastic Life (Christianity) Monasticism, Contemporary Women (Christianity)

Peacemaking (Judaism) Performance (Judaism) Pilgrimage (Christianity) Pilgrimage (Hinduism) Pilgrimage (Islam) Pilgrimage, Goddess (Spirituality) Polygamy (Christianity) Polygamy (Islam) Prajnaparamita (Buddhism) Prakriti (Hinduism)



Alphabetical List of Entries

Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon (Ancient Religions)

Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles (Sikhism)

Priestesses (Judaism)

Roman Catholic Women Religious (Christianity)

Priestesses and Oracular Women (African Religions) Priestesses and Elders (Paganism) Priestesses (Shinto) Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece (Ancient Religions) Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination (Daoism)

Rosh Hodesh (Judaism) Sacred Place (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Sacred Script (Prehistoric Religions) Sacred Spirits (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Sacred Texts on Women (Buddhism)

Prophet’s Wives (Islam)

Sacred Texts on Women (Hinduism)

Protestant Denominations (Christianity)

Saints (Christianity)

Purdah (Islam) Qur’an and Hadith (Islam) Rabbis (Judaism) Radha and Gopi Girls (Hinduism)

Saints, Sufi (Islam) Salome Alexandra (Judaism) Sappho (Ancient Religions) Saraswati (Hinduism) Sati (Hinduism)

Radical Women’s Spirituality (Spirituality)

Seasonal Festivals (Paganism)

Rastafari (African Religions)

Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms (Judaism)

Reconstructionist Paganism (Paganism)

Sex and Gender (Christianity)

Reform (Islam) Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History (Christianity) Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions (Ancient Religions) Renunciation (Hinduism) Ritual (Jainism) Ritual (Paganism)

Sex and Gender (Judaism) Sex and Gender (Spirituality) Shabbat (Sabbath) (Judaism) Shakti (Hinduism) Shamanism (Prehistoric Religions) Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures (Indigenous Religions) Shamans and Ritualists (Shinto)

xxi

xxii

Alphabetical List of Entries

Shamans in East Asia (Ancient Religions) Shamans in Korea (Indigenous Religions) Shari‘a (Islam) Sheela na gigs (Spirituality) Shinto Weddings (Shinto) Sibyls (Ancient Religions) Sikh Scriptures and Women (Sikhism) Soka Gakkai (Buddhism) Sophia (Christianity) Spiritualism (Spirituality) Spirituality and Gender in Social Context (Spirituality) Stage-of-Life Rituals (Hinduism) State Shinto (Shinto) Stigmatics (Christianity) Sufism (Islam) Sun Goddess (Ancient Religions) Synagogue (Judaism) Syncretism (Spirituality) Tahirih (Baha’i) Tantra (Buddhism) Tantra (Hinduism) Tara (Buddhism) Tea Ceremony (Buddhism) Tenrikyo¯ (Shinto) Therigata (Buddhism) Upper Paleolithic Female Figures (Prehistoric Religions)

Vedic Hinduism (Hinduism) Wicca (Paganism) Widowhood (Christianity) Women and Work (Judaism) Women in Baha’i Scriptures (Baha’i) Women in Early Buddhism (Buddhism) Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) (Christianity) Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices (Prehistoric Religions) Women in the Reformation (Christianity) Women of Color (Spirituality) Women Warriors (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity (Christianity) Women’s Buddhist Networks (Buddhism) Women’s Changing Roles (Confucianism) Women’s Organizations (Islam) Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia (Ancient Religions) Wu Wei and the Feminine (Daoism) Yoga (Spirituality) Yoginis (Hinduism) Yoruba Religion (African Religions) Zen (Buddhism)

Acknowledgments

Many people helped make this project possible. I am especially grateful to Charlene Spretnak who helped launch the project by introducing me to potential contributors. It was through Charlene that I met Miriam Robbins Dexter, to whom I will be forever grateful; she has selflessly mentored, encouraged, and supported me through the entire production. Many contributors dedicated time and effort to review and sometimes edit my work, including Carol P. Christ, Miranda Shaw, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Lynn Gottlieb, Kathrine Clark Walter, Arisika Razak, Kathryn LaFevers Evans Three Eagles, Riane Eisler, Amanda Haste, and Rachel York-Bridgers. Harald Haarmann compiled the timeline. Joan Marler provided additional support. Numerous others, too many to be listed here, also contributed to the completion of this work. I am deeply grateful to each of them. I wish to remember my teachers at Ventura College and my professors at the University of California Santa Barbara (especially John P. Sullivan) and the University of Southern California (Sheila Briggs and Robert Ellwood). My education also came through life lessons, conversations, and the support of fellow students, colleagues, and fellow writers, with special thanks to Karen Harrison, Amada Irma Perez, Ruth Handy, and Mar Preston. I have also learned from the many conversations I have had over the years with Astrid Potter. For their support and encouragement, I am grateful to friends, family, and colleagues. Foremost among these is my partner, Frank Manning, who generously provided material support without which this project would not have been possible. Thank you, my love.

Introduction

Women are creators and sustainers of culture. Across the span of human history, women have participated in world-building and life-sustaining cultural creativity. Religion is an important area where they have made enormous contributions. Learning about women’s faith practice, creativity, and experience in this area is educational for those in many fields of study. As one half of the human species, in some ways women represent all of humanity. It is a human fact, for example, and not just a fact about one sex, that all humans are mortal. While women’s roles in preparing the dead for burial may differ in some cultures from those of men, the reality and experience of death exists for all humans. Thus, knowledge of women in religion brings us closer to a full knowledge of humanity. Contemporary scholars recognize that a significant number of women’s voices have been suppressed and their lives made invisible by writers of history. The fact is, there is no need for a “men in world religions” encyclopedia because men have been the subject of history en toto for so long that, for the most part, “history” is “men in history.” A project like this comes into existence, in general, to compensate for a lack of exposure of what women have done, how they lived, and who they were. There is currently an enormous amount yet to be made known about women, and Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture across History is intended to contribute to that effort. In recent years, the study of women in religion has grown, as indicated by new titles such as Women in New Religions (Laura Vance, 2013), Women in Christian Traditions (Rebecca Moore, 2015), Women in Japanese Traditions (Barbara Ambrose, 2015), and Women and Asian Religions (Zayn Kassam, 2017). This two-volume encyclopedia contributes to the field of women in religion with articles on a range of topics and is unique in offering nearly 300 reference entries divided into 17 topical sections with a focus on women in world religions. These volumes gather together information on the many ways women express and experience their faith. Designed to complement general studies of religion, this project provides topical and organizational similarities to other studies in religion for readers who have come to expect them. The entries do not offer general descriptions of the world’s religions. They focus instead on the specifics of women in religion. While, ultimately, it would be best to develop materials that integrate the study of women and religion into a general and inclusive religious studies, the development of such literature is currently in its infancy. Given what is available, a combined reading of this work with general sources on religion will provide a more accurate understanding of religion than one provided by general studies of religion alone.

xxvi Introduction

Religion

The entries display common threads across faiths and cultures as well as tremendous diversity in women’s religious and spiritual activities. Each woman is born into a society and culture, and it has often been the case throughout history that one’s religion is based entirely on where one is born; a woman born in India to a Hindu family would become a Hindu, and one born in India to a Muslim family would become a Muslim. Such a person’s life may be lived entirely within one set of beliefs and practices; yet, within her society, and even within her religion, there are many faiths. Hinduism may be the most diverse of any group of practices to be called a religion. Other religions, such as those of indigenous peoples, are also very diverse. In Africa, for example, indigenous traditions find unique expression in each of thousands of groups, many blending in unique ways with the major imported religions of Christianity and Islam. In the diaspora, African religions like Candomblé and Vodou thrive in the spaces between continents and cultures— blending, renewing, and becoming. In Christianity, there are currently thousands of Protestant denominations, with new ones starting up and some dying out. Another factor affecting religion is choice, rather than birth. In many regions of the world today, individuals are free to choose from among many nonexclusive religious or spiritual traditions. Thus, a woman in the United States can choose to become a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Hindu, for example, and can practice her faith with greater or lesser dedication. She may even choose a variety of beliefs and practices from different faith traditions to create a spirituality unique only to herself. Yoga, for example, can be practiced without connection to or knowledge of its roots in Hinduism, or it can become one’s chosen path to the spiritual goal of “yoking” or uniting with the Divine. The incredible diversity among and within religions raises the question, How can we call something by the same name, religion, when there are such vast differences in practice? Sociologist Thomas Luckmann (1967) claimed that there are as many religions as there are people, expressing the idea that each person engages with religion in her own unique way. For Luckmann, to be human is to transcend one’s biological nature; therefore, all humans, regardless of context, experience religion in some fashion. For the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1912), religion is a function of the social rather than the anthropological nature of human beings. He saw religion as a set of inherited narratives and ritualized practices by which groups build and maintain a cultural world, remain socially cohesive, and share an ethos that undergirds the society’s basic laws and governing principles. Given the diverse social, geographical, and historical contexts in which people exist today, either or both of these perspectives may be helpful. In societies where individualism is prevalent and people can choose from and blend an eclectic array of practices, each is free to develop a personalized center and world view, and in this sense, there will be as many religions as there are people. Yet, the individual, as unique as she is, always remains part of a culture and society with roots in the past and a shared ethos grounded to some extent in the religion or religions of that society, past and present.



Introduction

Seeing patterns of religious elements in diverse cultures—such as belief in divinity, moral guidance, rituals, and sacred stories—is what makes possible naming something religious despite each culture’s unique characteristics, contexts, and histories as well as each individual’s experience and response to her faith. A schema of three forms of religious expression developed by Joachim Wach (1944)—theoretical, sociological, and practical—was used as a starting point for this project. Without accepting Wach’s emphasis on a similar core at the base of all religious expression, the schema was useful. Its emphasis on action—what religions do and say and how they organize (as my former professor, Robert Ellwood, described Wach’s schema)—made for a good fit with the intended focus on women as active agents in religion. A few examples will show the three forms in their application to the project: Related to practical expression (referring to “practices”) are entries on women’s rituals, meditation, pilgrimage, art, and drumming. Related to sociological expression are articles on women’s ordination, priestesses, rabbis, shamans, and gurus. Related to theoretical expression are entries on myths, such as those of Lilith (Judaism) and the Fall (Christianity), and female divinities, which are important to many women today and found in many religions. Wach’s Three Forms of Religious Expression Theoretical: Doctrine and myth—What do they say? Practical: Worship, prayer, pilgrimage, meditation, ritual—What do they do? Sociological: Leadership, groups, relation to larger community—How do they organize? (Ellwood and McGraw 2016, 7)

Whatever schema one uses (and there are many to choose from), care must be taken when drawing comparisons. Bracketing is a tactic used by scholars of religion to support objectivity while observing and describing religions. To bracket means to set aside one’s beliefs and assumptions and open up to another’s cultural, emotional, and intellectual world. This tactic is similar to the way science-fiction fans temporarily suspend their beliefs about reality (or suspend their disbeliefs about the world in science fiction) while watching a film or reading a book in that genre. Bracketing helps scholars achieve objectivity to the extent that may be possible. But, there are some caveats. First is the fact that complete objectivity is not possible. The second caveat flows from the first; where one must choose a side, it is best to err on the side of the women whose lives we discuss. Is it possible, for example, or even desirable, to remain completely objective when reporting that millions of women throughout history have suffered under social systems that were supported by religious ideologies which enabled and ignored the abuse of powers in which those women had no share? It is not for us to decide if a particular practice or system is oppressive to other women, but where women have felt the need to criticize and reform their religions, those voices should be heard and their cries for justice answered. Relevant to the study of women in religion are the ways religion functions as a form of control that perpetuates the social order in which it exists. When scholars began to study religion as an objective science (“the scientific study of religion”),

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the question arose as to what kind of thing religion, and culture for that matter, is. Not a physical entity like a mountain or table, religion is lived through its members. Societies, cultures, and religions preexist us (we are born into them) and perpetuate themselves through socialization and training. Although these systems do change, they depend on our cooperation and include ways of gaining it. Peter Berger (1969) developed a way of looking at religion as functional support for cultural mores and rules of conduct. Though social control is not all that religions do, the fact is undeniable when we consider concepts like “the will of God,” laws revealed in scripture, and creation stories proclaiming that all women must be ruled over by men because the first woman bit into a forbidden fruit. Berger’s explanation is that societies draw on concepts of sacred or divine entities, treat them as concrete realities, and place them at the head of social bodies, such as family, church, and government. This “sacred canopy” guides us like a candle in the night to fulfill the roles we were born to fill. Confucian ritual provides a good example of religion as social control (see the entries in Confucianism). This practice of reifying the Divine into an unquestionable authority over the social order is ingenious; since no one can prove that such entities do not exist, it is all the more difficult to challenge them. Some might say that, on this view, religion is a conservative tool that supports the status quo. They would not be wrong, and many women have left organized religions for this very reason. However, others would argue that religions have a liberating function, and they also would not be wrong; religions can be liberating, but this depends on the specific doctrines promoted and the flexibility of those who hold authority within the religious institution. Do they allow for change? How much change? How difficult is it to budge them, and how far will they go? Because of this function and the ways it plays out within each religion, an encyclopedia on women in religion would not be complete without a discussion of how religion supports the regulation of women’s lives and how some women have sought to change that. Therefore, entries on feminism and women’s movements in religion and spirituality, as well as fundamentalism and other conservative trends, have been included in many of the sections. Women

Wherever they reside, women are part of something larger than themselves; they act in relation to children, to men, to other women, to nature, and to the Divine. Because power is often held by men, and because women are often separated from their natal families and other women in patrilineal and patrilocal social structures, they are sometimes viewed as dependents who partake only of what others create. This project focuses on what women say and do to better see them as agents. It focuses on the issues that are important to women, on how women participate in and work to build, transform, and sometimes leave to create more inclusive faith traditions. The word women refers to more than the female sex and is grounded in society and culture. Societies mark gender in ways far beyond biological difference. When persons are divided according to sex and certain traits attached to each,



Introduction

individuals come to identify and be identified with those traits—a process called the social construction of gender. Over the centuries, societies have regulated what women can wear (such as skirts), what jobs they can take (such as nonleadership positions), and more based on their biological sex. In turn, these limitations have supported particular views of women (as people who wear skirts and are therefore unsuited to certain physical activities, as people who serve but do not lead). Sexism and misogyny have been, and often still are, a part of most religions. We see misogyny in early Christianity, for example, in the writings of Origen, who said that anything coming from the mouth of a woman is of little consequence; Augustine, who wrote that women are only good for procreation; and Tertullian, who said that woman is the devil’s gateway (see Ruether 1993). Similar views are seen in the texts of other religions, and in most cases, such comments are not merely rhetorical. They are used to justify restrictions on women’s lives, including their dress, work, comportment, education, legal capacity, and exclusion from positions of leadership and power. Rejecting all forms of sexism, I take as fact that biological differences do not have to mean differences in education, power, and intellect. It is important to understand that views which deem women as weaker vessels, as persons on whom education is a waste, or as incapable of responsible handling of power are social constructs with serious consequences for women’s lives, for the children who depend on them, and for the societies in which they live. Also of consequence are social limits placed on women according to class, caste, race, disability, sexual orientation, and more. Women do not constitute a singular category. These differences intersect with gender in its social construction and are used to justify forms of oppression, each with greater and lesser consequences for a woman’s ability to access material benefits, social status, freedom, and self-determination. At times, contributors to this work have been tempted to start with a general history of religion and then add women into the mix or to look for causes of women’s situations in what influential men have said and done. This is especially the case where men are or were the main literate ones, where their works were held in highest regard, and where their laws controlled what others, including women, could and could not do. However, it was deemed a better use of space to look at what women have accomplished rather than to detail what they were up against in gaining those accomplishments. Rather than focus on androcentric views and misogynist texts, we have taken as most important what women do and say, because to see women as capable of intent, action, and choice, even where their choices are limited, is to see them for who they are. The facts of the long history of abuses of women have not been ignored, but the chosen focus allows an emphasis on women’s voices, religious experiences, activities, leadership, contributions, and achievements as well as aspects of the traditions that are relevant to the female gender, such as female virtue and feminine images of the Divine. Women’s Issues in Religion

Many women embrace religion or spirituality, and many are adept in the creation and performance of liturgies, rituals, religiously inspired music, dance, song,

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poetry, prose, scriptural interpretation, and historical analysis. Some are great teachers, role models, and leaders. The lesser value that many societies have placed on women’s activities has challenged these women. Some of the ways women resist and rise up will be found in these pages. One especially contentious area where women actively work to gain ground is that of ordination. Many religious institutions have refused to officially recognize the superior insight, understanding, and spiritual advancement of these special women. Where they are refused ordination, spiritually adept women may be offered unofficial roles in which they contribute much to their communities but are denied the prestige and economic rewards of their male counterparts. Such are the shamans, the mystics, the female lay leaders, and, in some cases, the women canonized as saints long after their deaths. With education, which has increased over the past two centuries in most parts of the world, more women are able to get the training needed to prepare for official roles. Many have fought and continue to fight their exclusion from positions of authority as nuns, priests/priestesses, and other ranks within organized religions. Each section contains entries addressing women’s leadership roles. Another issue for women in religion is gendered language. Many of the world’s religions use masculine pronouns that appear to exclude women from the tradition’s history, stories, and liberating ideas. Women seek inclusion, and the use of gender-inclusive language helps make this possible. Beyond the question of ordination is the issue of what to call women should they be ordained. A feminine term many reject, for example, is priestess. Where churches refuse to update to more inclusive language, some women have created their own. See, for example, the entry “Priestesses” in the Judaism section. An especially contentious gendered-language issue is the exclusive use of male pronouns for the Divine in monotheistic religions. Women in Judaism and Christianity, especially, have struggled with this issue. In “Goddesses” (Judaism), Jill Hammer describes the Goddesses of ancient Israel, demonstrating that the Feminine Divine was not always excluded from Jewish tradition. She also relates some of the ways contemporary Jewish women are using feminine language—like God-She and Goddess—for the Divine. Women are also concerned with making the world a better place, and many have a special interest in caring for the natural world, educating children, ending war and poverty, and addressing sexism, racism, and other isms. A number of entries relate women’s involvement in this important aspect of women’s faith-in-action, including “Activism” (Indigenous Religions), “Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women” (Christianity),” “Peacemaking” (Islam and Judaism), “Education” (Baha’i, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), “African American Women” (Christianity), “Women of Color” (Spirituality), “Eco-Paganism” (Paganism), and “Ecofeminism” (Spirituality). When issues are of great importance to women and the changes they seek are withheld, some women do leave. The development of new religious or spiritual traditions in the modern era has been assisted by the exodus of many women from religious institutions. Carol P. Christ is an example of someone who left Christianity and contributed greatly to the development of theologies that address not only



Introduction

issues of gendered language but the gendering of the nature and attributes of the Divine. The Spirituality and Paganism sections cover new religions and spiritualties developed or codeveloped by women, some of whom left their natal traditions. History

This project is not only by women. Some of the contributors are men, and often the sources that contributors drew on in their research were written by men. In many societies, until as recently as the 19th century, most women were illiterate, and this is still true in some regions today. If a rare literate woman wanted to write, she was typically denied the privilege or had to write under a male pseudonym. This left the men of each time and place, limited to those of privilege, to record history. In those records, were women’s stories told, their experiences explained, their creativity and leadership written about? If we want to know what really happened to or by women in history, we have to ask tough questions, such as, Who wrote the existing history? What was their agenda? What was their social location, and what role did that play in their use of the evidence? When the historical evidence is clearly biased, we have to go back to the primary evidence and reinterpret it. Entries in this work that discuss women in history often draw on hard-won knowledge of women in prehistoric, ancient, medieval, and modern periods. This knowledge is hard won because it has had to be gleaned from scarce evidence and interpreted through an ardent process that involves first unlearning male-centric methods of receiving and interpreting the evidence and sometimes starting from scratch. Entries that look at women and religion in times long past, including entries on women in prehistory and ancient history (for example, entries in the Ancient Religions and Prehistoric Religions sections) may involve the application of recent methods over and against traditional methods and applications. One important example is the work of Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist who combined the methods of archaeology with linguistics, ancient historical evidence, mythology, and folklore to gain what many see as a more accurate understanding of women and religion in prehistory. However, a number of traditional archaeologists, including, for example, Colin Renfrew, sought to discredit her work, and many who failed to even study it dismissed it out of hand (Spretnak 2012). Despite the backlash against her new approach to prehistory, aspects of Gimbutas’s theories continue to be proven correct, and in a lecture at The Oriental Institute (Renfrew 2017), Renfrew himself conceded that evidence has recently come to light that “magnificently vindicate[s]” Gimbutas’s important Kurgan hypothesis. Other methods for overcoming the many biased histories and interpretations written over the centuries were developed by feminist theologians. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, developed a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion for reading, understanding, and interpreting historical evidence. She worked with artifacts beyond texts, such as the tools women used and the clothing they wore, to support more accurate readings of the texts of the earliest Christians and to gain a more thorough understanding of women’s lives, experiences, and contributions

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to early Christianity. Since historical texts were typically written by and for men, additional methods are especially important when searching for historical facts about women. Women and Religion in Contemporary Societies

In the contemporary period, there is vast change happening for women, with great educational opportunities, more female role models in public life, and more opportunities for religious expression than ever before. Women are actively and energetically engaging with religion for themselves, for other women, and for their communities. This shows a new pattern in religion, one of progress for women and, many would argue, for their communities, because the freer women are to contribute, the more the communities gain. This is true not only of women in majority religions, but in minority religions as well. This work offers many entries on women in minority religions, such as Baha’is, Wiccans, Sikhs, and Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries. Religious minorities are often misunderstood—despite the easy availability of interfaith dialogue, college courses that teach cultural competence, and popular and educational books for learning about these groups. Outside of Muslim-majority regions like the Middle East, Muslims are often seen as terrorists, and hate crimes are sometimes perpetrated against them. But there are vast differences between individuals and groups within Islam. Terrorists associated with Islam are limited to a few extremists, while nearly all Muslims have no association whatsoever with violence or extremism. Another group, Sikhs, are sometimes thought to be Muslims (and terrorists) based simply on similarities of dress. Wicca is another religion that is often maligned. Associations of Wicca with those accused of witchcraft during the Inquisition led some people to extreme views about them, such as the belief that witches sacrifice babies and cavort with the devil. Also, doctrinal differences between religions with similar background often have led one group to disrespect another and have even led to war. An important goal of this project is to increase knowledge and understanding to lead to greater tolerance, so that harm, whether intended or not, may be avoided. Language

Language is important, and how we use it may unconsciously perpetuate old prejudices. I have taken seriously the task of finding language that does not repeat old prejudices that, in addition to causing hurt and conflict when used, may also skew the facts. These include pagan with a small p; goddess with a small g; not capitalizing plural words for divinity, such as gods and goddesses; and the word cult. Goddess is foreign to those grounded in monotheism, where only male pronouns are used for the Divine, and God is understood, if not always acknowledged, to be male. Gods and Goddesses are also foreign to monotheists as well as foreign in the sense that they may refer to ancient religions. If, in fact, a religion has many deities, the plural Gods and Goddesses are not common nouns; they are names lumped



Introduction

together in single terms for ease of discussion. If God is a name and not a common noun when referring to any singular male deity of any monotheistic religion (as is often the case in discussions of religion), so are Goddess and Goddesses when referring to the female deities of polytheist religions. Failure to address this problem in language contributes to the colonization of polytheist religions by monotheism. Religions of the past constitute one of the most strenuously vilified areas. It was once thought that culture evolves in a way similar to biological evolution (a view still held by some) and that cultures of the past that have died out, like those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and those of so-called primitives, have been outgrown through evolution. Many of those cultures were polytheistic. Their pantheons included both male and female deities, and their beliefs often linked deities to nature or features and functions of the natural world. They are referred to as pagan, a term meant to be derogatory. But similar beliefs exist in indigenous traditions today and in other religions outside the dominant Western culture within which these prejudices took hold. It is essential to the purpose of learning to understand and empathize with others who are alive today that we do not carry old prejudices forward. The use of pagan with a small p is offensive due to the assumption embedded in its use that “our” religion has evolved and overcome so-called primitive features like multiple deities, female divinities, and nature spirits. Also, today there are groups that self-identify as Pagan. This has changed the meaning of the term and it is now associated with diverse contemporary faith groups that developed in the 19th and 20th centuries and which derive some of their beliefs and practices from ancient polytheistic religions. It is proper to refer to these groups as Pagan with a capital P (see the Paganism section). The term cult, while still commonly used by scholars in some fields, has been replaced in this work by more exact terms, such as religion, worship, and ritual. Cult, which is short for cultus (Latin), can be used for any religion in existence today, but this is uncommon. Instead, it is most commonly used in discussions of ancient religions, rituals, and worship practices, pointing to a possible bias in not naming ancient practices as religions. Another, and more important, reason for not using cult is that it may be taken as derogatory, especially where new religions or spiritualities, such as Wicca, Paganism, and Goddess Spirituality, see ancient religions as inherited traditions. Organization

Each of the entries is placed into one of the following 17 sections: African Religions Ancient Religions Baha’i Buddhism Christianity Confucianism Daoism Hinduism

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Indigenous Religions Islam Jainism Judaism Paganism Prehistoric Religions Shinto Sikhism Spirituality

Some sections are named for a specific religion (e.g., Baha’i, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Paganism). Other sections are named for a specific era (e.g., Ancient Religions, Prehistoric Religions) or region (e.g., African Religions). Another section, Indigenous Religions, covers a variety of indigenous spiritual practices. The final section, Spirituality, includes entries on contemporary or New Age spirituality as well as some broader topics where spirituality is taken to mean the spiritual aspect of religion in general. Each section includes a range of topics related to features seen in religions across cultures. Some of these are particular to women in the religion, and all focus primarily on women in religion rather than on religion more generally. There are entries that discuss women’s stage-of-life rituals, holidays and celebrations, art, dance, and performance in most sections. There are also entries on women’s roles and expectations in family, religious institutions, and education. See, for example, “Filial Piety” in Confucianism and “Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination” in Daoism. Some entries discuss material culture especially relevant for women, such as food, clothing, and household arts. Naming practices for this project evolved out of the need to simplify and make navigation easier. The word for the most important feature of every section and entry—women—is not used in section titles or most of the entry headwords. This is because to do so would create serious challenges for finding different topics, as everything would begin with women in . . . . Therefore, it should be kept in mind that all entries focus on both religion and women. Also, titles on similar topics may vary according to religion due to the different ways members of each religion speak of things. Contributors

Contributors to this encyclopedia bring a wide range of expertise that was recognized in terms of knowledge rather than office, such as academic rank. Openness to expertise outside of higher education is especially relevant in a field where experience, such as that of leadership in a religious organization, is an excellent teacher. Still, a large majority of our contributors work in academia, including as professors, assistant professors, professors emeriti, adjuncts, and well-prepared graduate students. Some are both academics and religious leaders. Religious leaders among our contributors include Wiccan priestesses, Jewish priestesses, rabbis, Christian ministers and lay leaders, a former nun, and a Native American



Introduction

shaman. There are also a variety of healers, ritualists, artists, performers, and museum directors. Each contributor brought expertise that was needed to provide rounded coverage of women in the world’s religions and that worked to ensure comprehensive coverage. Despite limitations of space, our goal was to cover diverse geographical and cultural contexts across historical periods. Some contributors, including Miriam Robbins Dexter, Harald Haarmann, Selena Crosson, Komal Agarwal, Nicol Nixon Augusté, N. K. Crown, D’vorah Grenn, John W. Fadden, and Sana Tayyen, also worked on the sidebars, which are included in most topical sections. More contributors than can be listed here also participated in a peer-review process in which entries by less experienced scholars were reviewed by those with a higher level of expertise. All the above tasks involved excellence of dedication, knowledge, and communication. It is with great pleasure and excitement that I present this work, Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture across History. Susan de-Gaia Further Reading Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. Translated by Joseph W. Swain. London: Allen and Unwin, 1912. Ellwood, Robert S., and Barbara A. McGraw. Many Peoples, Many Faiths: Women and Men in the World Religions. 10th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Renfrew, Colin. “Marija Rediviva DNA and Indo-European Origins.” The Oriental Institute Lecture Series: Marija Gimbutas Memorial Lecture. November 8, 2017. https://www​ .youtube.com/watch?v=y5u7fls9CIs. Ruether, Rosemary R. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Spretnak, Charlene. “Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutas.” Journal of Archaeomythology 7 (2012). http://www.archaeomythology.org/wp-content​ /uploads/2012/07/Spretnak-Journal-7.pdf. Wach, Joachim. Sociology of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

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Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

Paleolithic Age (“Old Stone Age”)—beginning 2.5 my (million years) BP (before present) • Migrations of hominid species out of Africa (homo erectus, archaic homo sapiens, presence of modern homo sapiens in the Near East since ca. 170,000 BP); archaic homo sapiens develops into Neanderthals and others and spreads into Eurasia • Anatomically modern humans arrive in Southeast Asia ca. 70,000 years BP, in East Asia and Australia ca. 65,000 BP, in Europe and Siberia ca. 45,000 BP, in North America ca. 24,000 BP (Alaska) and ca. 12,000 BP (North American inland), in the Pacific (western part) ca. 3500 BP • Early manifestations of symbolic activity (scratchings of visual symbols on a stone plate from Blombos Cave, South Africa) ca. 77,000 BP

Upper Paleolithic (“Later Stone Age”)—ca. 45,000–12,000 BP • Cave paintings in southwestern France (Cosquer, Chauvet, Lascaux, Pech-Merle) and northern Spain (Altamira) between ca. 35,000 and ca. 18,000 BP • Mobiliary art (figurines) from Europe and Siberia (around Lake Baykal): the HohlensteinStadel lion/human hybrid (perhaps female), female figurines, traditionally called “Venus figurines,” such as the Swabian Eve, the Venus of Willendorf, the dancing Venus of the Galgenberg, the statuettes from Malta near Lake Baykal, from ca. 35,000 BP onward • Cave paintings in the Ural Mountains (Ignatievka) from ca. 14,000 BP • The emergence of shamanistic traditions in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, with local developments such as Shinto in Japan and dreamtime animism in Australia

Mesolithic Age (“Middle Stone Age”)—ca. 12,000–10,000 BP • The earliest monumental temples, erected by hunter-gatherers, at Göbekli Tepe in eastern Turkey (engraving of a woman exposing her vulva in sacred display on a doorstep, most probably with an apotropaic function to ward off people who did not belong to the congregation) • Sanctuary at Lepenski Vir in the Danube Valley (with the characteristic feature of trapezoid structures)

Neolithic Age (“Younger Stone Age”)—ca. 8000–3500 BCE (before common era) • The beginnings of plant cultivation (independently in three regional centers at different times) and the spread of agriculture in independent movements: o Middle East and ancient Egypt

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East Asia (rice production in China) American Southwest Çatalhöyük—oldest agrarian settlement in Anatolia (ca. 7500–5600 BCE) The origins of pottery making (ca. 7500 BCE) The emergence of early civilizations and the persistence of their cultural heritage in subsequent periods Old Europe (or Danube civilization)—ca. 5500–3500 BCE o metalworking, first writing, religious architecture, religion of a major female divinity, figurines in abstract style, egalitarian social structures, urbanization (with megacities in southern Ukraine and Moldova) ancient Aegean cultures o o

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Copper Age (an extension of the Neolithic Age)—fifth and fourth millennia BCE Bronze Age—ca. 3500–1200 BCE • Ancient Egypt (beginning ca. 3300 BCE) o monumental architecture (pyramids, temples at Karnak), hieroglyphic writing, social hierarchy ancient Nubia • Mesopotamia (the oldest civilization being Sumer; beginning ca. 3200 BCE) o monumental architecture (ziggurats), urbanization, literacy (early Sumerian pictography, later cuneiform), social hierarchy Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian • Elamite civilization (ca. 3050–2700 BCE) major political center was Susa • Ancient Indus civilization (mature period ca. 2600–1800 BCE) centers in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro; egalitarian society • The emergence of Hinduism in India, with its origins in traditions of the Indus civilization and its further development under the influence of Indo-European (Aryan) culture that was transferred to India with the Aryan migrations or invasions around 1700 BCE • Ancient China (Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties)—ca. 1200 BCE–220 CE o Woodblock printing on paper (before 220 CE) Chinese civilization influencing regional cultures, such as Manchu, Tangut, Naxi, and others; Buddhism and writing spreading from China to Korea and Japan • Mycenaean city-states (ca. 1600–1200 BCE) • The proliferation of polytheism, with statuary depicting divinities with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic features (e.g., Egyptian Cat Goddess Bastet) • The establishment of trade networks in the Mediterranean (Mycenaeans, Phoenicians), the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea (merchants from Dilmun) • The beginnings of science in Babylonia and Egypt • The beginnings of alphabetic writing (Sinaitic) ■

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Iron Age—ca. 1200 BCE–ca. 400 CE • Pre-Columbian Americas (Olmec, Mayan, Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec)—beginning ca. 1200 BCE o Urbanization, writing, social hierarchy



Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

• Greek antiquity (ancient Greece, classical Greece; ca. eighth century–fourth century BCE)—the emergence of historiography, science, philosophy; polytheism with a marked preference for pre-Greek Goddesses (Athena, Hera, Hestia, Artemis) • Hellenistic age (since the era of Alexander the Great; starting in the latter half of the fourth century BCE) • The emergence of monotheistic religions: Judaism (sixth century BCE), Christianity (beginning of common era, CE), Islam (seventh century CE) • The emergence of Confucianism in China (sixth century BCE) • The emergence of Buddhism in India (fifth century BCE) and its spread into Southeast Asia, Central Asia, China, and Japan • Etruscan civilization (ca. 900–200 BCE)—The Etruscans mediated between the Greeks and Romans • Roman civilization and the romanization of pre-Roman populations in southern and western Europe (seventh century BCE–fourth century CE)

Middle Ages (early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages)—ca. 500 CE–15th century • Consolidation of Christianity in Europe; since the end of the fourth-century division into a western branch (Catholicism) and an eastern branch (Greek Orthodoxy, which later, in the 9th and 10th centuries, proliferates into Serbian and Russian Orthodoxy) • Islamic expansion (since the seventh century CE) and the split into Sunni and Shi’a Islam • The rise of Arabic science; the modern way of writing numbers originated from a collaboration of Indian and Arabic mathematicians in Baghdad from where it spread in the Islamic world; adoption of Indian-Arabic numbers by the Europeans during the era when Spain was under Moorish control (eighth century CE–1492) • Roman Catholic Inquisition (13th to 16th centuries) persecutes Jews, Muslims, and Christian sects deemed heretical, such as the 13th-century French Cathars for their veneration of Mary Magdalene • Exploration and conquest: Vikings (cross ocean to North America, ca. 10th century), Vasco da Gama (finds ocean route between Europe and Asia, 15th century), Columbus (finds ocean route between Europe and the Americas, seeks riches, spreads Christianity, and enslaves Native Americans, 15th–16th century)

Modern Era (since the latter half of the 15th century) • Rise of modern science (ca. 15th century), with developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry; religion-science conflicts (e.g., Galileo’s heliocentrism condemned by the Inquisition 1633; Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy supports destruction and pollution of natural world); and discoveries supporting religious/spiritual perspectives (e.g., quantum physics) • Invention of printing with movable letters (Johannes Gutenberg, ca. 1455), contributing to the Christian Reformation and development of Protestantism (16th century) • Colonialism by Christian and Muslim powers (throughout modern period) • Conquest and genocide of Native Americans (1540 through 20th century); Native American resistance and cultural recovery and renewal movements • 1590s–1680s: Large-scale witch hunts in France, Germany, England, and the United States (three-quarters are women) • 1600–1650: Nonconformist Puritans colonize North America

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• Transatlantic slave trade, slavery of Africans leading to spread and syncretism of African religions (16th to 19th centuries) • Holocaust; nationalist and social reform movements (19th to 20th centuries); secularism • Globalization: global economic and political movements; massive movement of people through global transportation (air, rail, and automobile travel); religious pluralism (coexistence and valuing of diverse religions) (20th to 21st centuries) • Digital technology (since 1980), leading to spread of secular and religious thought over Internet Harald Haarmann

African Religions

INTRODUCTION African religions consist of diverse beliefs and practices indigenous to Africa, with some practiced elsewhere after originating in Africa. A vast continent comprising more than 50 countries, Africa is rich in cultural diversity. African religions are dynamic and adaptive living traditions with deep roots in the past and adaptations to present conditions. Changing conditions to which Africans have had to adapt include slavery, colonialism, urbanization, and environmental change. The significant presence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in Africa has resulted in the blending of African traditions with these imports. African religions, grounded in oral traditions and embodied worship, promote morality, healing, and renewal. The oral nature of African religions contrasts with “religions of the book” like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, which place authority in written doctrines and sacred texts. However, African oral traditions are increasingly being transcribed, especially in the diaspora. Embodied worship practices, including ritual dance, music and drumming, possession, and more, create spiritual wholeness and right relations between the people and the spirits, ancestors, and deities, whose powers influence human lives for good or ill. Many African languages have no word for “religion.” Instead, traditions persist as individuals are born into a culture filled with myths, rituals, art, medicine, and more, where the spiritual is always present, and there is no separation between secular and spiritual worlds. In the Americas, where many Africans were forcibly brought from the 16th through the 19th century, African religions have syncretized with Christianity. In her article, “African Religions-in-Diaspora,” Arisika Razak discusses adaptations of African religions in the West, relating some of women’s significant contributions to the traditions and how these practices helped Africans adapt to slavery. And in “Candomblé,” Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba furthers the discussion, relating the development of Candomblé by slaves in Brazil, its popularity today, and the central roles of women in the religion. In Africa, women have been central to religious traditions for millennia. As Max Dashú shows in “Priestesses and Oracular Women,” women have held significant roles in African traditions since ancient times. In some traditions, women serve(d) as oracles and priestesses, contacting the spirits directly through spirit possession or indirectly through divination and ritual. In ritual sacrifice, worship, and prayer, priestesses propitiate the divinities and enlist their help for the survival and flourishing of the people. African women’s participation in artistic creation and performance is another rich and important aspect of religious practice (see entries “Art in Africa” and “Body

2 Introduction

Art”). Women also participate in rituals that guide and support them through the stages of life. In “Life-Cycle Ceremonies,” Allison Hahn discusses several stage-of-life rituals and celebrations for girls and women. One controversial rite of passage is female genital mutilation (also called female genital cutting). This rite is discussed in the article with that title. The articles in African Religions relate the significant roles and activities of women in African religious traditions. It goes without saying that, given the size and diversity of religions in Africa and African religions-in-diaspora, the selections included here represent a small part of what might be discussed in a larger project. General Bibliography—African Religions Ashcraft-Eason, Darnese Martin, and Oyeronke Olademo, eds. Women and New and Africana Religions. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Badejo, Diedre. Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1996. Beckwith, Carol. African Ceremonies: The Concise Edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002 Boone, Sylvia Ardyn. Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Daniel, Yvonne. Dancing Wisdom. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Dashú, Max. Woman Shaman: The Ancients. Oakland, CA: Suppressed Histories Archives, 2013, DVD. Drewal, Henry John, ed. Sacred Waters: Arts for Mami Wata and Other Divinities in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Griffith, R. Marie, and Barbara Dianne Savage, eds. Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Kaplan, Flora Edouwaye S., ed. Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and Power: Case Studies in African Gender. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997. Lesko, B. The Great Goddesses of Egypt. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. McIntosh, Marjorie K. Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Murphy, Joseph M., and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds. Ò.s.un Across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Olajubu, Oyeronke. Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Olupona, Jacob K., and Terry Rey, eds. Orisa Devotion as World Religion. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Otero, Solimar, and Toyin Falola, eds. Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Troy, Lana. Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History. Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Uppsalensis, 1986. Walker, Sheila. “Candomblé: A Spiritual Microcosm of Africa.” Black Art 5 (1984): 10–22. Washington, Teresa N. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.



African Religions-in-Diaspora

AFRICAN RELIGIONS-IN-DIASPORA African diasporic religious traditions are based on diverse indigenous African spiritual practices, which were globally disseminated during the Maafa (Great Disaster), or trans-Atlantic slave trade (16th through 19th century). Before enslavement, African women were artists, farmers, healers, diviners, priestesses, and rulers. As spiritual elders, queen mothers, marketplace chiefs, and leaders of spiritual communities, they crowned kings, supported religious festivals, and created ceremonial food, regalia, and artwork. Women were ritual singers, dancers, and instrumentalists—and in some traditions, drummers. Over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were taken to Latin America and the Caribbean, where they often outnumbered Europeans and were better able to practice indigenous religions—including religious drumming—than in the United States. Free and enslaved Africana women (women of African descent) were central players in the preservation and transformation of African religions. They also led slave revolts and established free African communities (known in Jamaica as maroons, in Brazil as quilombos, and in Latin America as palenques). The worship of Yoruba Orisha (Deities)—including the teachings and traditions of Ifa (based on Yoruba divination practices in Ile-Ife, Nigeria)—and the rituals of Vodou are two of the most widely known African diasporic religious traditions. Many of the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Yoruba people brought to the Caribbean in the 18th century were priests. Originally from semiautonomous Yoruba settlements in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Sierra Leone, their efforts enabled the survival of African religions-in-diaspora. Today, Orisha veneration exists in Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Vodou (a.k.a. Vodoun, Vodun, Voodoo) is based on the spiritual traditions of the Ewe and Fon peoples (Benin, Togo, Nigeria). It is practiced by Haitians locally and throughout the Haitian diaspora (e.g., in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Canada, France). Some Vodou deities (Lwa, Loa) are found in American Hoodoo, New Orleans and Cuban Vodou, and Caribbean Obeah (Belize, Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica, etc.). While Orisha veneration and Vodou are often regarded as separate traditions, prior to the Maafa, Yoruba spirituality had spread to neighboring Fon and Ewe communities. Some Vodou traditions contain Yoruba deities, and some Yoruba deities derive from Akan (Ghana) or Nupe (Nigeria) religious traditions. Members of Kikongo/Bantu linguistic groups (Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, etc.) also made strong contributions to African diasporic religions, especially in Brazil, Cuba, and Jamaica. Akan and Nupe spiritual elements exist in Caribbean Obeah and Surinamese Winti traditions. The diasporic practices of Santeria (a.k.a. Lucomi, or La Regla de Ocha), Candomblé, Vodou, and American Orisha-Ifa traditions are characterized by (1) recognition of a Supreme Being/Creator/Creatrix who is conceptualized as being beyond human concepts of gender; (2) reverence for a diversity of deities—male, female, both, and/or neither—who represent forces of nature or deified ancestors, conceptualized as “helpers” of the Supreme Being, to whom human prayers are addressed; (3) embodied worship services driven by highly sophisticated ritual music, dance, and drumming; (4) complex spiritual technologies enabling spirit

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possession and direct communication between the deities and their worshippers; (5) prescribed routes to initiation and membership in the priesthood; (6) animal sacrifice; (7) ethical teachings based on indigenous wisdom and moral values; (8) ancestor veneration; (9) liturgical languages based on Yoruba or Haitian Creole (a.k.a. Kreyol, which combines French, Spanish, Ewe, Fon, and Taino speech); (10) oral rather than written traditions; (11) the use of traditional plants and herbs for healing; and (12) male and female spiritual leadership. The histories, origin stories (patakis), and worship of Yoruba Orisha varied by location, as did the actions, gender, and significance of the deities. The Maafa changed some traditions: Yemoja, Orisha of Nigeria’s Ogun River, became the Mother Goddess of the Atlantic Ocean. Consecration to many Orisha, rather than one, became the diasporic norm. In countries where Catholicism was the primary religion (Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, etc.), male and female African priests hid the worship of African deities by syncretizing them with Catholic saints. They integrated religious traditions from different African nations—and in some areas syncretized African ancestral veneration with 18th-century European spiritism and indigenous Caribbean/Amerindian spiritual practices. The Yoruba city-states of Ode Remo, Osugbo, Oyo, Ogun State, and Abeokuta were particularly significant in establishing diasporic lineages of Orisha veneration. Africana women were major players in this process, for many Yoruba women were initiated priests or iyalorisa. Three African women—Iya Nasso (a.k.a. Engenho Velho, Nigerian priestess of Sango), Iya Deta, and Iya Kala—founded the first Brazilian Candomblé establishments in the early 1800s, and women predominated as spiritual leaders in Brazil into the early 20th century. Afro-Cuban spiritual practices began with the emergence of Kongo-based traditions in the 16th century. However, four 19th-century Cuban women are credited with creating or cocreating many contemporary Santeria practices. They include Mama Monserrate Gonzalez, Oba Tero (d. 1903 or 1907), Nigerian priestess of Shango; her goddaughter Fermina Gonzalez or Ocha Bi (1844–1950); Timotea Albear or Ayaji La Tuan (d. 1930), Nigerian priestess of Sango; and Rosalia Abreu, or Efunche Warikondo (d. late 1920s). Each of these women was highly knowledgeable and influential. While they held spiritual authority in different areas of Cuba (Matanzas versus Havana), they are credited with establishing Lucumi as a liturgical language, commissioning the first bata (ritual) drums, developing modern diloggun (cowrie shell) divination, standardizing diasporic initiation practices, and establishing diasporic rituals for specific Orisha. Their legacy was so strong that Cuban women predominated as ordination specialists (oriate) into the 1930s. While the number of venerated Orisha was reduced in the diaspora, a partial list of those worshipped today includes the following: • Elegba (Eshu, Eleggua, Exu): the Trickster; Guardian of the Crossroads; syncretized with Saint Anthony, Saint Michel, or Saint Martin • Yemoja (Yemaya, Iemanja): Mother of Fishes; Embodiment of Motherhood; syncretized with the Virgin of Regla (Cuba) • Osun (Oshun, Ochun): Goddess of Fresh Waters; the Embodiment of Sensuality, Wealth, Elegance, and Love; syncretized with Our Lady of Charity (patron saint of Cuba)



African Religions-in-Diaspora

• Oya (Yansa, Yansan): Embodiment of the Tornado; Ruler of the Cemetery; Deity of Change; syncretized with Our Lady of Candlemas, Saint Catherine, or Saint Theresa • Ogun (Oggun, Ogou, Ogum): Ruler of Iron and Technology; syncretized with Saint Anthony, Saint George, or John the Baptist • Obatala (Ochala, Oxala, Obbatala): Ruler of the White Cloth; Mother-Father; Shaper of Human Bodies; syncretized with Our Lady of Mercy or Jesus Christ • Orunmila (Orunla, Ifa): Lord of Divination; syncretized with Saint Francis of Assisi • Sango (Shango, Xango): Embodiment of Masculinity; Lord of Thunder; syncretized with Santa Barbara • Ochosi (Ochossi, Oxossi): the Divine Hunter and Master Herbalist; syncretized with Saint Norbert • Babaluaye: Orisha of Smallpox, Contagious Diseases, and Healing; syncretized with Saint Lazarus

Some of the most well-known female Lwa belong to the Erzulie (Erzili, Ezili) family. They include the following: • Erzulie Danto: Mother Goddess; Warrior Defender of Her Children; syncretized with the Black Madonna of Czestochowa or Our Lady of Mount Carmel • Erzulie Freda: the Lwa of Love and Compassion; syncretized with Our Lady of Sorrows • Lasyrenn (Labalenn): Lwa of Fishes; sometimes depicted as a mermaid; syncretized with Saint Martha

Other important Lwa include the following: • Papa Legba: Guardian of the Crossroads; syncretized with Saint Anthony • Damballah: The Serpent Deity; Father of the Lwa and Bringer of Rain; syncretized with Saint Patrick • Agwe: the Lwa of the Sea

Haitian Lwa are venerated with symbols known as veves drawn on the floor with cornmeal, bark, gunpowder, or redbrick powder—and each Lwa has a specific veve. Like the Orisha, Lwa can be male or female or embody aspects of both genders. Many Vodou religious communities have been led by priestesses who serve as healers, social workers, and diviners. Stories of the Lwa and Orisha have provided Africana women with inspiring examples of the strength, courage, patience, wisdom, love, spiritual prowess, and sexuality that enabled African people to survive the Maafa. One notable example occurred on August 14, 1791, during a Vodou ceremony when Haitian priestess Cécile Fatiman was possessed by Erzulie Danto. Erzulie Danto exhorted the enslaved Africans to revolt, launching the Haitian Revolution, which produced the West’s first free black nation. Ghanaian-born Queen Nanny was an Obeah practitioner who successfully battled the British and established a free maroon community in Jamaica. Black anthropologist, human rights activist, and modern dance pioneer ­Katherine Dunham (1909–2006) was a Vodou initiate whose choreography included dance and music from Vodou and Orisha ceremonies. Dunham’s work, and the work

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of her students, introduced thousands of African Americans to these religions. One student, Oba (King) Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I (1928–2005), founded Harlem’s Yoruba Temple (1960) and the Yoruba-style settlement, Oyotonji Village, in South Carolina (1970). Initiated in Cuba, his efforts to remove European and Catholic elements from Orisha worship and promulgate African-centered Orisha-Vodou (a.k.a. New World Orisha Spirituality or Orisha-Ifa) were supported and enabled by two renowned Santeria priestesses, Barbadian Mama Keke and Asuncion “Sunita Serrano” (1902–1996), as well as by black nationalist activist Queen Mother Moore (1898–1997). Other black women who contributed to the development and dissemination of American Orisha-Ifa Spirituality include Chief Oloye Fayomi Falade, Chief Oloye Aino Olomo, Chief Fama, Chief Oloye Luisa Teish, Iyanifa Oshunike, and Iyanifa Ifalola TaShia Asanti. While both male and female initiates are “brides” (iyawo, yawo) of Yoruba deities, gendered religious roles and responsibilities exist in most African and diasporic religious communities. In Cuba, Ifa traditions restrict the title of babalowa (highest level of diviner-priests) to men, even though an equivalent title for women, iyanifa (highest level of female diviner-priests), exists in Africa. Black women in Oyotunji Village were critical actors in successfully demanding reinstatement of this title in the United States. Today, many Africana practitioners are initiated in Nigeria, where an international council was formed to protect, preserve, and sustain Yoruba spiritual traditions both locally and globally. Many same-gender-loving women have been attracted to African diasporic religions that value women’s physical strength, spiritual leadership, and sexuality. In some diasporic communities, LGBTQIQ individuals are associated with particular Lwa or Orisha. Their sexual orientation is viewed as a reflection of their spiritual nature or the demands of their deity, and they can hold the highest level of spiritual authority. While restrictions on women’s and queer people’s religious roles exist, they have been challenged throughout the diaspora, and same-gender-loving priests have introduced and/or initiated thousands of individuals into African diasporic religious traditions. Arisika Razak See also: African Religions: Candomblé; Priestesses and Oracular Women; Yoruba Religion; Spirituality: Divination; Women of Color Further Reading Ashcraft-Eason, Darnese Martin, and Oyeronke Olademo, eds. Women and New and Africana Religions. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Olupona, Jacob K., and Terry Rey, eds. Orisa Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Otero, Solimar, and Toyin Falola, eds. Yemoja: Gender, Sexuality, and Creativity in the Latina/o and Afro-Atlantic Diasporas. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013. Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.



Art in Africa

ART IN AFRICA The art of indigenous peoples of Africa was produced in highly developed spiritual cultures. In African societies, the sacred was deeply embedded in everyday acts and functions. Religion and art were intertwined: human art praised and propitiated the spirit world and celebrated the world of humans, which was supported by the spirits. Sacred and secular acts of creativity embodied respectful exchanges between the realm of spirits and the world of humans. Matter was not dead—it was inhabited, alive, and volitional. The creation of jewelry, cloth, costumes, and images; the smelting of iron and gold; and the learning and execution of creative skills in music, dance, and public oration were never simple manifestations of individual artistic genius, although personal skill and exceptional artistry were recognized. Instead, the process of creation involved personal and ritual preparation, ceremonial prayers and invocations, and knowledge acquired through years of apprenticeship that was passed down through generations. The significance and creativity of women artists in precolonial African societies was often marginalized by Westerners. In part, this was due to the West’s separation of “fine arts” from crafts. The making of aesthetically pleasing objects for actual use—ritual, domestic, economic—was not disdained in Africa. In fact, it was the norm. However, the arts of pottery, beading, basketmaking, and weaving, which are done by women—and in some areas by men—were considered crafts rather than art by Westerners. While women’s participation as singers, dancers, and spiritual leaders was recognized, the masquerade—the dances, songs, ritual attire, masks, and ceremonies that collectively form highly valued spiritual rituals in many African societies—was initially viewed by Western researchers as an exclusively masculine form. Moreover, many African societies emphasize patriarchy/patrilineality, and in their encounters with Christianity and colonization, the role of women was increasingly subordinated. What went unrecognized was that many traditional African cultures employed complementary systems of sex and gender balances in the social, spiritual, and artistic realms. The Yoruba Gelede masquerade, which celebrates and propitiates the awesome, protective, lethal female powers, respectfully and collectively titled “Our Mothers,” is danced exclusively by men—many of whom are masked and costumed as women. Gelede has been characterized as a male performance event, although it includes the whole community. However, it is women who donate the head ties and cloths for male performers to wear. Moreover, Gelede female masks depict Yoruba women’s complex and elaborate hairstyles, which, in real life, are designed and executed by women. Research (Glaze 1975) on Senufo funerary activities in Côte d’Ivoire showed that male ritual artistry was paralleled by female ritual artistry. The wives of Senufo blacksmiths created ceremonial baskets, and the wives of brass makers created pots. In other African cultures, the wives of blacksmiths work with clay. Women’s (and men’s) pottery making can symbolize the moment of creation, when humanity was shaped from clay, and pot making is often spiritually, socially, and economically rewarding for women.

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Aronson (1991) notes that while women in Africa don’t make masks of wood, they do create and paint masks of fiber. While Senufo men carve the masks for the Poro society, women as ritual specialists determine the most efficacious placement of masks in male shrines. Among the Mende in Sierra Leone (Boone 1986), masks for the highly prestigious female Sande society are generally made by men, although the most sacred and beautiful masks are said to be carved by water spirits and retrieved from the waters by women. Sande female dance specialists often commission masks that require specific design elements from the carvers. In many African cultures, fertility and generativity were viewed as sacred acts, and the symbolic union of male and female was embodied in the creative process. Makilam (2007) asserts that when a traditional Berber Kabyle woman begins a pot, she starts with a ball, shaped like the feminine moon, on which she places a coil of clay representing the masculine element. The flattened foundation is named after female genitalia and the coil of clay after male genitalia. In Kabyle weaving, the crossing of the warp and weft threads symbolized the act of sexual intercourse; weaving represents the making of life just as lovemaking does. For Kabyle women, these arts are spiritual acts, embodying mystery, secrecy, and power. In African societies where men and women both weave, the looms are usually different. Among the Yoruba, men use a horizontal foot-treadle loom, producing long, narrow strips of cloth. Women (generally) weave on broader, fixed-frame stationary looms, producing a broader cloth. The ritual cloth worn by Oshugbo elders (traditional judges among the Ijebu Yoruba) is woven by women and carries within it symbols of the sacred. Among the Owo Yoruba, women weave the cloth for burials and title taking, and men weave for the mundane realm. In many parts of rural Africa, the seasonally renewed painting of houses is still done by women. Margaret Courtney-Clarke (1990) has documented the striking artwork created by West African women in Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Nigeria. These women create elaborate designs for living quarters, celebrating social, cosmological, and spiritual events. Painting motifs may embody abstract symbols of the body, reconciliation after quarrels, invocations for longevity, iconic representations of the feminine, and animals significant to the group. In South Africa, Ndebele woman may place reproductions of initiation beadwork on the walls of their houses. In Nigeria, Igbo uli patterns—created by women for body adornment—are also applied to house walls. Kabyle pottery patterns are used as decorations for houses, tattoos, and protective amulets. Even though African women’s power has diminished with colonization and modernity, contemporary women still weave sacred cloth and create hair designs commemorating social and cultural events. If they are members of indigenous religions, their songs and dances continue to celebrate the deities, traditional rulers, and other individuals of spiritual importance. Africa through the Eyes of Women Artists by Betty LaDuke (1991) demonstrates that the traditional arts of pottery and mud-cloth design are alive and well in contemporary West Africa. She profiles women artists like Nike Davies, who initially learned weaving from her grandmother and then the making of adire patterns, which are applied to cloth. While now divorced, she was the third wife of



Art in Africa

her husband, who taught her drawing. She now makes scenes in batik based on Yoruba myths, folklore, and her own dreams. Nigerian Yoruba sculptor Princess Elizabeth Olowu is the first Nigerian woman to work as a bronze caster. Born in 1939 to a royal household, she was trained in the creation of ritual artifacts, including textile dying and embroidery, ceremonial beadwork, and mat weaving. She learned to create the elaborate hairstyles that represent spiritual and secular power and adornment for Yoruba women. Finding herself called to sculptural traditions, she observed the palace bronze workers and created tiny items of clay. While the guild initially refused to admit her, as the daughter of the oba (king), she was finally admitted to the royal foundry and has been publicly recognized and honored. Her large cement statue Zero Hour depicts a woman in labor. It incorporates many tropes of traditional Yoruba spirituality and was created while she was pregnant. Unfortunately, Sokari Douglas Camp had to leave her natal environment to become a successful artist. Born in 1958, she, too, transgressed taboos forbidding women to work with metal. Her large moving sculptures evoke Kalbari Ijo masquerades—including movement and sound. Based in London, she uses steel as her medium and has created work honoring murdered Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Contemporary South African artist Laura Windvogel, who uses the name Lady Skollie, draws from the artistic traditions of ancestors of the San people, who may have produced the earliest evidence of human art in the form of incised pieces of red ochre found in a cave in South Africa said to be over 70,000 years old. Figurative art of the San/Khoisan people has been dated to as early as 27,000 years ago. Her work integrates Khoisan traditions that emphasize women’s genitalia and power, nature, and animals. Drawing from that tradition, she has created images that reflect and protest gender-based violence found in South Africa today. Arisika Razak See also: African Religions: Body Art; Yoruba Religion; Prehistoric Religions: Shamanism Further Reading Aronson, Lisa. “African Women in the Visual Arts.” Signs 16, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 550–74. Boone, Sylvia Ardyn. Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Courtney-Clarke, Margaret. African Canvas: The Art of West African Women. New York: Rizzoli International, 1990. Glaze, Anita J. Art and Death in a Senufo Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. LaDuke, Betty. Africa through the Eyes of Women Artists. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991. Makilam. The Magical Life of Berber Women in Kabylia. Translated by Elisabeth Corp. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Power, Camilla. “Women in Prehistoric Rock Art.” In New Perspectives in Prehistoric Art, edited by Gunter Berghaus, 75–103. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004.

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BODY ART Women have been making and displaying body art throughout Africa’s history. As far back as 2700 BCE, ancient Egyptian women used multiple types of oils, cosmetics, and pieces of jewelry to adorn their bodies. Statues of Egyptians, often found in tombs, display the ways that kohl, a type of black makeup, was used to outline the eyes. Scholars believe that this makeup was used to protect the wearer from evil and to honor female divinities. Later, around 500 BCE, women living in Nok communities in what is now Nigeria were famous for their intricate hairstyles and jewelry. Records of these ornamentations are found in terra-cotta statues. The designs are believed to have at times illustrated a subject’s beauty and at other times were designed to display images of disease, such as facial paralysis. Modern African communities continue to have strong traditions of body art that can be seen in women’s use of cosmetics, hairstyles, tattoos, scarification, and other body-modification practices. Some of these practices are based on long-held community ­traditions. Others are new practices and styles that have emerged as women par­ ticipate in development projects, globalization, and/or changing local aesthetics. In Ethiopia and South Sudan, Surma women use scarification and facial piercing. Today, some women are forgoing the scarification and instead using body paint to mark their bodies in the same ways that their ancestors did with scars. In other African nations, such as Benin, scarification is now illegal but has remained popular in rural villages where babies are marked to show that they are healthy and to protect them from evil spirits. Men and women in Benin also use tattoos to mark their affiliation with community groups and for spiritual protection. In Key Afer, Ethiopia, a woman of the Banna tribe Less permanent markings are wears a headdress and garment decorated with shells. also popular among some comBody art, both temporary (including headdresses, hairstyles, cosmetics, and jewelry) and permanent (includ- munities, such as the Surma and ing scarification, piercings, and tattoos), is common Mursi communities who live in East Africa. These community among African tribes. (DeAgostini/Getty Images)



Candomblé

members use powders made from volcanic rock to attach natural materials such as flowers to their bodies in intricate patterns. Further south, Masai community members also use natural paints to create designs on their bodies and faces to mark their participation in and successful completion of life-cycle ceremonies. In modern Nigeria, Yoruban body art includes the use of face and body painting to paint one’s ori onto the body. While ori directly translates to “head,” it also applies to an individual’s spirituality, destiny, and essence. These paintings continue today and were made known to American television viewers in 2016 when they were featured on dancers in Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. Allison Hahn See also: African Religions: Art in Africa; Yoruba; Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion Further Reading Cosgrave, Bronwyn. The Complete History of Costume and Fashion: From Ancient Egypt to the Present Day. New York: Checkmark Books, 2000. Kalilu, Razaq Olatunde Rom, and Margaret Olugbemisola Areo. “Cross-Currents and Transmigration of Motifs of Yoruba Art.” AFRREV IJAH: An International Journal of Arts and Humanities 2, no. 2 (2014): 108–29. Landau, Paul Stuart, and Deborah D. Kaspin. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Nevandomsky, Joseph, and Ekhaguosa Aisien. “The Clothing of Political Identity: Costume and Scarification in the Benin Kingdom.” African Arts 28, no. 1 (1995): 62. Silvester, Hans. Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2009.

CANDOMBLÉ Candomblé stands out as a contemporary Afro-Brazilian religion featuring spirit possession in which women play a prominent role. A syncretic religion, Candomblé was created as a consequence of the import to Brazil of great quantities of slaves from Yoruban West Africa in the second half of the 18th through the end of the 19th century. Yoruban slaves brought with them their language, customs, and religion, which underwent transformations due to their new circumstances. In spite of the syncretic adaptations, which were quickened by the fact that slaves had to camouflage their worship of the Orishas (Gods and Goddesses) under a Catholic veneer until the late 1970s, Candomblé is a proudly re-Africanized and widely practiced religion, especially in the northeastern state of Bahia, the place with the most Afro-descendants in the world after Nigeria (Walker 1984, 12). Like other syncretic New World devotions, Candomblé is considered to be a “survival” religion, involved in life on earth, and not a “salvation” religion concerned with the afterlife. It is especially interesting among world religions because of its matriarchal organization. The most traditional terreiros (spiritual communities) are led by women over 40, who are in charge of all the important ritual functions. The iyalorixá or mãe-de-santo (mother of saints) is the spiritual leader or

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chief priestess of a terreiro. She is the intermediary between the Orishas (Divinities) and humans, and she has the ability to interpret divine will through various forms of divination, such as jôgo de búzios (16 cowry divination) and jôgo de Odú (Ifa oracle). She is able to enter into trances and has healing and psychic abilities, and she is knowledgeable in practical matters, such as finances and the organization of the spiritual community. The iyalorixá initiates the abiãos (aspirants) into iaôs or filhas-de-santo (daughters of the saint) and makes all the major decisions regarding the terreiro. Other important functions, such as the iyá bassê (an older woman who cooks) or chief cook, iyá kêkêrê or mãe pequena (little mother), and ékéde (helper in possession trances), are exclusively held by women. Men’s functions, such as those of the ogãos (alabê—drummer, pêgigã—maker of the altar, and axôgún—performer of sacrifices) are considered auxiliary to women’s roles. Together, they constitute the família-de-santo (family of the saint) or Candomblé’s spiritual family. According to the categories coined by Dr. Heide Goettner-Abendroth in her Matriarchal Societies (2012, xxv), such community corresponds with the definition of matriarchy at the economic, social, political, and spiritual/cultural levels. Although in many religious communities in the world the majority of worshippers are women, a matrifocal structure such as in Candomblé, where older women are spiritual leaders in charge of all major decisions, simultaneously living in harmony with all other congregation members, including men, is uncommon. Is there any cultural basis for such an organization? The woman-centered organization of traditional Candomblé terreiros can be traced to the ancient Yoruba

Mãe de Santo (Mother of Saints) Sylvia de Oxalá, leads a ceremony at the Axé Ilê Obá temple in São Paulo, Brazil. Traditional Candomblé terreiros (spiritual communities) are led by a chief priestess over the age of 40. (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)



Candomblé

belief in the great power of women, especially older women, who are connected to the Àwon Ìyá Wa or iyá-mi—the powerful ancestral Mothers who imbue them with the mighty force Àjé. “The power of the mothers is equal or superior to that of the gods, for . . . the mothers own and control the gods” (Drewal and Drewal 1990, 8–9). Older women are in possession of mystical powers and are considered to be protective healers and guardians of morality, social order, and the just redistribution of power and wealth. They are respected but also feared, and they must be paid tribute and soothed in Gelede festivals. Drewal and Drewal (1990, 9, xv) explain the meaning of the word Gelede: “Gè means ‘to soothe, to place, to pet or coddle’; ele refers to a woman’s private parts, those that symbolize women’s secrets and their life-giving powers; and dé connotes ‘to soften with care and gentleness.’” Such festivals are still performed in Yorubaland (Nigeria and Benin) today, and in Brazil they existed until the 1940s. In that country, the power of the iyá-mi or “our Mothers” is still kept by the iabás or feminine Orishas, such as Oxum, Iemanjá, Nanã, Oyá, and Ewa, the iyá-eléye or “owners of the gourd with a bird inside” (Elbein dos Santos 1975, 114–17). Although in Bahia there are also less orthodox terreiros led by male priests (babalorixás or pais-de-santo) who initiate male filhos-de-santo (sons of the saint), the majority of them are known to be homosexuals. This fact is related to the fluidity of gender roles in Afro-Brazilian religious practices. Since the gender of the Orisha that is incorporated by the initiate during trances is independent from the gender of the person who incorporates them, there is a lot of ritual cross-dressing. In fact, the abião is always structurally feminine as she/he is being “mounted” by her/his Orisha during trances. In addition, male and female priests in Brazil wear Baroque-inspired women’s gowns and headdresses. In Africa, the priests and priestesses of the Yoruba religion dress in 19th-century women’s nuptial attire. There is an interdependence between the matrifocal organization of the traditional Candomblé terreiros and the socioeconomic life circumstances of Bahia. After the end of slavery in 1888, it was easier for women than for men to make a living as independent vendors or domestic servants, and men could not play the role of providers of a household. As a consequence, even today, especially in poor neighborhoods, many multigenerational households are headed by women, who are the providers, and their daughters are valued more than sons. In these matrifocal and matrilineal households, children may be of several different fathers, and their last name is usually taken from the mother. As the anthropologist Ruth Landes (1994, 147) wrote in her book City of Women, a famous account of life in Bahia in the 1930s, “Stability is provided by black women. And the women have everything: they have the temples, the religion, the priestly offices, the bearing and rearing of children, and opportunities for self-support.” In addition, several Yoruban religious functions, such as the olúwo and the babalawo, have disappeared in Brazil, and their activities, such as divination, have been transferred to the female priestesses, the iyalorixás. It is interesting to note that although Cuban Santeria or Regla de Ocha have the same Yoruba-Catholic

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ingredients as the Brazilian Candomblé, a similar process did not happen in Cuba, where Regla de Ocha is still dominated by male babalawos and oriyatés. Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Priestesses and Oracular Women; Yoruba Religion; Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Spirituality: Divination Further Reading Capone, Stefania. Searching for Africa in Brazil. Translated by Lucy Lyall Grant. London: Duke University Press, 2010. Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal. Gelede: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Elbein dos Santos, Juana. Os nàgô e a morte. Petropolis, Brazil: Vozes, 1975. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide. Matriarchal Societies. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Landes, Ruth. The City of Women. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1994. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. Fierce Feminine Divinities of Eurasia and Latin America: Baba Yaga, Kali, Pombagira, and Santa Muerte. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Walker, Sheila. “Candomblé: A Spiritual Microcosm of Africa.” Black Art 5 (1984): 10–22.

F E M A L E G E N I TA L M U T I L AT I O N Female genital mutilation (FGM), also referred to as female genital circumcision and female genital cutting, is defined as a set of “procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons” (World Health Organization 1997, 3). FGM is still practiced in 29 African countries; however, the incidence of this procedure is steadily decreasing due to effective health-promotion campaigns to eradicate this harmful practice. The highest percentages of girls aged from birth to 14 years who underwent FGM between 2010 to 2015 were recorded in Gambia, Mauritania, and Guinea, where approximately half of the girls of this age have undergone this procedure, followed by Eritrea, Sudan, Guinea Bissau, and Ethiopia (United Nations Children’s Fund 2016, 2). Although most historical scientists and linguists studying major religious texts have concluded that this practice has no religious origins, in some African countries, such as Eritrea, people still have a popular belief that FGM is a religious requirement. The most common indirect links of FGM with religion that circulate in some African communities include girls’ sexual purity, cleanliness, femininity, and attractiveness to the husband. Uncircumcised women in these communities are considered unclean, unattractive, and promiscuous and, therefore, are less likely to be married. FGM practices have ancient roots. Medical historians who studied ancient scripts found that some forms of FGM were practiced in ancient Rome to control the sexuality of female slaves and later in ancient Egypt, in the pharaonic era, as part of girls’ initiation; that is why one of the forms of FGM is called pharaonic



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circumcision. Nowadays, FGM is internationally considered a violation of human rights, a violence against women and girls, and a form of child abuse. FGM practices have various consequences related to women’s psychological, physical, and reproductive health. Women and girls undergoing FGM may experience immediate health effects, such as severe blood loss, shock, infected wounds, and infectious diseases (including sepsis, tetanus, and AIDS) as well as long-term health effects, including impaired menstrual flow contributing to reproductive-tract infections, inhibited and painful sexual intercourse, and prolonged labor complicated with fistulas. Posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression are the common psychological problems experienced by women who have undergone FGM. In Africa, FGM is practiced by the followers of four major religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and animism. FGM was/is widely practiced by various denominations of the Christian Religion, including Catholics, Coptic Orthodox, and Protestants in Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania, although the Christian Bible has no indication for this practice. Nowadays, Christian authorities in many countries agree that this practice contradicts the major biblical principles. According to Jewish law, FGM, as any other mutilation to the human body, is prohibited. However, it is still traditionally practiced by the Falashas, a Jewish minority group in Ethiopia. Their teaching is based on the Torah, the five books of Moses; they do not have access to the other major canonical scriptures of Judaism, such as the Talmud and the Mishnah. Islam’s sacred scripture, the Qur’an, has no indication for FGM. In many Muslim countries, FGM is not practiced and is even considered a harmful traditional practice, one that is forbidden by Islam the same as all other mutilations of the body. However, some Islamic groups argue that since there is no direct prohibition of this practice by the Prophet Muhammad, it can be practiced. In Africa, FGM is still practiced by Muslim followers in Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, and other countries. Followers of animism perform FGM for a number of different reasons. For example, some tribes living in the south of Chad perform it as part of the initiation or rite-of-passage ceremony, where girls are also taught some cooking and child care skills. Other tribes, although living in the same proximity, practice FGM as part of their annual harvest festivals. Legislative regulations related to FGM may vary across African countries. In some African countries, for example in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, FGM practices were outlawed and criminalized. Other countries, including Liberia, Mali, and Sudan, have no criminal law against FGM in place to date. In Egypt, this practice was medicalized, and the majority of these procedures are performed by health professionals. Victoria Team See also: Islam: Female Genital Mutilation Further Reading El-Damanhoury, I. “The Jewish and Christian View on Female Genital Mutilation.” African Journal of Urology 19 (2013): 127–29.

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Gomaa, Ali. “The Islamic View on Female Circumcision.” African Journal of Urology 19 (2013): 123–26. Mulongo, Peggy, Caroline Hollins Martin, and Sue McAndrew. “The Psychological Impact of Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) on Girls/Women’s Mental Health: A Narrative Literature Review.” Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 32 (2014): 469–85. United Nations Children’s Fund. Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Global Concern. New York: UNICEF, 2016. http://www.unicef.org/media/files/FGMC_2016_brochure_ final_UNICEF_SPREAD.pdf. World Health Organization. Female Genital Mutilation: A Joint WHO/UNICEF/UNFPA Statement. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1997.

LIFE-CYCLE CEREMONIES Life-cycle ceremonies are important for many women across the world. Ceremonies are as diverse as the people for which they are held, and it is important to remember that there are many unique communities in Africa. Some have traditionally practiced life-cycle ceremonies and carry on those traditions today. In others, the ceremonies change as community members move away from traditional lands. For girls and women, life-cycle ceremonies are rites of passage and have many purposes for the individual and group. For example, ceremonies build and preserve solidarity. Children advancing through a ceremony are welcomed into a new part of the community, frequently with new rights and responsibilities. In addition, as part of completing a ceremony, individuals are frequently given training, advice, or education that helps the individual better understand herself and her people. In some traditions, ceremonies are held at a specific age or a specific time in the person’s biological history, such as when girls enter puberty. In others, children go through the ceremony in groups by age and gender. The form of a ceremony can differ widely and may include dances, tests, tattooing, scarring, travel, or medical procedures. Some life-cycle ceremonies are the same for men and women, but many are different. While women’s ceremonies can be held for many reasons, they are most common at a female’s birth, naming, entering adulthood, marriage, and obtaining elder status. Ceremonies at birth both welcome an infant into the world and celebrate the mother’s good health through childbearing. In some traditions, a set number of days must pass before a girl is named, the same as for boys. For example, the Ga of Ghana hold a ceremony that marks a girl’s acceptance as a moral person within the community. This ceremony occurs eight days after the girl’s birth. Until the naming ceremony is completed, the mother and child may be kept inside and are sometimes isolated from other family members. Animals may also be slaughtered in honor of the new girl child, and the child may be indoctrinated into a religion through baptism or naming rituals. In many traditions, a girl’s body is permanently or temporarily marked to indicate that she is progressing toward adulthood. These marks can take the form of scarification, tattoos, piercing, or radical changes in hairstyle. For example, among the Akan of Ghana, girls have traditionally shaved their heads when they entered



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puberty. As the girl ages, her hair will grow back in, and she will be given hair combs to use during her marriage. This tradition continues today in two ways. Girls continue to shave their heads as a rite of passage into adulthood, and some girls maintain a shaved or short-cropped hairstyle as a required element of West African private Christian school uniforms. In traditions with strong taboos regarding knowledge that can and cannot be shared with children, adulthood ceremonies are preceded with educational activities. For example, Masai girls in Kenya and Tanzania undergo female genital mutilation before they can be married. This process is accompanied by education and guidance by older community members and marks the girl’s acceptance as a woman. This practice can be very dangerous to a girl’s health, and some groups are beginning to either hold the ceremony in a hospital or change the ceremony to other procedures that mark a girl’s passage into adulthood. Marriage ceremonies may begin when a marriage is arranged by a girl’s parents or when a girl agrees to marry a suitor. Oftentimes gifts are exchanged during betrothal and marriage and to mark marriage anniversaries. In other traditions, few celebrations are held at marriage, as celebrations are reserved until a woman becomes pregnant or bears a child. African women go through their last living life-cycle ceremony when they reach elder status. This occurs either at a specific age or when their age group is the oldest group remaining in the community. The final life-cycle ritual occurs at death. Allison Hahn See also: African Religions: Body Art; Female Genital Mutilation; Christianity: Christianity in Africa; Islam: Islam in Africa Further Reading Beckwith, Carol. African Ceremonies: The Concise Edition. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Kilson, Marion. “The Ga Naming Rite.” Anthropos 63/64 (1968/1969): 904–20. Nevadomsky, Joseph, and Ekhaguosa Aisien. “The Clothing of Political Identity: Costume and Scarification in the Benin Kingdom.” African Arts 28, no. 1 (1995): 62–73. Winterbottom, Anna, Jonneke Kommen, and Gemma Burford. “Female Genital Cutting: Cultural Rights and Rites of Defiance in Northern Tanzania.” African Studies Review 52, no. 1 (2009): 47–71.

O R I S H A V E N E R AT I O N See African Religions-in-Diaspora PRIESTESSES AND ORACULAR WOMEN African women’s ceremonial leadership is a rich but understudied subject spanning many millennia. It is documented in Neolithic rock art; the archaeology of Egypt, Sudan, and Nigeria; and the oral histories of African countries. Ancient literature also refers to African priestesses; Herodotus says that the oracular priestesses of

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Dodona, known as the Black Doves (Peleiae Melainae), came to Greece from Egypt. But female spiritual leadership remains a living tradition in many African cultures, from women’s ritual societies and womanhood initiations to funerary rites and healing ceremonies. Evidence of women’s ceremonial leadership in the very ancient rock galleries of the Sahara and southern Africa predates written history. At the Algerian site of Tiout, a large petroglyph shows a woman with her arms raised in invocation and a line of energy passing from her to a hunter. Farther south, the rock paintings of the Tassili n’Ajjer depict women in processions, clapping and singing, performing ecstatic dance, and in shamanic flight. In the Brandenburg mountains of Namibia, the mural at Maack rock shelter portrays a woman striding in ceremonial regalia, wearing face and body paint and ritual ties around her arms. She holds a staff, a common theme in portrayals of female shamans worldwide. Women also wield staffs in Saharan rock paintings as well as at Sipolilo, Zimbabwe, where an ancient rock mural shows a woman shaman wearing ritual ties and dancing with a wand. The female invocator is a central image in predynastic Egyptian ceramic paintings, which depict a woman with upraised arms standing in a ceremonial boat. Her gesture is repeated by numerous ceramic female figurines (some of them vulture-headed) and again in protodynastic paintings at Nekhen (Hierapolis). In pharaonic times, stone reliefs depict women dancing, drumming, shaking the sistrum in the temples, and celebrating ceremonies. Snake dancers in elaborate headdresses honor Serpent Goddess Uadjet in a relief carved around 1100 BCE. Another relief in the Cairo Museum shows a procession of women sounding their drums before Hathor or Isis beside heavily laden offering tables. A painted relief shows the Fourth Dynasty princess Nefertiabet (ca. 2500 BCE) wearing a Painted limestone stele shows princess Nefertiabet leopard-skin dress. Leopard hides (ca. 2500 BCE) wearing a leopard skin, which is were a priestly attribute throughassociated with the role of priestess. Queens held out Egyptian history—as they priestess roles in ancient Egypt, as demonstrated continue to be in other parts of in artifacts like this stele, in which they are shown with ceremonial objects and crowns decorated with Africa in modern times. Egyptian the attributes of an Egyptian Goddess. (DEA/G. Dagli queens retained priestly attributes and were often depicted Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images)



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holding ceremonial objects such as the sistrum, and their crowns reflected the attributes of female divinities. The queens’ ritual role appears to decline during the Middle Kingdom but is revived in the New Kingdom, as indicated by depictions of Ahmose-Nefertari and other queens of the 18th Dynasty and later. Nefertiti stands out as “a prime ritualist in the cult of Aten” as depicted on the Nefertiti pylon and pillars at Karnak (Williamson 2015, 182–83). Although male priests predominated in the state religion of ancient Egypt, priestesses also existed. Their title was most commonly hmt-ntr (servitor of the Divine), the feminine counterpart to a common priestly title of men (hm-ntr). The temples of Hathor were the most powerful stronghold of Egyptian priestesses and had a strong ecstatic component reflected in images of the Goddess and her followers playing frame drums and sistrums. Many funerary reliefs commemorate priestesses of Hathor, and some tattooed mummies, such as that of Amunet, have been identified as her hmt-ntr. The kadake queens of Sudan (ca. 800 BCE to 100 CE) had political power, sometimes ruling and leading armies, but their role as priestesses was even more salient. Numerous stelae and architectural reliefs show the queens of Napata and Meroe in the act of pouring libation and shaking the sistrum between the eighth and first centuries BCE. In the 25th Dynasty, founded by Nubians, Princess Amenirdis I (d. 720 BCE) revived the old female priestly title “God’s Wife” at Thebes. In the lineage she founded, each “God’s Wife of Amun” appointed her successor, as Amenirdis I is depicted inducting Shepenwepet in a stone relief at Karnak from around 700 BCE. Queens act as priestesses in many West African traditions. In Old Benin, Nigeria, the Iyobas are depicted in ceremonial acts in the Ikegobo (altars of the hand) and other bronzes. Oral histories remember Iyoba Idia (ca. 1470–1550 CE), in particular, as a queen who not only exerted political power but also acted as a powerful priestess within the royal family, renowned for her protective magic and precognitive power. This same magical potency applied to royal women titled N’kamsi among the Bankim in Cameroon (19th century), who acted as royal counselors, diviners, and healers. Royal women are also described as founders of oracular lineages over much of East Africa. The Shona princess Nehanda (ca. 1500 CE) was said to have fled a traditional requirement of marriage to her brother, taking refuge in the Cave of Mazoe in northern Zimbabwe. She became the first of a line of lion oracles that was named after her. When a Nehanda died, the lion spirit would roam the land and eventually select her successor. This lineage was still active when the Nehanda Nyakasikana (d. 1898) led the Shona resistance to the Rhodesian colonization. The Lobedu of northern South Africa are traditionally governed by Mujaji, “Rain Queens,” who are both political and religious leaders. As their title indicates, the power to bring rains is attributed to them, not only by the Lobedu but also by enemy nations who brought tribute to the Mujaji in appeals to end droughts. Oral history says that the first Mujaji was named Dzuguzini (dating not available). She was by varying accounts a princess of Mwanamutapa or the daughter of the king of Mamba. One account has her fleeing the wrath of her father, Chief Mugodo, either

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because he committed incest with her or because she took a lover. Her mother helped her escape and gave her the sacred beads and the rain secrets that she used to found the Lobedu line of Mujaji, which continues today. In Tunisia, Dahia or Dihia al-Kahena led the Amazigh (Berber) resistance to the Arab conquest of Tunisia in the seventh century. The title al-kahena means “the prophetess, priestess, sorceress” in Arabic. Some say she was Pagan, others Jewish, as Ibn Khaldun wrote in the late 1300s. Dahia al-Kahena won dramatic victories in her early battles, but the invading armies kept coming, and she died in battle around 704 CE. In Mali, the Bosso people had shamans called tungutu, the most renowned of which was a woman named Pa Sini Jobu, centuries ago. Oral histories show that her ceremonies centered on ecstatic dance and that she used ritual pots, as did the Yoruba and other West African priestesses. Sacramental dance also figures prominently in ceremonies led by priestesses of the Fon/Fanti, in Benin Republic (formerly Dahomey), and those of the neighboring Yoruba. Oracular priestesses were very prominent in southeastern Africa before European colonization. Along the Zambezi River, oral histories of the matrilineal Goba people commemorate Kasamba, a Tonga shaman-priestess who founded a hill sanctuary in the time of the Bantu migrations, perhaps around 1300 CE. The Banamainga Goba recount how Kasamba was called from Soli Manyika to unite them against the warlords who were causing chaos. She restored the peace and founded a sanctuary at Njami Hill, the oldest in Zimbabwe. After her death, Kasamba became the tutelary spirit of the shrine, which was so powerful that no one could become ruler without her blessing. It was the business of her successor priestesses, the guardians of the Njami Hill sanctuary, to determine who would become king. The warlords continued to cause trouble, notably a certain Ntambo. But the rains stopped, the drought was widely interpreted as the consequence of his disruptions, and he was forced to make amends to the shrine. Over time, royal, military, and colonial interests undermined the authority of the shrine priestesses, though women elders continue to lead in ceremonies to the land-shrine spirits and the ancestors (Lancaster 1981, 16–19, 194). In Malawi, a line of prophetic women titled Makewana (Mother of Children) were the highest spiritual leaders of the Chewa in the 1800s and earlier, and the country was named after the Pool of Malawi, where the sacred python that inspired them lived. They were chosen by spirit selection, signaled by initiatory illness and other signs. In the south of Malawi, the Mang’anja also had oracular priestesses. In neighboring Zimbabwe, it was a woman who filled the highest prophetic office of the Shona, carrying the title “the Voice of God.” Also, at the clan level, it was predominantly women who acted as channels for the ancestors. African women’s ecstatic spiritual ceremonies survived in some modern societies in the Zar and Bori Religions, in which spirits are evoked by particular drum patterns and songs and enter into the dancers. These spirits have roots in old ethnic divinities as well as later cultural patterns. Zar appears to originate in women’s ceremonies for Goddess Atete among the Oromo of southern Ethiopia. Enslaved captives spread the rites into Sudan, Egypt, Arabia, and other Muslim countries,



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Muhumusa Rwandan queen Muhumusa (d. 1945) became the most renowned of the oracles of Nyabinghi in Uganda, Rwanda, and northeastern Congo. She was a charismatic healer who opposed Tutsi chiefs aligned with colonial Europeans in the early 1900s. The English responded by passing the Witchcraft Act of 1912, which outlawed indigenous religion, and by keeping her under house arrest for more than 30 years. But many other Voices of Nyabinghi arose, although most of their names were not recorded by colonial writers. Most of these bagirwa (oracles) were women, such as Kaigirwa, who led the Nyakishenyi revolt in 1917 and again in 1919.

acquiring new spirits and stories along the way. The ceremonies are healing for the overwhelmingly female congregants, who put on the regalia associated with their spirits (as is also done in Yoruba and other West African traditions). In Hausa country, the spirits are called bori and the women who dance them bori magadjiyar. The magadjas dress in magnificent cowrie-studded regalia for these ceremonies. There are many other instances of women’s ceremonial leadership. In a few places, women still dance the masks, as the Bijagos women do for their matrilineal ancestors in Guinea-Bissau and among the Mende and Mande peoples of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. Among the Kunama of Eritrea, ancestral priestesses called Andinna perform healings, divinations, and protective dances with swords as they travel from village to village at certain times of the year. The Andinna undergo spirit selection, enter trance, and show other shamanic qualities, as is true for healers among the BaPende and BaYaka peoples of southern Congo. Women’s shrines once existed in the lower Congo region, often in sacred groves presided over by shaman-priestesses called nganga nkisi. Max Dashú See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Life-Cycle Ceremonies; Yoruba Religion; Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion; Islam: Islam in Africa Further Reading Dashú, Max. Woman Shaman: The Ancients. Oakland, CA: Suppressed Histories Archives, 2013, DVD. Hopkins, Elizabeth. “The Nyabingi Cult of Southwestern Uganda.” In Protest and Power in Black Africa, edited by Robert Rotberg and Ali Mazrui, 258–336. New York: Oxford, 1970. Kaplan, Flora Edouwaye S., ed. Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses, and Power: Case Studies in African Gender. New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1997. Lancaster, Chet. The Goba of the Zambezi: Sex Roles, Economics, and Change. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. Martin, Phyllis. Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.

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Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Iyoba Idia: The Hidden Oba of Benin.” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies 9 (2006). http://rainqueensofafrica.com/2012/11/iyoba-idia -the-hidden-oba-of-benin/. Troy, Lana. Patterns of Queenship in Ancient Egyptian Myth and History. Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Uppsalensis, 1986. Williamson, Jacquelyn. “Alone Before the God: Gender, Status, and Nefertiti’s Image.” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 51 (2015): 179–92.

R A S TA FA R I The Rastafari Religion draws from Abrahamic traditions, combining Ethiopian Christianity and Jamaican traditions. This combination has created many different roles and regulations for Rastafari women. Central to all Rastafari traditions is the rejection of materialism and oppression. Ethiopia, often referred to as Zion, is believed to be both the birthplace of humanity and the place to which true believers should return. Rastafarians believe that Haile Selassie I, who was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, was the 225th in a line of Ethiopian monarchs. This legacy is traced to the Solomonic dynasty, formed in 10 BCE by Menelik I, who was the son of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Today, Rastafarians live around the world, with large communities in Jamaica, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Studies of Rastafarianism have been predominantly produced by male scholars. However, a number of Rastafari women, such as Sister Carol (b. 1959), Rita Marley (b. 1946), Marcia Griffiths (b. 1949), and Judy Mowatt (b. 1952) have begun to publish, speak, and create music about their lives and changes in their community. Rastafari teachings are centered on the resistance of oppression. However, practitioners and scholars have indicated that many practices are based on patriarchy, which creates unequal practices for men and women. For example, Rastafarian traditions regulate the ways that men and women interact in both private and public life. In the private sphere, the Leviticus Ceremonial Law, which is based on Leviticus 15:19–30, indicates that women are unclean during their menses. The implication of this law ranges from prohibiting women from touching men’s food during this time to calling for women to be secluded. Another example is that while some Rastafari communities allow men to have several sexual partners, women are expected to have only one partner and may be shunned by the community if they violate this expectation. Access to and knowledge of birth control is also restricted, and women frequently rely on the rhythm method for family planning. Many Rastafari women also adhere to a dress code that includes covering their hair in public and not wearing revealing clothing. Sometimes revealing clothing is defined as tight-fitting garments; at other times, the definition includes pants. Rastafari scholars, such as Carole Yawney and Maureen Rowe, have written about changes such as those in the 1970s when Rastafari women rejected these dress codes. As part of their religious practice, Rastafarians hold Nyabinghi Assemblies. These religious ceremonies are typified by drumming, dancing, smoking, and speaking. In some Nyabinghi Assemblies, women may attend but are not allowed to drum, smoke, or speak. At other Nyabinghi Assemblies, women are permitted to speak



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but are rarely invited to drum. Today, some Rastafari women have created their own Nyabinghi Assemblies where they can participate in all activities without restriction. Allison Hahn See also: Christianity: Christianity in Africa; Spirituality: Drumming Further Reading Edmonds, Ennis B. Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Klobah, Loretta Collins. “Journeying towards Mount Zion: Changing Representations of Womanhood in Popular Music, Performance Poetry, and Novels by Rastafarian Women.” Ideaz 7 (2008): 158–97. Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. Chanting Down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

VODOU See African Religions-in-Diaspora YORUBA RELIGION In both Yorubaland (spanning parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo) and the Yoruba diaspora, women and the feminine can be found at the heart of Yoruba mythology and the practice of Yoruba Religion. The religion does not delineate spiritual from material but assumes the interconnectedness of the seen and unseen, the born and unborn, life and death, positive forces and negative forces, heaven and earth, male and female. One of the primary intentions behind Yoruba ritual is to achieve balance and harmony between these groups. Because Yoruba Religion aspires to such harmony, both men and women must have access to religious power and participation (McIntosh 2009, 190; Olajubu 2003). Therefore, women in Yoruba Religion occupy fundamental positions as Yoruba deities, Yoruba priestesses and other worshippers, and members of Yoruba women’s groups, including Iya mi (a.k.a. the Society of Powerful Women or the Mothers). The feminine in Yoruba Religion can be located among the worshipped spirits, called Orisha, who represent primordial divinities, deified ancestors, and personifications of natural forces. Though the gender of an Orisha is often fluid and ambiguous, some have distinctly female characteristics. For example, many Yoruba origin stories attribute the creation of humans and nature to an Orisha called Oduduwa, who in some cases has been described as having female characteristics. River Goddesses Yemoja and Osun are also described in feminine terms. Rivers in Yorubaland have long been associated with fertility and motherhood. Women commonly visit the shrines of these Orisha to ask for children or to give thanks for those they already have. Yemoja is Goddess of Rivers and Streams as well as the mother to many other Orisha. It is believed that all waters on the earth flow from her. Osun represents the sacred, life-giving dimension of waters. Women who worship these Orisha as priestesses often have exclusive access to their shrines during

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important festival rituals (Olajubu 2003, 106). Priestesses serve as an essential link between the spiritual and material realms. In Yoruba society, a woman’s significance is most obviously rooted in her ability to create life through motherhood. If a woman fails to become a mother, her infertility is not attributed to physical issues alone but also to spiritual ones. Women’s attempts to increase their chances of motherhood demonstrate the fluid boundary in the Yoruba world view between the spiritual and material worlds. In addition to petitioning Orisha such as Yemoja and Osun, Yoruba women can appeal to the supernatural forces of juju and magic to help themselves become pregnant. Women also seek various forms of medicine and healing to maintain their vitality and that of their children. It is not enough that a woman become pregnant; she must also raise a healthy child. Onisegun, professional medicine women with deep knowledge of herbs and other healing rituals, can be consulted to restore and preserve well-being. While all women are revered for their supernatural ability to give life as mothers and healers, certain women are venerated for their possession of exclusive knowledge and spiritual power. For example, members of Iya mi are commonly reputed to practice witchcraft. In an Ifa legend, aje was a power given to select women by the Supreme Being to balance the power wielded by men as the primary decision makers in society. When women use the mighty feminine force aje to curb the abuse of power by men, their actions are seen as beneficial to restoring balance in Yoruba society. Members of Iya mi can be consulted for their healing powers and ability to wield juju. They are also feared for their ability to cause impotence, infertility, and problems during pregnancy in the lives of individuals, or epidemics, droughts, and floods in society more broadly. Certain women also have access to supernatural knowledge through the practice of Ifa divination, Eerindinlogun, or Obi Dida (divination with kola nut). Witchcraft and divination position women as powerful mediators between the spiritual and material realms. Women also play an important role in Yoruba religious tradition in the diaspora, which has taken two major forms: Cuban Santeria/Regla de Ocha and Brazilian Candomblé. For example, oral histories of Santeria highlight the efforts of renowned iyalochas (priestesses) alongside babalochas (priests), whose ritual lineages continue to shape the religion’s rituals and beliefs (Falola and Childs 2004). Though these religions have been influenced by non-Yoruba religious traditions, like Catholicism and others, the worship of feminine deities like Osun and Yemoja remains central to their practice. In Cuba, the feminine deity Osun (called Ochún) has become associated with the Catholic Virgin of Charity, while Yemoja (Yemayá) has become associated with the Virgin of Regla (Falola and Childs 2004, 120). In Bahia, Brazil, Osun (Oxum) devotees congregate at multiple mae d’agua festivals every year (Murphy and Sanford 2001). The centrality of women and the feminine in Santeria/Regla de Ocha and Candomblé is a testament to women’s fundamental significance in Yoruba Religion. Mackenzie J. Finley See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Art in Africa; Body Art; Candomblé; Priestesses and Oracular Women; Christianity: African American Women; Spirituality: Women of Color



Yoruba Religion

Further Reading Awolalu, J. O. Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites. London: Longman, 1979. Falola, Toyin, and Matt D. Childs, eds. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. McIntosh, Marjorie K. Yoruba Women, Work, and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Murphy, Joseph M., and Mei-Mei Sanford, eds. O`.s. un across the Waters: A Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Olajubu, Oyeronke. Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

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Ancient Religions

INTRODUCTION Interest in ancient Greek and Roman cultures has never waned, and their influence is still felt today. The ancient Roman Goddess Diana, for example, is worshipped in Dianic Wicca. She is also represented by Wonder Woman, a pop-culture icon inspired by the ancient Goddess. Articles in this section discuss women’s roles in religious life and female deities of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as those of the ancient Near East and Asia, from about 3000 BCE to 500 CE. Some religions of the ancient world that are still practiced today are covered separately: “Early Christianity” in the Christianity section, “Ancient Judaism” in the Judaism section, and so on. While ancient cultures, unlike those of prehistory, left written texts and inscriptions that help us interpret their thoughts, deeds, and intentions, the scholarly study of ancient cultures is still young. Texts and artifacts from the ancient world are fragmentary, and many ancient languages have only recently been translated. Given the fact that feminist scholarship is even younger, a fair and comprehensive reading of the evidence on women in the ancient world remains a work in progress. Contributors to this section specialize in a field that may require specialized talents, like the ability to read ancient languages or scripts. In “Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia,” Therese Rodin discusses cuneiform script that was invented in ancient Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE. She relates evidence that women used the script in the Sargonic period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE), that women both wrote and read the texts, and that some female divinities of the period were portrayed as literate as well. Some female scribes of ancient Mesopotamia worked for priestesses, while others may have been priestesses themselves. (Also see associations between women, religion, and as yet undeciphered early writing in “Sacred Script” in the Prehistoric Religions section.) The roles of priestess and oracle were important in various parts of the ancient world. In “Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece,” Harald Haarmann discusses women’s ritual and worship functions in ancient Greece, including those of the Pythia of Delphi, a female oracle whose pronouncements were highly sought. In “Delphic Oracle,” Gary Kerley further details this female oracular tradition and its history from early Greece into the Roman period. Another female oracular tradition was the Sibylline Oracle, as related in the entry “Sibyls.” In “Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions,” Lewis Webb examines women’s public roles in ancient Roman religions. He relates how, from the third century BCE to the fourth century CE, women served both priestly and nonpriestly roles in the religion, presiding over public rites and participating in public

28 Introduction

processions. Some ancient women held other important roles, including Sappho (ca. 630–570 BCE), a poet whose fame in the ancient world was equal to that of Homer, and Hypatia (ca. 351–415 CE), a mathematician and philosopher. (See the “Sappho” and “Hypatia” entries.) Also important were women’s roles and experiences at home and in the family. “Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of” and “Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions” offer a view of women’s private lives, with their connections and disconnections to religion. Sexual orientation is also addressed; the entry titled “Homosexuality” relates some of what is known of women’s homoeroticism in the ancient world. Other articles on women in ancient religions include an entry on ancient Mesopotamia and another on ancient Egypt, where some women were priestesses and queens (e.g., Cleopatra). In the regions of China, Siberia, Japan, Manchuria, and Korea, women served as shamans and priestesses from ancient times. In “Shamans in East Asia,” Max Dashú relates the importance of women shamans in ancient East Asian cultures with some links into the present and describes some of their functions, ritual dress, instruments, and icons. Finally, across the ancient world, people venerated and feared powerful female deities. A number of articles highlight Goddesses of the ancient world, such as “Athena,” “Gaia,” “Inanna,” “Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess,” “Ninlil,” and “Sun God˘ dess.” A fascinating figure from the ancient world is the fearful Gorgon Medusa, discussed in the entry of that title. General Bibliography—Ancient Religions Abrahamsen, Valerie A. Women and Worship at Philippi: Diana/Artemis and Other Cults in the Early Christian Era. Portland, ME: Astarte Shell Press, 1995. Ahearne-Kroll, Stephen P., Paul A. Holloway, and James A. Kelhoffer, eds. Women and Gender in Ancient Religions: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr ­Siebeck, 2010. Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Broekema, Henriette. Inanna, Lady of Heaven and Earth. History of a Sumerian Goddess. Leeuwarden, Netherlands: Elikser B. V. Uitgeverij, 2014. Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Deacy, Susan. Athena. London: Routledge, 2008. Deakin, Michael. Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2007. Dexter, Miriam Robbins. “The Assimilation of Pre-Indo-European Goddesses into Indo -European Society.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 8, no. 1–2 (1980): 19–29. Dillon, Matthew P. J. Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. London: Routledge, 2002. DiLuzio, M. A Place at the Altar: Priestesses in Republican Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Fischer-Hansen, Tobias, and Birte Poulsen, eds. From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast. Copenhagen, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009. Fontenrose, Joseph. The Delphic Oracle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006.



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Green, Carin M. C. Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Heimann, Sandra Bart. The Biography of Goddess Inanna; Indomitable Queen of Heaven, Earth and Almost Everything: Her Story Is Women’s Story. Bloomington, IN: Balboa, 2016. Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Keller, Mara Lynn. “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries.” Rosicrucian Digest 2 (2009): 28–42. King, Karen L., ed. Women and Goddess Traditions: In Antiquity and Today. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1997. Leeming, David. Medusa in the Mirror of Time. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Lion, Brigitte. “Literacy and Gender.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, edited by Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 90–112. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Macgregor, Sherry Lou. Beyond Hearth and Home: Women in the Public Sphere in Neo-Assyrian Society. State Archives of Assyria Studies XXI. Helsinki, Finland: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2012. Marcovich, Miroslav. “From Ishtar to Aphrodite.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 30, no. 2 (1996): 43–59. Marinatos, Nanno. Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image, and Symbol. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Marler, Joan. “An Archaeomythological Investigation of the Gorgon.” ReVision (Summer 2002): 15–23. Neils, Jenifer, ed. Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Parca, M., and A. Tzanetou, eds. Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Parke, H. W. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1988. Pinch, Geraldine. Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books, 1975. Raynor, Diane J., trans. Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works with an Introduction and Notes by André Lardinois. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Robins, Gay. Women in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press, 2004. Rodin, Therese. The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Historia Religionum 35. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-228932. Sered, Susan Starr. Women of the Sacred Groves: Divine Priestesses of Okinawa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Stratton, Kimberly B., K. B. Stratton, S. Kalleres, S. Dayna, and D. S. Kalleres. Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Takács, S. Vestal Virgins, Sibyls, and Matrons: Women in Roman Religions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.

AT H E N A Athena was worshiped by the Greeks from the 17th century BCE, if not earlier, until the late Roman period into the fifth century CE, if not later. Athena is most commonly

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known as Goddess of Wisdom, Courage, and Craftsmanship, but she was complex, and her spheres of influence were diverse. Athena was both Mother Goddess and Virgin Warrior Goddess in the Greco-Roman world. Her famous birth myth involves bursting forth from the head of her father, Zeus. She was one of the few deities who could victoriously challenge both Zeus and Poseidon. While associated with birth, as Warrior Goddess of a warrior culture, she also played a role in death. Depictions of Athena generally appear in two forms, standing with panoply and weapons (in a full suit of armor) or sitting peacefully. Athena’s versatility shows in depictions connecting her to the underworld, and, though virginal, she is depicted with fertility symbols. These include golden ripe grain (associated with fertility), pomegranates and snakes (both related to fecundity and the afterlife), and Goddess Athena wears a peplos (woman’s garment) in owls and crows (both symbols this fifth-century-BCE relief. Athenian women would offer a peplos to Warrior Goddess Athena and ask of the underworld). Olive her to protect them in times of war. (Susana Guzmán branches, a sign of peace and victory, connect to the Virgin Martínez/Dreamstime.com) Warrior as well. Near her Athenian temple grew a great and ancient olive tree. One of her primary motifs was the spindle, which represented one of women’s primary chores in the ancient world. With the motif of the spindle, Athena depicts the daily life and duty of Greek women. Peplos garments (body-length cloth garments worn by women) were an annual offering to the statue of Athena in Athens. The peplos was woven annually by eight young girls as a tapestry depicting Athena’s mastery over the Giants (a race of exceptionally strong warriors). The eight maidens were picked from Athena’s 49 basket-bearer priestesses. Athena revealed innovation in technology (the spindle and farming techniques). Like most Greco-Roman deities, Athena’s worship varied by region, yet, transregionally, women played a substantial role in the religion of Athena. Some of Athena’s priestesses (polias) were pulled from an aristocratic heritage and served



Athena

for life. One inscription honors a priestess for serving 64 years. Some offices were held by married women, as opposed to virgin priestesses as seen in other female worship. In addition to older and married women, young maidens also served as priestesses for Athena. Priestesses for Athena of Victory (Nike, meaning Athena as the victor) were selected equitably from all social groups, not based on socioeconomic status. Typical of ancient religions, the ruling class monopolized the priesthood. For example, the demigod Queen of Athens held the mythical office of the First Priestess of Athena. Athena’s priestesses offered her libations. A barefoot and unadorned maiden, modestly dressed in a white robe, approached the altar while holding the libation bowl at her side to pour the liquid offering. Athena also accepted animal sacrifices and human sacrifices. The Parthenon includes a frieze of human sacrifice, texts suggest she recognized noble suicides as sacrifice, and other accounts portray her requiring an annual offering of a female virgin impaled and immolated in Corinth. In Knossos, she received infant sacrifice from the Mycenaean Greeks (1600–1100 BCE). For the protection of their children, women offered Athena the hair of their firstborn son. For both births and deaths, families gave Athena grain and a silver coin. On the matter of birth, Goddess Athena served as a sexual protector. She remained a virgin despite Hephaistos’s attempt to rape her. In Greek culture, women who left their house independently of a man were unprotected from rape. So, too, women belonging to the losing side of a battle were generally appropriated as sex-slave spoils of war. In the Iliad, Athenian women presenting the peplos to Goddess Athena prayed for both the protection of their own city and the protection of women and children of the Trojan enemies. Greek women celebrated Athena as the protector from rape and the comforter after rape. A sculpture represented in one of Athena’s temples revealed a maiden, impregnated through rape, giving birth within Athena’s temple. Athens rarely saw peace. In perpetual war, women constantly feared capture and rape. Athena represented hope and protection. She modeled evasion of sexual marauders. Her virginity proved her strength and ability to oppose masculine intrusion and to protect both the city and its women from penetration. Kristan Ewin Foust See also: Ancient Religions: Gorgon Medusa; Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of; Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions; Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon; Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece; Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions; Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Spirituality and Gender in Social Context Further Reading Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Deacy, Susan. Athena. London: Routledge, 2008.

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Hall, Lee. Athena: A Biography. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. Lefkowitz, Mary R. “Women in the Panathenaic and Other Festivals.” In Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia and Parthenon, edited by Jenifer Neils, 78–93. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Luyster, Robert. “Symbolic Elements in the Cult of Athena.” History of Religions 5, no. 1 (1965): 133–63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1061807.

DELPHIC ORACLE For the Greeks, Delphi, on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, was believed to be the literal center of the world. At Delphi, Greek for womb, the site chosen by Zeus himself, the oracle lived in the temple dedicated to Apollo, the God of Prophecy. The Delphic Oracle was consulted before any major undertaking, so rulers, philosophers, and even ordinary citizens came to the temple to ask the Pythia, High Priestess of Apollo, for advice or guidance. Founded originally as a shrine to Earth Goddess Gaia in 1200 BCE, by the eighth century, the temple was presided over by the Pythia, the prophetess who was possessed by Apollo and who spoke on his behalf. The name itself is derived from the original name of Delphi. The Pythia, originally a virgin girl between the ages of 13 and 16, was later replaced by an older woman past 50, dressed symbolically as a young girl. She was unmarried, could have no physical defects, and was probably chosen from the normal—some say elite—women of Delphi. Sources vary on the specific rituals of the Pythia, but most say she underwent some sort of training and purified herself from a nearby sacred stream before entering the temple. There she climbed upon a tall bronze tripod that straddled a chasm. Before a visitor was allowed in, the Pythia was seated, holding a wreath of laurel, and intoxicated or under a spell from chewing laurel and bay leaves. Others say her intoxicated mood was affected by gases rising from a crack in the ground below where she sat. Legend says that when Apollo slew Python, the body fell into a chasm and rotted, thereby producing the intoxicating vapors. When French archaeologists in the 1890s uncovered the remains of Apollo’s temple, they unearthed a fault line and chasm that contained ethylene, a gas that creates euphoria. Petitioners to the Pythia could ask only one question. Some say she talked directly to those seeking advice; others say her answers were written down by male priests. Sometimes portrayed as wild and incoherent, when the Pythia responded, she spoke in verses that were deliberately vague. Oracles in general offered alternative advice rather than predict the future, which may have been the role of the Pythia herself. Since no explicit written account of the questions and answers has survived, the actual consultation is subject to interpretation. Later, when her popularity grew, three Pythia were used, and consultations were given on the seventh day of each month from February to November rather than once a year on February 7, the birthday of Apollo. The last recorded response by the Delphic Oracle is in 393 CE, when Christian emperor Theodosius I prohibited Paganism altogether. Gary Kerley



Diana

See also: Ancient Religions: Gaia; Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece; Sibyls; Spirituality: Divination Further Reading Bowden, Hugh. Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Fontenrose, Joseph. The Delphic Oracle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Parke, H. W., and D. E. W. Wornell. The Delphic Oracle. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956.

DIANA Diana is a Roman Goddess often associated with women, childbirth, the moon, hunting, animals (both wild and domestic), and nature broadly. Although most likely originating in Italy as a local woodland deity, she came to be equated with the Greek Goddess Artemis, who shared many of the same features regarding women, animals, and hunting. Goddess Diana subsumed multiple titles and deities over the centuries: Latonia, Lucina, Juno, Trivia, Luna; she also became known as “Triple Goddess” as she absorbed the roles of Luna and Hecate. Françoise-Hélène Massa-Pairault and other scholars suggest that the multiple manifestations of Diana are products of the worship of Artemis in the sixth century BCE Greek colonies of Italy, especially Cumae and Capua. Ancient shrines to Diana have been unearthed from Évora, Portugal, to Ephesus in Asia Minor. In Roman art, Goddess Diana is often depicted as a huntress, equipped with a bow and accompanied by a deer or dog. Goddess Diana’s primary locus of worship was Aricia, Italy, on the shores of Lake Nemi. Here, veneration of Diana was led by her main priest, the rex Nemorensis. The shrine was used often by members of the Latin League, consisting of Rome and their allies in Latium. At this location, Diana is associated with a local water spirit named Egeria as well as her alleged first priest, a minor divinity named Virbius. Diana’s role included bestowing royal status upon rulers in the Arician woods. She was also venerated by women who were at some stage of childbearing––whether hoping to become pregnant, already pregnant, or in labor––as is attested by votive figurines found in the Arician sacred grove and in Ovid’s poetry. Diana was celebrated on August 13 with a festival that was initiated in the sixth century BCE by King Servius Tullius, who established her shrine on the Aventine Hill of Rome. This

Wonder Woman—Princess Diana of the Amazons The pop-culture icon Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston (1893–1947) in 1941. Marston was a comic-book writer, a psychologist, and a feminist. He based his Wonder Woman character on Diana, the ancient Roman Goddess. Wonder Woman gained popularity through comic books, a television series, and recently a film released by Warner Brothers (2017).

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Left: Diana, Roman Goddess of the Hunt, first century BCE; right: Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot in the movie Wonder Woman, 2017). In Roman art, Diana was often portrayed with a bow and arrow, which may be the items missing from her upheld hands in this statuette. Wonder Woman is a story character based on the ancient Goddess Diana. (J. Paul Getty Museum/ Warner Bros./Photofest)

was a festival celebrated primarily by slaves, since the “foreign,” non-Roman deity was often sought after for asylum by Rome’s first slaves in Latium. Goddess Diana is still significant in a form of Italian American witchcraft, Stregheria, and in Dianic Wicca. Stregheria functions as a reconstructionist Neo-Pagan form of witchcraft, since it was revived in the 1970s by Leo Martello’s attempt to connect Stregheria to more ancient forms of polytheism. The medieval form of Italian witchcraft to which Stregheria is connected was known as a religion of Diana. Dianic Wicca, on the other hand, is well known for its exclusive veneration of female deities, in contrast to other forms of Wicca that venerate male deities as well. This form of reconstructionist Neo-Pagan Wicca was birthed in the 1970s by Zsuzsanna Budapest. While technically monotheistic, Dianic Wicca sees female deities of various times and cultures as avatars of the Primal Goddess. This form of Wicca is well known for its matriarchal outlook, feminist celebration of women, and affirmation of female sexuality. Diana’s reception and historical legacy persists through multiple avenues. In The Golden Bough, James George Frazer uses the rex Nemorensis as a symbol of the universal, periodic death of the sacred king. Diana also makes appearances



Egyptian Religion

in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Carlos Fuente’s Diana o la cazadora soltera, and multiple works of Shakespeare. Along with her common depictions in Baroque and Rococo art, Diana is also used in neoclassical Beaux-Arts architecture alongside Goddess Pomona. In popular culture, William Moulton Marston based his comic-book character Wonder Woman on an archetype of Diana the Huntress. Chance Bonar See also: Ancient Religions: Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon; Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions; Paganism: Reconstructionist Paganism; Ritual; Wicca; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality Further Reading Coleman, Kristy S. Re-riting Woman: Dianic Wicca and the Feminine Divine. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2009. Dumézil, Georges. Archaic Roman Religion. Vol. 2. Translated by Philip Krapp. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970, 407–12. Fischer-Hansen, Tobias, and Birte Poulsen, eds. From Artemis to Diana: The Goddess of Man and Beast. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009. Green, Carin M. C. Roman Religion and the Cult of Diana at Aricia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Haroian-Guerin, Gil. The Fatal Hero: Diana, Deity of the Moon, as an Archetype of the Modern Hero in English Literature. Writing about Women 21. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996.

EGYPTIAN RELIGION Like many ancient cultures, the ancient Egyptians practiced polytheism. The nature of their religion differed from Greco-Roman polytheism as females faced less subordination to males in Egypt. The Egyptian cosmogony starts with a hermaphroditic deity, Atum, standing over the chaotic waters (Nun/Nunet) and masturbating to create pairs of male and female deities. From the intermarriage of these sibling couples, the pantheon developed. The marriage of siblings in the divine world parallels the royal custom. Pharaohs portrayed themselves as gods, and the population accepted their divinity. To keep the bloodline pure, the pharaohs married their sisters. The role of the royal woman as mother and sister-wife allowed more freedom and influence for (some) women in Egypt than seen in other ancient cultures. Royal women dominate modern knowledge of ancient individual women. Women of importance in ancient Egyptian Religion and governance include ­Hetepheres I (ca. 2575–2551 BCE), Ankhesenpepi II (23rd to 24th century BCE), Nefertiti (ca. 1370–1330 BCE), Hatshepsut (ca. 1507–1458 BCE), and Cleopatra VII (69–30 BCE). Hetepheres I, the wife of Pharaoh Sneferu (her half-brother) and mother of Khufu, two of the most renowned pyramid builders in Giza, received burial in one of Giza’s small pyramids, suggesting her worthy of pomp, funeral rites, and afterlife. As queen, she was called daughter of a god by the population. She gained

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both honor and respect, and her orders were received and obeyed like those of a goddess. Pepi II (ca. 2325–2150 BCE), the last ruling pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, took the throne as a young boy. His mother, Ankhesenpepi II, governed in his stead. Both she and her sister, Ankhesenpepi I, married Pepi I. Their names literally mean “her life belongs to Pepi.” This seems to illuminate much of the status of even royal women in the Sixth Dynasty. The sister-wife’s duty centered on her brotherhusband-God-king. While this seems demeaning to women, it should be noted that all Old Kingdom Egyptians dedicated their lives to serving and pleasing their God-pharaoh. This marital name change may not indicate that the sister-wife’s duties lacked value, as sometimes wives and mothers ruled as regents in authoritative positions over males. For example, Pepi II’s mother ruled Egypt under her son’s crown. Egyptian queens often became deputies in their husband’s absence or in times of crisis. Ankhesenpepi II held titles such as “God’s Daughter” and “Companion of Horus.” Pharaoh Akhenaten’s chief consort, or wife, Nefertiti (14th century BCE), received more depictions in art than any other queen. Most of her images include her husband and son, young king “Tut,” in religious ceremonies. Akhenaten included her in his religious revolution in which worship of the Sun God Aten eclipsed and

Queen Nefertiti (seated right), with her husband Pharoah Akhenaten and three of their daughters, enveloped by the rays of Sun God Aten (ca. 1370–1330 BCE). This queen performed religious rites alongside her husband, and she was often shown with him as his equal. (Ruggero Vanni/Corbis via Getty Images)



Egyptian Religion

repressed the traditional Egyptian pantheon. Images of the royal couple show the sunrays of Aten enveloping the royal family, but the sunrays’ grasp excluded those who weren’t family members. The elevation of the whole family unit in the religion, with Nefertiti’s polygamous husband, stands in singularity. Unlike previous or later queens, she held a position alongside (yet slightly behind) her husband in religious sacrifices. Her consistent company with Akhenaten underlines the theory that she became coregent of her husband. Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII, themselves, ruled as pharaohs. Hatshepsut, known as God’s Wife, though she relinquished the title when she became GodKing herself, ruled in the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom. As daughter of a mighty pharaoh, wife to another, and mother to a third, her position and relation gave her authority. She ruled successfully in her own right, building temples and expanding territorial boundaries. She adopted male iconography, such as a pharaoh’s goatee, to present herself as the legitimate ruler. Though successful, the population never fully respected her. Sexually graphic and demeaning graffiti depict her in a submissive position. She experienced damnatio memoriae when her exiled son returned to reclaim the throne. In damnatio memoriae, the Egyptians literally chiseled away her name from the monuments and projects she completed to spiritually and magically exterminate her existence. Cleopatra VII took the throne as joint regent with her brother at her father’s death. Her brother died, leaving her as sole leader. Cleopatra’s popularity comes from her romantic affairs with Julius Caesar (with whom she had a son) and Marc Antony (with whom she had two sons and a daughter) in the Roman period (first century BCE). Caesarion, Caesar’s son, whom she declared as the God Horus, posed a threat to the stability of the Roman Empire, so Octavian (later to become Emperor Augustus) eliminated him. During the Roman civil wars, Cleopatra aided in the desecration of the Temple of Artemis by ordering the execution of her sister, who was harbored there. Cleopatra descended from the Greek Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, but she adopted Egyptian religious social traditions. She portrayed herself as the reincarnation of Isis, as opposed to the traditional pharaoh who reincarnated Ra and, at death, Osiris. She believed in the necessity of the physical body to participate in the afterlife. Thus, captured by Rome, she committed suicide instead of being executed by the Romans and her body left exposed until her flesh rotted. Instead of her corpse, the Romans used an effigy of her to depict their conquest of her. Through sympathetic magic, the image, like a voodoo doll, would transfer the shame and torture to the deceased Cleopatra VII, it was believed. In traditional Egyptian Religion, at death, the pharaoh would traverse through the 12 hours of the night. This journey consisted of a series of 12 gated realms collectively known as the Amduat or Duat. Osiris, God of the Dead and the first mummy, judged the deceased and would later merge with the Ra-king. Female deities and sacred women also played an important role in the Amduat. Goddess of Rebirth Nunet (or Nu/Nun), the watery abyss, guards the sixth hour of the Amduat. Nunet often stood for the precreated world from whom the sun emerged. Nunet, sometimes connected to Hathor, (re)birthed Re, the Sun God. The baptism, or second birth, symbolized the resurrection of the deceased incarnate in

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the new pharaoh—that is, the new pharaoh that lived. Resurrection could not happen without childbirth, an exclusively feminine duty. To achieve resurrection, in the underworld, Osiris weighed the heart of the deceased on a scale against the feather symbol of Ma’at. Goddess Ma’at symbolized the concept of truth and uprightness. Mourning and wailing women appear throughout the graves of the pharaohs. Women publicly mourned death as part of their religious duty. Their arms held before them, bent upward, and their hair down and unkempt, the women lined the streets, wailing. The grieving ladies participated in the Amduat journey, lamenting the pharaoh through death to resurrection. Depictions show the wailing women with ashes on their heads and crying. Other depictions present women in procession bearing offerings of flowers, jars, and other odd objects. The bereaved consistently donated food and beverage, necessary for survival in the underworld, to the deceased. In Egypt, as in other ancient cultures, a woman’s appearance and fertility directly determined her worth. Her fertility became inseparable from religion. Sex, sexuality, fertility, birth, and rebirth intertwined with the hierarchy of religion. Individual family houses contained shrines where locals worshiped the fertility God Bes, who protected children. State religion administration did not involve the average Egyptian, though they visited the temples with offerings. Home excavations reveal steles and altars to Bes and Taweret. Food, drink, flowers, and statuettes remained common offerings to these household Divinities. Women invoked Isis and Hathor (Sexual Fertility Goddess, associated with the sky, the sun, dancing, music, weaving, women, and cows) to protect childbirth. Ancient spell books burst with spells to ward off infant mortality. Offerings included nude female statuettes, girdles, and wigs. A plethora of medical-magic papyri have been found describing gynecological remedies and prescriptions to increase fertility. Magical tests determined pregnancy and fetus gender based on the condition of the woman’s breasts and by watering barley and wheat seeds with urine while noting the seeds’ growth. An Isis knot, inserted into the vagina, served as an amulet to prevent miscarriages. Nefertiti and later Cleopatra VII had no qualms about flaunting their sexuality. As “God’s Wife of Amun,” Nefertiti’s duty, in this title, remains unknown, though historians suggest her role was to incite sexual arousal in the God to preserve the fertility of Egypt, not unlike contemporaneous Ishtar priestesses in the ancient Near East. Under Hatshepsut, the chief priest of Amun’s daughter received the office “divine adoratrice.” The office became politicized, and mothers wishing for their daughters to marry the pharaoh angled for this title. By the Third Intermediate Period, the two high priestess offices had merged. Royal and temple prostitutes experienced little or no social marginalization. They maintained religious purposes by using music and dance to incite clients to copulate. Emission was spiritual. Acrobatic dancers with flowing hair performed at the Temple of Karnak. At times women held the position of the official of temple music. Ambiguity exists in the range of gender equality or inequality between a priestess’s role and a priest’s, but even in female-dominated worship, such as that of



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Hathor, males appear to have been in control. Hathor gave happiness and fertility and helped women find “good husbands” per an Old Kingdom inscription on a statue of Nefretimin. By the 18th Dynasty, the priesthood had become a full-time political bureaucracy and excluded women, although women still participated in temple music. Kristan Ewin Foust See also: African Religions: Priestesses and Oracular Women; Ancient Religions: Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of Further Reading Fischer, Henry G. “A Feminine Example of Wd- h.m·k, ‘Thy Majesty Commands’ in the Fourth Dynasty.” Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 61 (1975): 246–47. Hodel-Hoenes, Sigrid. Life and Death in Ancient Egypt: Scenes from Private Tombs in New Kingdom Thebes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pinch, Geraldine. Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Tyldesley, Joyce A. Chronicle of the Queens of Egypt: From Early Dynastic Times to the Death of Cleopatra. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Tyldesley, Joyce A. Nefertiti: Egypt’s Sun Queen. London: Penguin, 2005. Ziegler, Christiane. Queens of Egypt: From Hetepheres to Cleopatra. Larvatto, Monaco: Grimaldi Forum, 2008.

ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES Greco-Roman Mysteries were religious schools and worship practices centered on the mystes, or initiate. The most famous example is the Eleusinian Mysteries, while other examples include the Dionysian Mysteries or the Orphic Mysteries. Full of cathartic and ecstatic practices, the Eleusinian Mysteries emerged out of the worship of Demeter and Persephone (also called Kore, meaning “girl” or “maiden”), Mycenaean traditions (1500 BCE), and the Greek Dark Ages. Performed every year during Anthesterion (February–March) and Boedromion (September–October) to celebrate the sowing, sprouting, and reaping of the harvest, the Lesser and Greater Eleusinian Mysteries connected the life cycle of grain to the cycle of human existence. Through dramatic re-creations, initiates learned the truth of the underworld, the nature of the soul, and the importance of maintaining a virtuous life. Little is known of the rites, rituals, and secrets unveiled within the Mysteries, as practitioners were held to secrecy upon the pain of death. Named after the city of Eleusis, where the Mysteries originated, the religion centers on the story of Demeter, Greek Goddess of Agriculture and Fertility of the Earth, who plunges the world into a famine out of despair. As developed in Greek mythology and in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (ca. seventh century BCE), Persephone, daughter to Great Mother Demeter, was kidnapped by Hades to be his wife in the underworld. Full of grief, Demeter neglected her responsibilities as steward of the natural world, allowing the earth to go barren, while demanding that the people of Eleusis build her a great temple. Although she was saved by

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Hermes, Hades forced Persephone to spend one-third of each year as Queen of the Underworld. In response, and upon Persephone’s earthly return each year, Demeter allowed the seeds of the natural world to be fruitful, revitalizing the harvests necessary to sustain human beings; but, when Persephone was forced into the underworld, the natural world would die, an eternally recurring process that not only explained the changing seasons but also, more significantly for initiates of the Mysteries, reflected the concept of transformation and the cyclicality of life, suggesting that existence does not end with material death, but rather death signals change from one state of being to another. After being reunited with Persephone, Demeter taught the elders and leaders of Eleusis how to perform her rites, which not only commemorate Demeter’s search for Persephone but also symbolically connect the initiate to Demeter and Persephone, who symbolize life, death, and immortality. Although the exact content and structure of the Mysteries remain unknown, the value of initiation was found in its sublime message regarding life and death and in unveiling the immortality and purity of the human soul. The Mysteries echo both the knowledge gained by Persephone’s descent into the underworld and the life cycle of seeds, which lie dormant in the earth only to sprout to life in the spring. Derived etymologically from the Greek words myein (to close) and mysterion (mystery, also refers to a secret rite or doctrine), the term mystery is applied to religious orientations defined by secret initiatory rites and esoteric doctrine. Open to any Greek-speaking individual regardless of socioeconomic standing—women, men, children, and even slaves— who had not committed murder, participation was limited only by access to the proper resources. Initiation required the purchase of piglets (to be used for sacrifice) and the contribution of 15 drachmae to the priest to help pay for the great civic sacrifices that occurred on the first and last days of the festival. Mythology, historical descriptions, poetry, and visual arts show that the Mysteries included varying degrees of rituals and initiations, with the most advanced being the epopteia, and the main form, the telete, including the dromena (the things enacted, likely a sacred pageant dedicated to Demeter and Persephone), the deiknymena (the things shown), and the legomena (the things spoken, likely liturgical and invocational statements). Led by mystagogos (leader of the mystes), hierophantes (revealers of holy things), and dadouchos (torchbearers), initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries began by physically transforming the body through fasting and the drinking of kykeon (a psychedelic substance), thereafter receiving the wisdom located in the kiste (sacred chest) and the kalathos (lidded basket). Initiation purified the soul, helping the individual uncover the value of experiencing altered states of consciousness, including the after-death experience and, for some, the truth of the underworld. Consisting of two main ceremonies, the Eleusinian Mysteries began with the Lesser Mysteries during the spring each year at Agrae (a suburb of Athens) followed by the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis during late September. Commencing with a march from Athens to Eleusis, the festival culminated with rites performed in the Telesterion (Hall of Initiation) following ritual bathing and three days of fasting. The Eleusinian Mysteries revolved around accessing hidden physical objects



Eleusinian Mysteries

and the secretive knowledge they revealed. Based on a set of rites, and contextualized through a nine-day festival, the Greater Mysteries connected to the tale of Demeter and Persephone through five distinct degrees as outlined by sixth-century Neoplatonist Olympiodorus: the first two degrees involved ritual purification; the third consisted of preparatory ceremonies; the fourth degree signaled the Lesser Mysteries dedicated to Persephone, with those initiated gaining the name mystes (one initiated); and the fifth and final degree indicated the Greater Mysteries of Demeter, with successful initiates called epoptes (one who has seen). Central to the rites of the Eleusinian Mysteries was a 10-day sacred journey from Athens to Eleusis (to symbolize Demeter’s search) led by the Priestess of Demeter and Persephone, who carried the basket of hiera (or the Goddess’s sacred things); fasting to illustrate the collective suffering of Demeter, Persephone, and humanity when the earth fails to bloom; a night of revelry known as pannychis that centered on kernophoria, a torchlit special dance led by women who carried the first fruits of the harvest on their head; and breaking the fast by drinking kykeon, a sacramental drink administered at the end of the journey and consisting of some mixture of barley, mint, the cooking herb pennyroyal, and psychoactive ingredients, most likely the fungus ergot, a fungal parasite that grows on barley and contains the alkaloid ergotamine, the chemical precursor to LSD. The sacramental drinking of kykeon manifested strong entheogenic experiences, including mystic visions and revelatory states of mind that purified and transformed initiates prior to entering the Telesterion, where the most secret aspects of the Mysteries took place and were revealed, often amid the singing of hymns (likely the Homeric Hymn to Demeter) by the Priestess of Demeter and the Hierophant. Ingesting kykeon liberated the soul from the body, helping unveil the possibility of eternal life by delineating between the limits of the material world and the sublimity of the divine realm and after-death condition. The Eleusinian Mysteries signify an attempt to personally experience the connection between the human soul and divine consciousness. The Mysteries climaxed with visions that expose the nature of creation and consciousness after death. Just as Persephone journeyed to the underworld and returned to the living each year, and just as Demeter allows for cycles of creation and destruction, so, too, will every human experience death of the mortal body only to uncover another plane of existence, the immortality of the soul. Held from the 1500s BCE until 392 CE, the Eleusinian Mysteries offered Greeks an opportunity for divine perception and revelatory wisdom. Morgan Shipley See also: Paganism: Ritual; Wicca; Prehistoric Religions: Crete Religion and Culture; Spirituality: Divination Further Reading Bowden, Hugh. Mystery Cults of the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Cosmopoulos, Michael. Bronze Age Eleusis and the Origins of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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Keller, Mara Lynn. “The Ritual Path of Initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries.” Rosicrucian Digest 2 (2009): 28–42. Meyer, Marvin W. The Ancient Mysteries, a Sourcebook: Sacred Texts of the Mystery Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mylonas, George Emmanuel. Eleusis and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961. Wasson, R. Gordon, Carl A. P. Ruck, and Albert Hofmann. The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2008.

GAIA A primordial elemental goddess (protogenoi), Gaia (derived from ge or ga, the Greek common noun for “land”; also called Gaea, Gi, Ge, and, in the Roman pantheon, Terra) emerges consistently within Greek mythology, not only personifying Earth but also representing the very locus of creation. According to creation narratives of the ancient Greeks (particularly within Hesiod’s poem “Theogony,” which means “the genealogy or birth of the Gods”), Gaia springs into existence without cause or explanation, through parthenogenic birth (without male intervention). While one myth describes Chaos, Eros, and Gaia being born out of a cosmic egg, pointing to an initial spark of cocreation out of nothingness, Gaia is considered the mother of everything and, among ancient Greeks and within Greek mythology, was known as the Original Goddess, or Supreme Goddess, by deities and humans alike. At first, only Chaos existed. Out of this void of darkness and confusion, along with Erebus, an unknowable place where death and Night dwell, and Eros (love), who brought Light and the very beginning of order, Gaia (Great Mother/Mother Earth) willed herself into existence, creating the conditions for the rest of creation to unfold. As Creatrix of the material world and the entire universe, ancient Greek cosmology locates Gaia as supporting the seas and mountains upon her breast. Conceived as a flat disk circumscribed by Oceanus (the river Okeanos, birthed from Gaia), controlled from above by the solid dome of heaven, and contained below by the inverse dome of Tartarus (abyss where souls are judged and the wicked punished), earth ultimately symbolizes Gaia’s womb and emerges in Greek mythology as the physical location out of which and from which creation develops. Appearing as a divine character in both the epics of Homer and the poetry of Hesiod, it is told that, following this initial spark of creation, from the union of Gaia and Chaos, with aid from Eros, Uranus (Father Sky) was born. Along with Gaia, he would birth not only the Titans and Titanesses but also the Giants (Hecatoncheires), Oceanus, and the entire physical world—mountains, plains, seas, and rivers—as we understand it. Responsible for the heavenly Gods and the material realm, Gaia is Great Mother of All Creation, who directly births all mortal crea­ tures from her earthly flesh. She thereafter emerged as the primary antagonist of Greek mythology, literally driving both creation and the conditions that would lead to the pantheon of Greek Gods and Goddesses led by Zeus. The classical pantheon of Greek Gods and Goddesses was born from Gaia’s union with Uranus, while the Sea Gods were born from her union with Pontus (the Sea).



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Outside of her specific Greek context, Gaia has become almost synonymous with Goddess movements that regard Earth as a living being, as the Feminine Divine both figuratively and literally. Whether characterized as Mother Nature or Mother Earth, Gaia personifies the entire earthly ecosystem; she is the means to achieve harmonic symbiosis, a wholeness and balance within our natural worlds and physical environment. Rather than holding dominion over the earth, Goddess-movement practitioners align with their Greek predecessors in understanding humanity as a living part of the earth environment and thus worship Earth in some form, often as Goddess Earth or Gaea, who encompasses and conceives all life. As echoed in Greek mythology, the emphasis on and worship of Gaia captures the dynamism of female-centered spirituality with its emphasis on an immanent Feminine Divine presence. Such a literal reading finds its most contemporary inflection in the Gaia hypothesis, formulated by chemist James Lovelock (1979) in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Considering the environmental consequences of believing that humans hold total dominion over the natural world, the Gaia hypothesis replaces a model of domination with one that captures the implications of the Greek understanding. Rather than separative and distinct, all life is contingent, part of a single, all-encompassing planetary consciousness—Mother Gaia—who makes it possible for the earth to support life while also revealing a sacred sense of nurturing that locates the catalyst for life and health within the divine womb of Mother Nature. Morgan Shipley See also: Ancient Religions: Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon; Paganism: Eco-Paganism; Spirituality: Art and Performance; Ecofeminism; Goddess Spirituality Further Reading Berens, E. M. The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome. n.p.: Start Publishing, 2012. Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1998. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Classics, 1999. Lovelock, J. E. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Pike, Sarah M. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

GORGON MEDUSA The Gorgon Medusa, with her bulging eyes, head bristling with hissing snakes, and lolling tongue extended between sharp fangs, has haunted the Western imagination for more than 2,500 years. The image of a shaggy, bodiless face with a wide-eyed, devastating glare and fearsome cry predates the appearance of the stylized Gorgon head, or gorgoneion, as it was known throughout the Greek world. This nameless terror first appears in Homer’s Odyssey (ca. eighth century BCE)

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as a grizzly apparition, “the gigantic shape of fear,” that Odysseus encounters in Hades. In the Iliad, Homer identifies this image as the central motif on the shield of Agamemnon: “And thereon was set as a crown, Gorgo, grim of aspect, Glaring terribly, and about her were Terror and Fear.” The name Gorgo, or Gorgon, is derived from the Greek gorgos—meaning “terrible” or “horrifying”—to describe the ultimate female monster. There are three Gorgon sisters—Sthenno, Euryale, and Medusa—representing the circular continuity of mythic time. Only Medusa appears in the present, while her sisters reside in the eternal dimensions of past and future. Their lineage reaches deep into the pre-Greek societies of the ancient world, whose deities reflect people’s intimate association with earth, sea, and sky and the eternal cycles of birth, maturation, disintegration, and regeneration into new life. According to Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE), the Gorgons were direct descendants from the most ancient family of deities. The story of the Greek hero Perseus decapitating Medusa, which circulated in Greek oral traditions, was mentioned in the Theogony, in plays by Aeschylus and Euripides (sixth and fifth centuries BCE), and in other works, including the Biblioteca of Apollodorus (second century BCE) and the Metamorphoses by Ovid (first century BCE). Various versions of the tale were added by other authors over time. Regardless of numerous variations, a canonic form of the myth can be discerned throughout the Greek classical period. In its basic form, Perseus goes on a hero’s journey to decapitate the Gorgon Medusa. He is successful because of the indispensable help from his half-sister, Goddess Athena, who plays a main role in the action. To the Greeks, the Gorgon Medusa, by definition, was a vicious monster who had to be destroyed. This was a perilous challenge for any hero due to the fact that Medusa’s head, even when severed, retained the power to turn men to stone. But according to Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Medusa had once been a beautiful maiden who was raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple, polluting its sacred precinct. Athena took out her fury not on Poseidon but on Medusa by cursing her and making her hideous with writhing snakes for hair. In the Bibliotheca, Apollodorus mentions that Athena guides Perseus’s hand in cutting off Medusa’s head. When the deed is done, Perseus, wearing the helmet of invisibility, shoves the severed head into a magical bag (kibisis) and flies off in his winged sandals, pursued forever by the remaining Gorgon sisters. The Gorgon is an ancient Triple Goddess, a potent threshold guardian whose fierce frontal gaze was originally used to protect the sacred sanctuaries dedicated to the Goddesses of the Old Religion. Ferocious masks—with bulging eyes, protruding tongue, and fangs—have been worn from ancient times in ritual contexts throughout the world. In Greece, grimacing terra-cotta masks with fangs from the eighth century BCE were preserved in a sacrificial pit associated with the shrine of Hera at Tiryns. Life-sized terra-cotta masks of aged women and Gorgons, worn in rituals and used as votive gifts, were unearthed at the sanctuary of Ortheia in Sparta. Most of the masks from this sanctuary date from the end of the seventh through the sixth century BCE. Ortheia was eventually associated with Artemis,



Gorgon Medusa

who is sometimes depicted with wings and wearing a Gorgon mask. By the seventh century BCE, the Gorgon Medusa’s apotropaic powers were co-opted to serve the Greek establishment. Gorgoneia were used for protection throughout the Greek world—installed on the upper part of temples (the realm of the Olympian deities) as well as on private dwellings, domestic furnishings, ovens, and coins. Ironically, Medusa’s visage was also mounted on shields, armor, and chariots to protect the Greek warriors engaged in destroying all threats to the Greek social order, including her own. The Gorgon expanded into a full sculptural figure during the mid-sixth century BCE. A power- Medusa’s head, even when severed, could turn men to stone according to ancient Greek myth. In this ful example is the eight-foot-high modern rendering, Raging Medusa, contemporary artsculptural relief of Medusa ist Cristina Biaggi depicts the Medusa as an image of installed at the highest position beauty and an expression of women’s legitimate rage. on the pediment of the temple (Cristina Biaggi) of Artemis at Corcyra, Corfu. Her enormous head and upper torso are in a frontal position, while her muscular lower body is in a bent-knee Knielauf pose, with winged sandals and great expanded wings. She appears to be swiftly running or flying through the air. Her tunic is encircled at the waist by two copulating serpents, and snakes with open jaws emerge horizontally from under her open ears. Her children, Pegasus and Chrysaor, are sheltered beneath her arms. While the story of the Gorgon Medusa typically focuses on her hideous looks and the fact of her beheading, she carries a much deeper significance that is usually overlooked. Long before the Gorgon Medusa constellated in the Greek mind as a demonic figure, the potencies she represents were honored as the regenerative source of life in the earliest horticultural societies of the ancient world. The broad outlines of Old European (pre-Greek) beliefs are intrinsic to the seasonal activities of planting, harvesting, and working the soil. Central to the practice of horticulture is the observation that the decomposition of previously living matter nurtures the fertility of the earth. Within this context, concepts of the sacred are analogous to the cycles of the living world. In mythic terms, the Great Goddess as the sacred source of life is a metaphor for life giving birth to itself and absorbing

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itself in death. Therefore, she is also the Death Goddess who presides over the rotting decay that is essential for the regeneration of life. The Gorgon face is analogous to the mask of Death Goddess Hecate, whose powers, described by Hesiod, date from the beginning (the “abysm of time”). The Gorgons dwell in caves, the underworld womb of the earth, as does Hecate. They stand with Hecate (the Triple Moon Goddess) at the end of the cycle of life on the threshold of disintegration where old forms inevitably dissolve so that new life can emerge. Hecate’s staff, with three Gorgon masks facing in different directions, was placed at crossroads where offerings were left by Priestesses of the Night wearing Gorgon masks. The full moon, as the white mask of Hecate, is also called the Gorgon’s head. Gorgons have the wide eyes of a predator: the owl who hunts in the darkness of night and the snake who fascinates its prey before devouring it. Their mouths are wide with the death grin of a skull. Their protruding tusks are those of the wild boar, a scavenger known to devour corpses. The Gorgons and their sisters, the Graiae, were called Phorcydes after their father Phorcys (also a corpse eater) and were daughters of the underworld realm of death and transformation. The snakes that sprout from the Gorgons’ heads carry layers of ancient symbolism. Their hibernation in the earth ties them intimately to the grave, while the shedding of skin emphasizes rebirth. The serpent suggests the umbilical link to the womb during gestation, the lifeline to the mother, a direct source of ancestral knowledge and wisdom. The full-bodied Gorgon Medusa combines the serpent powers with the potent presence of the bird of prey, becoming the plumed serpent who circulates freely in all domains: flying into the great above, slithering into the earth and through the waters, commanding the infinite realms of sky, earth, underworld, and sea. When the Olympian pantheon and the worship of the Greek hero gained ascendancy, the earth deities of the Old Religion were demonized or co-opted. As an extreme concentration of ancient female powers, the Gorgon Medusa posed a direct challenge to male structures of dominance. The murder of Medusa by the Greek hero Perseus symbolized a male rite of passage perpetuating officially sanctioned power dynamics while defining the dangerous consequences of the manifestation of female sovereignty. Medusa in Western History

The Gorgon Medusa remained a popular subject of sculpture, bas-reliefs, and mosaics during the Greco-Roman period (ca. first century BCE–fourth century CE), although her fierceness was progressively neutralized by an emphasis on youthful beauty. As Christianity became established throughout the Roman world, Pagan iconography was considered idolatrous and was obsessively destroyed by zealous believers. Non-Christian female images, and the Gorgon Medusa in partic­ ular, were demonized as abominations. Christian scholars during the medieval period (ca. 5th–15th century) treated the beheading of Medusa as an allegory in which Perseus, as a virtuous son of Zeus, was victorious over Medusa, the epitome of evil. Moreover, all women were



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considered potential threats to men because of their erotic powers. Men’s morality and their very souls were at stake in the presence of this dangerous female force. Renaissance artists (ca. 14th–17th century) produced stunningly rendered images of the beautiful Medusa with frighteningly realistic snakes for hair, bringing the Gorgon—at the grisly moment of her decapitation or after she was already stinking and dead—into visceral focus in the popular mind. These works—painted or sculpted by da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rubens, Bernini, and others—evoked Medusa as the terrible beauty, the ultimate femme fatale, easily recognizable as the girl next door, or as a mother-in-law, or a man’s own wife. These Medusas—not exotically stylized but dreadfully familiar—emphasized a growing distrust of women, amplified by the horrors of the Inquisition, during which any woman could be arrested, tortured, and burned. An iconic bronze sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini (1554) depicts Perseus as the sword-bearing youthful hero standing triumphantly on Medusa’s naked body, holding aloft her beautiful severed head. This masterpiece stood for centuries in the center of Florence as an elegant expression of the culturally sanctioned necessity for heroic males to cleanse civil society of unbridled female powers. This condemnation of women was briefly transposed during the Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries when the intoxication of feminine sexuality was embraced as a forbidden source of ecstasy. Medusa, who embodied both beauty and horror, was seen not as a monster but as a victim. She became a treasured theme in the visual arts and literature of the Decadents and Romantics who cultivated the sensual discord she represented between pleasure and pain, death and the Divine. During the early 20th century, Sigmund Freud used a psychoanalytical interpretation of Medusa as symbolic of women’s danger to men. In his view, the fangs protruding from the Gorgon’s mouth represent the “vagina dentata,” while the snakes writhing on her head are evidence of castrated phalli. The philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Neumann continued this theme by declaring in The Great Mother (1963, 168), “The hero is the man who overcomes the Terrible Mother, breaks the teeth out of her vagina, and so makes her into a woman.” By the mid-20th century, many women had become increasingly fed up with male domination and the culturally sanctioned myths used to justify patriarchal structures. The decapitation of Medusa was recognized as representing the ultimate bondage and silencing of women. The lid of imposed silence came off as many women began to tell their own stories and to listen to each other—often for the first time. Women’s literature, poetry, oral histories, dance, rituals, and incantations have poured forth to inspire and reclaim forbidden powers. Moreover, as a fundamental boundary crosser, Medusa is embraced by many who do not conform to white mainstream society and who are creating culture on the margins and bringing their work to center stage. The Gorgon Sisters and Hecate, as Triple Goddesses, function as sacred metaphors of inescapable dissolution and transformation. Their deep significance is rooted in the rich, decomposing matrix of earth’s fertility that nurtures all life on earth. Joan Marler

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See also: Ancient Religions: Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon; Prehistoric Religions: Crete, Religion and Culture; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality; Sheela na gigs Further Reading Bowers, Susan R. “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 2 (Spring 1990): 217–35. Culpepper, Emily Erwin. “Ancient Gorgons: A Face for Contemporary Women’s Rage.” Women of Power 3 (Winter/Spring 1986): 9–16. Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Homer. The Illiad. Translated by R. Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by R. Lattimore. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. Leeming, David. Medusa in the Mirror of Time. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Marler, Joan. “An Archaeomythological Investigation of the Gorgon.” ReVision (Summer 2002): 15–23. Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton University Press, 1963. Wilk, Stephen R. Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

G R E E K A N D R O M A N W O M E N , D A I LY L I V E S O F The daily life of women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds from 800 BCE to 437 CE changed through the various phases of life from infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The status of a woman—slave, free, virginal, married, or widowed—dictated her daily activities and expectations. The first struggle for female infants was infanticide. Greek and Roman societies valued male births more than female. In these military societies, females posed a liability to the family. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century BCE) mentions parental requirements to raise all males and the firstborn female. The father determined which children to keep and name. The Greek and Etruscan families gave women unique names, but in the Roman world, she took her father’s name. All daughters, if kept, received the father’s name. For example, Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) named his daughter Julia. A second girl would be Julia II, nicknamed “Two.” A third girl, Julia III, would be called “Three,” and so on. Roman boys received unique names. In poor families, the children worked. Struggling families might sell their children into slavery for financial gain or as a punishment to the child. Slaves had no legal protection from abuse, but free children also routinely experienced beatings. Adults exploited slave children, male and female, for sex. Greeks and Romans considered pederasty as a social norm. It pervaded in both cultures as a form of mentorship for prepubescent children, slave or free. Manumission, in the Roman Empire (27 BCE–476 CE), could not occur until age 30. As daughters offered less perceived value to the family, they probably faced the fate of slavery more than their fraternal counterparts.



Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of

As children, boys and girls played together. They enjoyed the family dog, handball games, and dice games. Girls played with clay or cloth dolls as well as mice, setting them up with miniature carts to pull. Children participated in religious ceremonies; some ceremonies even required children. At the end of their childhood and transition into adulthood, maturing girls would dedicate their dolls to female deities, such as Demeter and Artemis. Girls who died before maturing took their dolls with them to the grave. Roman girls would dedicate their childhood toga (child’s garment) to Fortuna Virginalis and take on a new adult stola (woman’s garment). The average life expectancy in the ancient world ranged between 20 and 30 years (Engels Statue called the Black Artemis of Ephesus, with 1980), but many people lived into what may be multiple breasts or ripe fruits on her their fifties and even seventies. body, a Roman copy of a Greek statue, second century The low life-expectancy statistics BCE. Girls in ancient Greece danced for Artemis at come from a very high infant and her festivals and might spend a year serving in her child mortality rate and from temple. (Musei Capitolini, Rome, Italy/Ghigo Roli/ high death rates in childbirth Bridgeman Images) from adolescent brides. Girls, when they reached puberty, married older, financially stable husbands. The paterfamilias arranged the marriage. Rape victims were encouraged to commit suicide as an honorable escape because they were no longer a valuable political asset in marriage transactions. On rare occasion, instead of marriage, elite members of society could commit their daughters to virginal priestess positions. In the Roman world, they joined the Vestal Virgin religious college. In the Greek world (ca. 800–146 BCE), they became priestesses of a Goddess Religion, such as Athena’s. Adult women played the role of wife, mother, slave, prostitute, or widow. A woman outside of these categories committed social deviance. In Rome and Sparta, women transacted market and legal business independently, though the paterfamilias might send representation with the women. In the rest of the Greek world, women could not conduct business outside of the house. They required a male family member as an escort to festivals or funerals. Greek women faced exclusion from public life, even from the Olympics. Roman women, however, enjoyed public

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spectacles like gladiators and animal fights at the Colosseum and other arenas. Some religious ceremonies segregated by gender; for example, the Roman Bona Dea celebration of the Great Goddess disallowed male involvement. Women made offerings to female deities unique to their gender. For example, Artemis received offerings of mirrors, spindles, and jewelry. Greek couples lived detached lives. Women had separate quarters in the typical Greek house. While generally relegated to the house, wives and mothers essentially ruled the household. Campaigns kept fighting-aged men away from home. Women maintained and managed plantations, slaves, businesses, and children. Women of lower classes would typically weave, work wool, and perform agricultural duties. Women entered marriage with a dowry, which remained her own property within the marriage unless she ceded it to her husband. Women used their personal property for investment opportunities, including interest loans. Divorce occurred frequently in the ancient world. No negative religious stigmas followed divorce. Marriages did not represent a union before, to, or under the deities. Marriage served as a contract between families. Reputable people in the Greek and Roman world had several divorces. Husband or wife could initiate the divorce, but the process posed greater risk for women than for men. In the event of a divorce, the children stayed with their father. The wife needed permission from the head of her family’s house to divorce. Upon divorcing, she returned to her paterfamilias. Infertility, considered the wife’s deficiency, presented a legal ground for divorce, though there are examples of romantic, faithful, and happy marriages without the production of children. In “The Eulogy of Turia,” found on a tombstone, a Roman husband praises his barren wife. She kept the household, mortgaged her dowry for him, saved him from the proscription list, and remained faithful to him. Because they could not produce children, she offered him a divorce. He refused. The eulogy paints a picture of a marriage based on love, but ancient literature suggests that husbands and wives usually found romance outside of their arranged marriage. Love flowered in adultery, companionship within same-sex friendships, and partnerships. Taboos of same-sex physical relationships centered on age, not homosexuality or religion. Slaves provided a frequent extramarital sexual outlet. While female slaves cooked, cleaned, and kept the house, their duties contained another primary expectation of sexually pleasuring their master and guests. Masters used slaves for sex without social or religious dishonor. For example, in The Golden Ass (second century CE), the hostess offers her slave, Photis, to the guest, Lucian. While love and sex occurred outside of marriage, a woman seeking sex outside of her nuptial bed would have been disgraced, stoned, or executed if caught. Love potions and magic spells were used to attract the attention of a desired mate. Both genders used spells and concoctions for sexual encounters. Widows may have been the most liberated category of ancient women. Without a permanent paterfamilias, they found release from traditional roles. The paterfamilias found new marriage arrangements for young widows. If older, the widow remained faithful to her husband’s family but ran the household and legal affairs on



Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of

her own. For example, in the first century CE, Octavia raised the illegitimate children of Marc Antony (through Cleopatra VII). After Antony divorced her, remarried, and died, she continued to raise Cleopatra VII’s children. Her strategy may have been more political than humanitarian, but she was at liberty to act. While women remained subservient to men in all areas of life, they seemed to gain independence during long wars. The women of the warring societies found themselves running the household and even polis affairs. In the fifth century BCE, Aristophanes captures the independent female spirit in the play Lysistrata. Aristophanes depicts Athenian and Spartan women joining together to stop the war by withholding sex from their husbands. The identity of ancient women centered on their physical bodies. Their power over the opposite sex, their position in society, and their role as mothers and wives centered on their sexuality and fertility. The refusal to stay within the standard female roles led to death. Through the story of Thecla (first to second century CE) in “Acts of Paul and Thecla,” the requirement and social obligation of marriage for women in the Roman Empire becomes evident. While betrothed, she converted to Christianity and began following the apostle Paul. In the Pauline fashion, she pledged to remain unmarried and celibate. For violating her father’s marital arrangement and neglecting to yield to social norms, the community, led by her father and former fiancé, attempted to brutally and publicly execute her. Legally, Roman and Greek marriages required consent. In this case, she could “consent” or die. The final aspect of the daily lives of women, prostitution in the classical world, deserves attention. Prostitution pervaded in ancient Greece and Rome. Every major urban center had a brothel, and trains of prostitutes followed military outposts and campaign campsites. Unlike sacred temple prostitutes of ancient Babylon, the occupation of prostitution lacked nobility or religious dedication in the Greco-Roman world. Women and mature girls who served as prostitutes came from poverty or slavery. Without reliable forms of birth control, pregnancy resulted. Near Roman brothel sites, archaeologists find caches of exposed infant skeletons. The author Plutarch (second century CE) describes a particularly famous Athenian prostitute, Aspasia, from the fourth century BCE, who ran a brothel that serviced Socrates and his pupils. Plutarch suggests her influence led General Pericles to start the Peloponnesian War. Some prostitutes had the unique ability to live outside of a paterfamilias domain. They could live and act independently but in shame and disrespect. Kristan Ewin Foust See also: Ancient Religions: Athena; Egyptian Religion; Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions; Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions; Christianity: Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Widowhood; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Engels, Donald. “The Problem of Female Infanticide in the Greco-Roman World.” Classical Philology 75, no. 2 (1980): 112–20.

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Evans, John K. War, Women and Children in Ancient Rome. New York: Routledge, 2014. Fantham, Elaine, Helene Peet Foley, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Sarah B. Pomeroy, and H. A. Shapiro. Women in the Classical World: Image and Text. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books, 1975.

HOMOSEXUALITY Female homosexuality and homoeroticism in ancient Greco-Roman contexts is a topic that is often overlooked by both scholars and students of religion. Neglect of such a deeply intimate subject may be, in part, due to men’s lack of interest in female-female interactions—both in the ancient and modern worlds. Broadly speaking, women’s experience and the ordinary lives of women were virtually invisible to elite Greco-Roman men, whose primary interests lay rather in public, political, and military spaces. Because of both the conscious and unconscious ignorance of Greco-Roman authors concerning female homosexuality, only fragmented representations, and some satirical stereotypes used to discredit such relations, survive. Some of our sources for information about female homosexual interactions come from the Lesbian (from the island of Lesbos) poet Sappho, medical texts of Hippocrates, Plato’s Symposium, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the satirical authors Martial and Juvenal. Although one might use the term lesbian to describe female homoeroticism, this word has a complicated history that potentially makes it anachronistic for the Greco-Roman world. The term lesbian was used by 19th-century sexologists to categorize female-female love as a pathological disease; on the other hand, the ancient use of lesbian referred to the island of Lesbos or to fellatio. Although the term is often used in the Western world as part of the female homoerotic identity, it might be more accurate in this instance (although also more biased toward elite male authorial interests) to use the terms of ancient authors: tribas or frictrix, both words that designate the act of rubbing. Most studies of ancient female homoeroticism are instantly drawn to the paragon of female love: Sappho of Lesbos (ca. 612–557 BCE). Sappho is extolled by ancients and moderns as a timeless poet who expresses love and life in intimate ways. Fragments of her poems portray Sappho praying to Aphrodite for the return of a female lover, the comparison of Anactoria to Helen of Troy, and a potentially amorous rivalry with another woman. In a different literary genre, the physician Hippocrates (ca. 460–375 BCE) provides a biological explanation for female homoeroticism in On Regimen. In his view, all humans possess male and female seeds that determine one’s masculinity or femininity. Sex leads to a transfer of these seeds, which then “fight” with one another to become the dominant trait in the child. From this perspective, a female-loving female has an imbalance due to improper seeding at her conception. Both Martial and Juvenal (first century CE) record stereotyped portrayals of homoerotic women as hypersexual and dangerous to Roman society––both sexually and morally depraved.



Hypatia (ca. 351–ca. 415 CE)

Two important deductions from these primary sources should be noted here. First, scholars such as Wayne Dynes have recognized that Roman authors who discuss female homoeroticism often try to “explain it away” as something Greek or “other” to Roman culture. Second, these elite male authors can also be accused of phallocentricity––that is, an overt emphasis on the phallus. Ancient male authors endeavored to describe and satirize female-female love within a male paradigm in which there was often an attempt to mirror male-male and male-female love. Chance Bonar See also: Ancient Religions: Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of; Sappho; Christianity: Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity; Marriage and Divorce Further Reading Augustine. Letter 211. Translated by Sr. Wilfrid Parsons. In Fathers of the Church. Vol. 32: 50. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1956. Brooten, Bernadette. Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Brown, Judith C. Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Dynes, Wayne R., and Stephen Donaldson. Homosexuality in the Ancient World. New York: Garland, 1992. Matter, Ann. “Discourses of Desire: Sexuality and Christian Women’s Visionary Narratives.” Journal of Homosexuality 18 (1989/1990): 119–31. Murray, Jacqueline. “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages.” In Handbook for Medieval Sexuality, edited by Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage, 191–222. New York: Garland, 1996.

H Y PAT I A ( C A . 3 5 1 – C A . 4 1 5 C E ) Hypatia was a mathematician, philosopher, and leading intellectual who was regarded as one of the greatest teachers of her time. Highly unusual for a woman, she was appointed head of Alexandria’s Platonic academy, where she specialized in Neoplatonist philosophy. Drawing on Plotinus (204–270 CE), Neoplatonists reconciled polytheism with monotheism by arguing that deities of different cultures and historical periods were different aspects of the Divine One. Hypatia’s students included future leaders of the Christian church, such as Bishop Synesius of Cyrene (ca. 373–414), some of whose correspondence to Hypatia has survived. Estimates of Hypatia’s birth date vary from 351 to 370 CE. Her father, Theon Alexandricus (ca. 335–405), was a famous mathematician and astronomer. Nothing is known about her mother. Hypatia’s family were Greeks resident in Alexandria on the coast of northern Egypt. Alexandria was founded around 330 BCE, following the Greek conquest of Egypt, and became an international trading port. It took over from Athens as the leading intellectual center of the Mediterranean, attracting important scholars, such as the mathematician Euclid.

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Theon gave his daughter an excellent education in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, something rare for women. Like other intellectuals of the time, Theon was concerned about preserving Greek scholarship in a period when Christians were destroying manuscripts perceived as “Pagan.” Hypatia continued this work. Few of her writings have survived, but she is thought to have worked on editions of important texts, including Ptolemy’s Almagest and Astronomical Canon, Diophantus’s Arithmetica, and Apollonius of Perga’s Conics. She was an expert in the design of scientific instruments, including a hydrometer for measuring the relative density of liquids and an astrolabe for calculating the position of the sun and stars. The main contemporary source for Hypatia’s life is Ecclesiastical History (ca. 415 CE) by Socrates Scholasticus (Socrates of Constantinople; ca. 380–439). He records the respect in which Hypatia was held. Her dignity and virtue were widely admired, and she was at ease in the company of powerful men. She was thought not to have married, finding more freedom in her single, celibate status. Life in Alexandria was becoming dangerous, however, even for powerful people such as Hypatia. Alexandria had been annexed by the Roman Empire in 80 BCE, but the empire was in decline, and political turmoil was common. Alexandria was a volatile city with a multicultural population of Europeans, Africans, Arabs, and Asians as well as competing faith communities, including Pagans, Jews, Gnostics, and various branches of Christianity. After 380, when Emperor Theodosius I proclaimed Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, tolerance of other faiths declined. The situation was exacerbated by the appointment in 412 of a new archbishop, Cyril, later canonized as Saint Cyril of Alexandria. Cyril inflamed religious tensions and came into conflict with Orestes, the imperial governor. In 415, Hypatia was accused of siding with Orestes in the dispute. She was set upon in the street by a Christian mob, who dragged her to Cyril’s headquarters at the Cesareum. Here she was stripped naked and her flesh torn from her bones until she died. Her body was burned. In recent centuries, Hypatia’s tragic death has captured the imagination of religious and political reformers. She has been celebrated successively as a heroine of rationalism, Protestantism, feminism, and Paganism. Vivianne Crowley See also: Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion; Paganism: Paganism Further Reading Deakin, Michael. Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr. Amherst, MA: Prometheus Books, 2007. Dzielska, Maria. Hypatia of Alexandria. Translated by F. Lyra. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Zenos, Andrew Constantinides. Of Hypatia the Female Philosopher. Vol. 2: Socrates Scholasticus. A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Series II, chap. 15. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. Translated by Andrew Constantinides Zenos. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1890.



Inanna

INANNA The Mesopotamian Goddess Inanna may have derived from the all-powerful Great Mother Goddess of prehistoric times. In Sumer, before the Bronze Age collapse (1200 BCE), she was often the highest-ranked deity. Known as Sumer’s Mother Goddess and War Goddess, she was born from a volcano and symbolized the liminal barriers between life and death, earth and underworld. As patriarchy became normative, many of Inanna’s powers and attributes declined, especially with the rise of the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires and the introduction of the worship of Ashur and Marduk. Of interest are Inanna’s iconography, the syncretization of her worship, her influence in women’s daily lives, ritual sacrifices to her, her mythology, and her most important ceremonies—the Sacred Marriage and the Great Wailing. Canaanite cultures called her Asherah, Ashtart, and Astarte; she was Tanit in Carthage, Eshtar and Ishtar in Akkadian and Babylonian, Baalat-Gebal in Byblos, Turan in Eturia, and Aforodita and Aphrodite in Cyprus and Greece. Epitaphs of Inanna include Queen of Heaven and Earth, Silver Inanna, Giver of Life, Wielder of Death, Earth Mother, and Lady of the Largest Heart. Symbols such as sacred trees, childbirth, snakes, sprouts, Asherah poles, date palms, sacred triangles, cones, sparrows, and vulvas represent her power over birth, death, and regeneration. Owls, the crescent moon, horns, leopards, lions, dragons, cows, the morning and evening star (Venus), and storms are also associated with her. The poet and priestess Enheduanna (23rd century BCE) wrote hymns to honor Inanna’s power and strength. She glorified Inanna’s stance against Enlil’s rape attempt, depicting Inanna standing against the whole circle of high Gods. About a thousand years later (1500–1200 BCE), an Akkadian work, The Counsel of Wisdom, cautions against marrying a follower of Ishtar because she will take many husbands. One of the only occasions polyandry is mentioned in any ancient text, this comment apparently disparages the sexual freedom of Inanna’s priestesses or of women who worshipped her. King Gilgamesh disrespectfully tosses Inanna the masculine member of her sacred bull. Biblical judgments on women who worshiped in open-air temples “on every high mountain and under every green tree” (Deuteronomy 12:2; Isaiah 30:25, 57:5–7, 65:7; Jeremiah 2:20, 3:6–13, 17:2) most probably refer to widespread worship of Inanna’s counterpart Asherah in Israel and Judah. Through her high priestess, Inanna played the bride in one of the ancient Near East’s highest festivals, the Sacred Marriage, practiced from 3000 BCE through the Roman Empire. The original 10-day ceremony gathered all the city-states to Nippur. The festival celebrated Inanna’s marriage to her first husband, the shepherd-king Dumuzi (also called Tammuz, Atunis, Adonis, and Adoni). As the power of kings increased, Sumerian and Akkadian kings took the role of Inanna’s husband, entering into symbolic marriages with Inanna’s priestesses. The kings represented the high Gods of their respective pantheon—Enlil, Marduk, or Assur—who became known as Inanna’s husbands. Inanna’s priestess covered her body with precious gems, and the ritual spoke of the power of her sacred vulva. On the final day of the rite, the couple engaged in intercourse. The service included predictions for the

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coming year’s agricultural fertility. The sexual union of the king with the Goddess legitimated his power and ensured the fertility of the land and animals. Inanna’s marriage and fertility were linked to her other main ceremony, the Great Wailing. Inanna descends to the underworld seeking her lost husband, Dumuzi. Women of all ages participated in ceremonies mourning Dumuzi’s death. These rituals provided women with an opportunity to mourn their own losses as well. Women’s grieving rituals are found in many other cultures. For example, in the sixth century BCE, Israelite women mourned at the temple (Ezekiel 8:14). In mourning rituals, women sat on the ground chanting, played the lyre, hugged the ground in tears, and covered themselves in ashes. They stretched out their arms, cursed and pleaded with the Gods and Goddesses, pulled out their hair, beat their breasts, and lacerated their bodies. The sacred marriage and mourning rituals illustrate Inanna’s connection to birth, death, and rebirth. Kristan Ewin Foust See also: Ancient Religions: Mesopotamian Religion; Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon; Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia; Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Spirituality and Gender in Social Context Further Reading Broekema, Henriette. Inanna, Lady of Heaven and Earth. History of a Sumerian Goddess. Leeuwarden, Netherlands: Elikser B. V. Uitgeverij, 2014. Echlin, Kim, and Linda Wolfsgruber. Inanna: From the Myths of Ancient Sumer. Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2003. Ellis, Elsi Vassdal. Inanna: The Sacred Marriage Rite. Bellingham, WA: EVE, 1987. Harris, Rivkah. “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites.” History of Religions 30, no. 3 (1991): 261–78. Marcovich, Miroslav. “From Ishtar to Aphrodite.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 30, no. 2 (1996): 43–59. Wolkstein, Diane, and Samuel Noah Kramer. 1983. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper and Row.

MARRIAGE, ANCIENT GREEK AND ROMAN RELIGIONS Matron expectations varied across Greco-Roman cultures, but general themes exist, such as domestic roles and reproduction. This article details the role of women in marriage and outlines diversity across the Spartans, Athenians, and Romans. Monogamy predominated Greco-Roman marital ideology; however, extramarital and homosexual encounters occurred. Slaves, adolescent boys, prostitutes, and concubines serviced both sexes of the wedded population. The ancient cultures required women to marry, with the exception of virginal priestesses who held perpetual fecundity. With such potential procreative power, virgin priestesses led ceremonies and ritual holidays to invoke fertility of people, flocks, and crops. The paterfamilias used women as transferable economic property. In the case of divorce, children followed their father, while the dowry, which



Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions

the wife brought to the arrangement, followed the wife. Without a dowry, women became concubines, prostitutes, or slaves. Wives remained at home to manage household duties, including weaving and managing assets, slaves, and children, as men spent several months a year in battle. Roman and Spartan wives owned property, contracted loans, and backed investments—liberties Athenian women lacked. Spartan wives expressed more autonomy than their Athenian and Roman counterparts. They practiced public nude gymnastics, while Athenian women wore veils and remained within their quadrant of the house. Religion directed the success or failure of the military. Spartan mothers (800s–192 BCE) played an essential role in the military, as they believed strong women produced strong sons. Spartan women married between age 18 and 20 and Athenian and Roman brides between age 12 and 16. Spartan males lived in a military community apart from their family beginning at age 7. At age 20, males, still in the military commune, gained the right to marry. Though allowed to marry, they could not live with or see their wives, except at night, until they became full citizens at 30 years old. In Roman and Athenian weddings, women wore veils. Spartan bridesmaids, however, took the bride to a dark room, shaved her head, and dressed her in male clothing. She waited for the groom to sneak into the room. He seized her, sexually sealing the marriage. For the next decade, until the groom became a full citizen, the couple only met nocturnally in secret. The Spartans considered the structure religiously crucial for military victory. On the contrary, Athenians held a three-day public marriage spectacle. The bride-to-be dedicated her childhood doll to Aphrodite, signifying her transition from maiden to matron. After a ritual bath, and dedication of the bathwater to the deities, the bride followed a dancing procession through the city. The ceremony began with animal sacrifices. Symbolizing her cessation of virginity, the bride’s hair was cut and sacrificially offered. The bride lifted her veil and glanced at the groom, sealing the groom and father’s contract. She served as the transactional good. Unlike in Imperial Roman law (first century BCE to fifth century CE), Athenian marriages omitted the requirement of bridal consent. After the glance, the bride and groom consummated the marriage. Some Athenian women continued to live with their parents through the marriage. Female silence and seclusion guidelines pervaded the Athenian domestic sphere more than their counterparts in other Greco-Roman cultures. In the Roman world, matrimonial ceremonies varied. The Romans perceived women as sexually promiscuous. Though desired, no one expected female fidelity. By simply acting as a married couple and professing marriage publicly, a Roman couple became married. Another Roman method for matrimony occurred through the manus, or binding of hands together. The manus ceremony released numina or indigitamenta (spiritual forces) who enforced the union. Sometimes the bride and groom consumed bread and sacrificed cakes to the Gods and Goddesses. The husband carried his new bride over the threshold as she first entered his home to introduce the household divinities to her, thus preventing the ancestral spirits from evicting her.

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According to myth, the Romans acquired their first brides through military conquest in the eighth century BCE. Romulus kidnapped Sabine women who acquiesced as wives. In honor of the Sabine submission, Roman men parted the bride’s hair with a spear in the marriage ceremony. Placing the spear on the head mystically bound the bride to submit to her husband. Traditionally, and later by law, the marriage required formal consent by the Roman bride. However, not consenting to the father’s arrangement often resulted in a public punishment or even a death spectacle for the daughter, as seen in Thecla’s refusal to marry after converting to Christianity (second to third century CE). Though objectified and coerced into marriage, counter examples of wives in happy marriages exist. On a Roman gravestone, a man praised his deceased wife’s attributes, behavior, and fidelity. Kristan Ewin Foust See also: Ancient Religions: Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of Further Reading Dixon, Suzanne. Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres, and Real Life. London: Duckworth, 2001. Hubbard, Thomas K. A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities. Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2014. Lefkowitz, Mary R., and Maureen B. Fant. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Women’s History and Ancient History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

M E S O P O TA M I A N R E L I G I O N In ancient Mesopotamia, religion was closely connected to the household, whether that was a palace, a temple, a farmhouse, or a smaller household. The deities were treated as royalty, and in the large temples, they were given good food and amusement. Since the women were in charge of the household, they had a central position in the rituals. Further, it was quite common that the daughters or other female relatives of kings and the upper classes were installed as priestesses in temples. Their role was to pray for their fathers and their family. Since most of the written sources from ancient Mesopotamia regarding women and religion come from the court and the upper classes, this entry will primarily deal with women from those classes. The so-called Royal Cemetery of Ur gives us some information of women in the period of archaic Ur (ca. 2700–2600 BCE). This period belongs to the end of the protohistorical time of ancient Mesopotamia that runs from the invention of rudimentary script for accounting (ca. 3200 BCE) to the Early Dynastic IIIb period (ca. 2450–2350 BCE) when we get historical information from the sources. The royal cemetery contained 17 intact royal graves, understood as such because of the lavish grave goods. Two persons with cylinder seals with the inscription queen were found as well as cylinder seal inscriptions referring to two persons who were kings. Besides the lavish grave gifts, there were also attendants who had probably been executed to follow their king and queen to the grave. The queen called



Mesopotamian Religion

Women in ancient Mesopotamia, especially daughters of kings and the upper class, conducted religious rites. This votive plaque, ca. 2500 BCE, shows the daughter of King Urnanše of Lagaš in a position of prominence over her four brothers—first in the row and taller than her siblings (top row). (DEA/G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images)

Puabi was adorned with more jewelry than any of the other buried royalty. Her retinue consisted of 23 attendants, whereas King Mesanepada and King Meskalamdu were accompanied by 74 and 63 attendants, respectively. In general, most of the buried attendants were women. The queen called Ninbanda was followed to her grave by four attendants. Both Ninbanda and Puabi were solely called queens, without any reference to a husband, whereas Ašusikildigˆira was referred to as the wife of Akalamdu, King of Ur. Because of the rich grave gifts and the sacrifice of human attendants, it has been discussed whether the kings and queens of the Royal Cemetery of Ur were comprehended as either divine or semidivine. Regardless, when these kings and queens were buried, they were treated in a highly ritualized way. Urnanše is the founder of the Lagaš dynasty of the Early Dynastic IIIb period. We have a votive plaque from his reign that depicts him accompanied by his children, all with piously clasped hands. Urnanše had eight or nine sons and one daughter. In the upper register of the plaque, the king himself is seen, facing five of his children. His daughter had a prominent position among her siblings, as she is shown coming first in the row and being taller than her four brothers.

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Most of the written sources from the Early Dynastic IIIb period come from the queen’s household in the city-state of Lagaš. The majority of the sources from the queen’s household date to the seventh, eighth, and ninth kings—Enentarzi, Lugalanda, and Uru’inimgina—who were the last kings of the dynasty. Under Enentarzi and Lugalanda’s queens, Dimtur and Baranamtara, the queen’s household was called é munus (or é mí), “the house of the woman.” The queen administered both her own estate and the é Bau, the temple of the Goddess Bau. Bau was the wife of Ningirsu, the main male deity of the city-state. Under King Uru’inimgina and Queen Šaša, the é munus changed name to é Bau, and the queen was removed from the supervision of the estate. However, after one year, the previous order was reintroduced, and Queen Šaša is seen in the sources as supervisor again. We know that both Baranamtara and Šaša were active in religious festivals, bringing offerings both to deities and to the dead. Also, high officials and other staff of the palace and the queen’s estate/the temple of Bau participated at banquets arranged by the queens. During the banquets, the king and the queen offered food for both deities and the human participants. One of the most important women of the Sargonic period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE) is Enheduana, en-priestess of the Moon God Nanna in Ur. She was daughter of ˘ King Sargon, the founder of the Sargonic, Akkadian dynasty. Enheduana is the ˘ first textually attested en-priestess and the first named poet in history (Westenholz 1989). Several literary texts are attributed to her. As en-priestess, she was seen as Ningal, the wife of the Moon God. Because of ritual purity, she had to live her whole life in the temple enclosure. As an earthly representative of Nanna’s wife Ningal, she probably prepared his food and also prayed to him as well as carried out purification rituals in the temple. After Enheduana, there was a long tradition ˘ of the kings installing their daughters as en-priestesses of Nanna in Ur. After the Sargonic (Old Akkadian) period, southern Mesopotamia saw a revival of Sumerian kingship under King Gudea (ca. 2141–2122 BCE) and under the slightly later Ur III kings (ca. 2112–2004 BCE). During the Ur III period, the queen did not own large estates. However, she continued to administer lands and cattle of the state and temples, and she distributed sacrificial animals to the temples. For queens as well as other women, there was a close relationship between household, economy, and religion. An important religious task of the women was to pray for the life of their husband and children. For example, Gudea’s wife Ninalla dedicated a bowl to the Goddess Bau for the life of her husband and for her own life. When we come to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), women’s task to pray for their family, and above all for their father, was systematized in the institution of the nadıˉtu-priestesses. These priestesses usually lived unmarried and in celibacy in a convent area. The nadıˉtu-priestesses came from the elite of the society. One renowned nadıˉtu-priestess is Eristi-Aya, the daughter of the king of Mari, a West Semitic kingdom in the northwestern fringes of Mesopotamia. Eristi-Aya wrote letters to her parents, and among other things she told them that she constantly prayed for her father in the temple (Stol 2016). Other priestesses during the Old Babylonian period were the qadištu, the ištarıˉtu, and the kulmašıˉtu.



Mesopotamian Religion

The textual evidence for the period 1600–900 BCE is sparse; therefore, we will turn to the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. In the Neo-Assyrian Empire (744–627 BCE), after the crown prince had become king, the relationship between the king and his mother became important in the royal ideology. One example of their close relationship is the inscription on the Queen Mother Sammu-ramat’s boundary stone, where she describes how she and her son Adad-nerari crossed the Euphrates to wage war against an enemy king (Macgregor 2012). Sammu-ramat does not partake in the war, but she and her son erect the boundary stone together after the victory. Under the two last kings of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, Esarhaddon and Aššurbanipal, prophecy became a central technique to get information about the future and about the Divine will. The female prophets are more frequent than the male ones in the sources, and this is also the most common type of female religious practitioner during this period. The queen mother used prophets for getting information in difficult times, but most of the prophecies were given to the king. In the Neo-Assyrian society, women like the entu, the šeˉlûtu, the ištarıˉtu, and the qadištu were related to temples. The šeˉlûtu was a votary girl given to the temple. The ištarıˉtu was dedicated to the Goddess Ishtar, but nothing is known of her rites. The qadištu is attested from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000 BCE) and down to the last century of the Mesopotamian culture (sixth century BCE). She is found in ritual instructions, incantations, and letters. The meaning of the Akkadian word qadištu is “the consecrated one.” In Akkadian, the en-priestess was called entu-priestess. The latest attestation of an entu-priestess dates to the reign of King Nabonidus (556–539 BCE), who was the last king of the Neo-Babylonian period. Therese Rodin See also: Ancient Religions: Inanna; Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess; Ninlil; Writers ˘ and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia; Judaism: Goddesses; Lilith; Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures Further Reading Baadsgaard, Aubrey, Janet Monge, and Richard L. Zettler. “Bludgeoned, Burned, and Beautified: Reevaluating Mortuary Practices in the Royal Cemetery of Ur.” In Sacred Killing: The Archaeology of Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East, edited by Anne Porter and Glenn M. Schwartz, 125–58. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2012. Macgregor, Sherry Lou. Beyond Hearth and Home: Women in the Public Sphere in Neo-Assyrian Society. State Archives of Assyria Studies XXI. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2012. Stol, Marten. Women in the Ancient Near East. Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. Westenholz, Joan Goodnick. “Enheduanna, En-Priestess, Hen of Nanna, Spouse of Nanna.” Dumu-e2-dub-ba-a: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, edited by Hermann Behrens, Darlene T. Loding, and Martha T. Roth, 539–56. Philadelphia: University Museum, 1989.

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ˆ A MOTHER GODDESS 62 NINH URSAG ˘

ˆA MOTHER GODDESS N I N HU R S A G ˘ Ninhursagˆa was the Mother Goddess of the Sumerian state pantheon in third mil˘ lennium BCE Mesopotamia. As such, she belonged to the top four Deities—An (King), Enlil (King), Ninhursagˆa (Mother Goddess), and Enki (Lord)—each of ˘ whom had an area of his or her own to preside over in the cosmos. An presided over heaven, Enlil over the cultural and political space, Ninhursagˆa over the earth ˘ and mountains and their creatures, and Enki over the subterranean waters. However, this was a result of an effort to coordinate different traditions into one; originally, Ninhursagˆa was also related to heaven and the netherworld. Further, there ˘ were also local Mother Goddesses in each village and city. The Mother Goddess had several names. In Sumerian, besides the name Ninhursagˆa, “Lady of the Mountain Ranges,” among others she was called Nintu, “Lady ˘ Birth” and Ninmah “High Lady,” which might originally have been epithets. A fur˘ ther name was Aruru, which is found both in Sumerian and Akkadian sources. In Akkadian sources, she was also commonly called Beˉlet-ilıˉ, “Mistress of All the Gods” (Asher-Greve and Westenholz 2013, 90). Ninhursagˆa was important primarily during the third millennium, and she is ˘ found in the oldest literary texts as well as in other early texts. Perhaps because her cities became unimportant and/or were abandoned in the early second millennium, her worship is hardly attested at all from that time. This process can also be seen in the literary sources, where she was moved from the third to the fourth place among the highest deities. Initially, the highest deities were enumerated in the order of An—Enlil—Ninhursagˆa—Enki, but in the early second millennium ˘ Ninhursagˆa and Enki change places. ˘ Even though her worship more or less disappeared during the early second millennium, we have a lot of literary attestations of her from that date, since Sumerian literary texts were written down and copied in the schools. There are two myths from the early second millennium where she is one of the two main protagonists: “Enki and Ninhursagˆa” and “Enki and Ninmah” (see Rodin 2014). There is also a ˘ ˘ hymn to her from that period, and she appears in other literary texts (e.g., Rodin 2014, 98). The Mother Goddess is further found in the Akkadian Atrahasis myth ˘ under her names Beˉlet-ilıˉ, Nintu, and Mami, and in the Gilgamesh epic under her names Beˉlet-ilıˉ, Aruru, and Mammıˉtum (Rodin 2014, 172f, 253). The general role of Ninhursagˆa as Mother Goddess is seen in epithets like ˘ “Mother of All Children” and “Mother of the Gods.” She is found in the sources as Divine Birth-Giver, Midwife, and Wet Nurse and often in relationship to kings. Like other Goddesses, Ninhursagˆa is connected to laments. Laments were used ˘ in cases of destruction and death, and Ninhursagˆa laments the death of King ˘ Ur-Namma (ca. 2112–2095 BCE) (Rodin 2014, 103), and in the guise of a cow she laments the loss of her calf. Since Ninhursagˆa occurs in laments, we can infer ˘ that these were part of her religion. Just as the Mother Goddess is a source of life, she is also a source of destruction. She was thought to destroy her creatures, humans, and animals (e.g., by withholding food, the produce of the land). In spite of this, the Mother Goddess was



Ninlil

thought of as a compassionate mother, and she never completely left her creatures. Further, Ninhursagˆa had several traits that are present in Healing Goddesses as ˘ well, and in the myth “Enki and Ninhursagˆa,” she heals Enki and saves him from ˘ death. The sources have their limitations regarding information about worship of the Gods and Goddesses. We know that they were worshipped in temples and that they were treated as royalty and given food and entertainment. One ritual was the sacrifice of animals, which were then eaten. A common practice was to install a statue of a deity in the temple for one’s own life or for the life of one’s family. A few statues installed for Ninhursagˆa are extant. Only the royalty and the elite had the ˘ means to install statues. Ninhursagˆa is further mentioned in two birth incantations, one from the Ur III ˘ period (ca. 2112–2004 BCE) and the other from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE) (Rodin 2014, 103). Although the male deities Enki and Asalluhi ˘ are more commonly attested in birth incantations, the two incantations suggest that the religious practitioner who helped women in childbirth could turn to Ninhursagˆa for help as well. ˘ Therese Rodin See also: Ancient Religions: Inanna; Mesopotamian Religion; Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia; Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Spirituality and Gender in Social Context Further Reading Asher-Greve, Julia M., and Joan Goodnick Westenholz. Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 259. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2013. Rodin, Therese. The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Historia Religionum 35. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-228932.

NINLIL The Goddess Ninlil was one of the most important Goddesses in the Mesopotamian pantheon beside the Mother Goddess Ninhursagˆa and the love and war ˘ Goddess Inanna/Ishtar. She is attested throughout the cuneiform period, from the Early Dynastic IIIa period (ca. 2600–2450 BCE) to the end of the Neo-Babylonian period (ca. 900–539 BCE) (Beaulieu 2003, 274). Ninlil is her Sumerian name; she was called Mulliltu in the Old Babylonian Akkadian dialect and Mullissu in the Neo-Assyrian Akkadian dialect. Ninlil was married to Enlil, the king of the pantheon until the end of the Old Babylonian period (ca. 1600 BCE), thus making her queen. In the Neo-Assyrian period (934–610 BCE) the God Aššur was king, and Ninlil under her name Mullissu was his wife and queen. Besides being queen, Ninlil also represented motherhood just like Ninhursagˆa. Whereas the Goddesses Ninhursagˆa and Inanna/ ˘ ˘

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Ishtar often acted on their own, without a male partner, an important role of Ninlil was to be her husband’s wife. Unlike the two other Goddesses, Ninlil acts in a world view where marriage is important for the Goddess’s identity. Ninlil had several children, of whom all were sons. The most renowned of the sons is perhaps Ninurta, who in some traditions was seen as the son of Ninhursagˆa. ˘ Ninurta is the hero of the pantheon and he wages war against the enemy countries for his father, King Enlil. With Enlil, Ninlil also had the sons Su’en (-Ašimbabbar), Nergal (-Meslamta’ea), Ninazu, and Enbilulu. Furthermore, in a fragmentary myth, it is said that Ninlil bore the God Išum to the Sun God Šamaš before she was married (George 2015, 2). Most of the Sumerian literary texts were written down in Mesopotamian schools in the early second millennium BCE. Among these texts there are two myths in which Ninlil is one of the main protagonists. These two myths are called “Enlil and Ninlil” and “Enlil and Sud” (see Asher-Greve and Westenholz 2013, 145ff.). We also have a hymn that is dedicated to Ninlil (Asher-Greve and Westenholz 2013, 146). Besides that, she occurs in other texts, but is not central in the narrative. In the myth “Enlil and Ninlil” the young girl Ninlil is advised by her mother not to go along the river, because then Enlil will see her and want to have sex with her. Ninlil nevertheless goes to the river and is raped by Enlil. Now the Moon God Su’en grows in Ninlil’s womb. Because of the rape, Enlil is condemned by the 50 Gods as well as the seven Gods who decree destinies to leave the city of Nippur, his and Ninlil’s hometown. When Enlil leaves the city, Ninlil follows him. Each time she catches up to him he has sex with her and each time a new deity is created. The Gods Su’en, Nergal, Ninazu, and Enbilulu are the result of all the intercourse. In “Enlil and Sud,” the other myth in which Ninlil has a central role, Enlil comes to the city Ereš where the young woman Sud lives. He sees her and says that he wants to marry her. Sud seems to be offended and goes in to her house. Enlil then sends one of his ministers to Sud’s mother to ask for her daughter’s hand. Sud’s mother agrees, and Sud and Enlil marry. After the wedding Enlil gives Sud the name Ninlil. In the hymn to Ninlil the Goddess is praised as having lots of divine powers and being equal to her husband, Enlil. The focus is on her power and majesty. Therese Rodin See also: Ancient Religions: Inanna; Mesopotamian Religion; Ninhursagˆa Mother ˘ Goddess; Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia Further Reading Asher-Greve, Julia M., and Joan Goodnick Westenholz. Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 259. Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013. Beaulieu, Paul-Alain. The Pantheon of Uruk during the Neo-Babylonian Period. Cuneiform Monographs 23. Leiden, Netherlands, Boston: Brill and Styx, 2003. George, A. R. “The Gods Išum and Hendursanga: Night Watchmen and Street-lighting in ˘ Babylonia.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 74 (2015): 1–8.



Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon

Rodin, Therese. The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Historia Religionum 35. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-228932

PRE-GREEK GODDESSES IN THE GREEK PA N T H E O N Scholars of Indo-European culture and mythology have always wondered why there are so many female divinities in the Greek pantheon when one would expect male deities to dominate. The presence of Goddesses in ancient Greek society finds a simple explanation in the fact that most of them are of pre-Greek origin, and this is true for their names as well as for their ritual practices. The heritage of the pre-Greek Goddesses is anchored in Old Europe (see the entry “Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe”). Over time, the all-embracing figure of the Old European Goddess transformed into many different divine personalities, distinguished according to their functions. For the ancient Aegean cultures of the Bronze Age, the presence of a major female deity—perhaps presiding over a pantheon of male deities—can be reconstructed. The pre-Indo-European Goddess Religion continues in ancient Crete with its Minoan civilization that flourished in the second millennium BCE. Scholars’ opinions are divided over whether there was one mighty female Divinity or a pantheon of male and female Divinities. Even if Minoan Religion knew various Divinities, the prominence of Female Deities among them remains striking. “That a powerful goddess of nature was the chief deity of the Minoans . . . has never been seriously questioned” (Marinatos 1993, 147). A heritage of female power is reflected in Goddess worship in classical antiquity, where the Old European Goddess has proliferated into a kaleidoscope of individualized divinities that continue, each in her own sphere, to reproduce a religion with a mythical network involving pre-Greek terminology and specific aspects and qualities of the former Great Goddess. The domains of the Greek Goddesses ranged from the most private (i.e., Hestia) to the most public (i.e., the state religion of Athena). Their functions were specialized (i.e., Themis) as much as comprehensive (i.e., Artemis). Female Divinities were the protagonists at places that were of great significance for the formation of a sense of Greek unity (i.e., Hera at Olympia, Gaia at Delphi, and Demeter at Eleusis). The Goddess Athena (A-ta-na in Mycenaean Linear B texts of the 13th century BCE) was one of the most powerful of all Goddesses of the Greek pantheon. As Protectress, Athena watched over the safety of Athens and the well-being of its citizens. The Athenians were aware that the Goddess whom they venerated, Athena, had been worshipped long before their arrival. The sanctuary of Olympia is famous as the venue of the Olympic Games, and Zeus is often said to be its dominant divinity. However, Olympia’s early patroness, in fact, was Hera, the pre-Greek Earth Mother and Goddess of Marriage and Childbirth. The oldest temple at Olympia, the Heraion, is dedicated to Hera. The temple of Zeus was constructed later.

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Greek Goddesses with Roots in Prehistory The following Greek Goddesses represent an inheritance of the Divine Feminine from Neolithic Europe (ca. 6500–3500 BCE): • • • • • • • •

Gaia: Earth Goddess, worshipped at Delphi and other places Hera: Goddess of Fertility, Matrimony, and Childbirth; Patroness of Olympia Demeter: Grain Mother, Patroness of Agriculture Hestia: Guardian of Hearth and Household Artemis: Patroness of Nature and Wildlife Themis: Goddess of Customary Law and Righteousness Dike: Goddess of Justice Athena: Patroness of Technologies, such as pottery, ship building, and weaving; Patroness of Justice, Arts, and Science

The Goddesses of ancient Greece have roots in Neolithic Europe, where, according to archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the earliest agrarian societies were peaceful, highly creative, egalitarian, and female centered in social structure and religious life. The presence of female deities in the Neolithic period is evidenced by a tremendous production of female imagery. These Goddesses are themselves deeply rooted in earlier prehistory. From the Pre-Paleolithic (9000–7000 BCE) and Upper Paleolithic (ca. 43000–9000 BCE), female figures have been found in much greater numbers than those of males. During this long stretch of prehistory, the feminine form was depicted often in eastern, western, and central Europe, in carvings, sculptures, and paintings on cave walls.

Hera’s role in the Greek pantheon of classical times may seem somewhat marginal, but this impression is misleading; “the Iliad nevertheless preserves traces which suggest that Hera had once been a truly powerful goddess, and of course her importance in worship continued to be very significant in later times” (Yasumura 2011, 57). There are sacred sites in the Greek world where Hera is featured in her own glory, not in the shadow of her husband, Zeus. One of those sanctuaries with a mighty temple dedicated to Hera is Paestum (Greek Poseidonia) in southern Italy (south of Salerno). Harald Haarmann See also: Ancient Religions: Athena; Delphic Oracle; Gaia; Gorgon Medusa; Prehistoric Religions: Crete, Religion and Culture; Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe Further Reading Dexter, Miriam Robbins. “The Assimilation of Pre-Indo-European Goddesses into Indo-­ European Society.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 8, no. 1–2 (1980): 19–29. Haarmann, Harald. Roots of Ancient Greek Civilization: The Influence of Old Europe. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2004.



Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece

Marinatos, Nanno. Minoan Religion. Ritual, Image, and Symbol. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Yasumura, Noriko. Challenges to the Power of Zeus in Early Greek Poetry. London: Bristol Classical, 2011.

P R I E S T E S S E S A N D T H E I R S TA F F I N A N C I E N T GREECE Priestesses of public worship in ancient Greece were recruited from the ranks of aristocratic women. This was true for the office of the functionaries in the worship of the various Goddesses. For instance, the status of the high priestess of the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens, dedicated to Athena, was one of the highest prestige in Greek society. The highest office among some of the most prestigious religious rites of the Greek world was always held by women of influential aristocratic families. One of those families stands out because their women set a record for the history of priesthood in Athens and in all of Greece. Those were the Eteoboutadai, an aristocratic kin group (genos) that could claim to have a prestigious genealogy. Twenty-five women of the Eteoboutadai held the office of Priestess of Athena Polias, in an uninterrupted sequence, from the end of the sixth century BCE to the end of the second century CE. The most prestigious functionary at Delphi was a priestess, the Pythia, guardian of the oracle. The popularity of Delphi and the significance assigned by worshipers to its oracle show in antique sources, and there is ample literary documentation of the contents of particular oracular pronouncements. Famous writers of antiquity dedicated parts of their work to the description of sacred activities performed at Delphi. Those who are mentioned in the literary sources as visitors to Delphi are not only living people but also figures of Greek mythology. For instance, Delphi is in focus in Sophocles’s play Oedipus. Delphi’s fame reached far beyond the Greek world, and once all of Greece had been integrated into the Roman Empire, many Romans also visited Delphi. Among them was Cicero (106–43 BCE), the famous orator and writer who discussed the oracles of Delphi in his work On Divination. All great figures of Athenian history frequented the sanctuary of Delphi to consult the oracle. One stands out in the history of democracy; while exiled, Cleisthenes from Athens made inquiries at Delphi about what the future might hold for him. The Pythia pronounced an oracle encouraging him to remain steadfast and envisaged Cleisthenes’s successful return. Cleisthenes did return to Athens and carried out his reform work. In 507 BCE, he established the principle of democratic governance on the communal and state level. Communal festivities, accompanied by processions, played a central role for celebrating the spirit of community life in the Greek cities. Those processions were led by female protagonists, by priestesses, respected members of their community. “It was the priestess’s responsibility to carry the holy things in sacred processions, which gave visibility, not just to the instruments of worship, but also to the priestess herself” (Connelly 2007, 167).

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In addition to the offices of public worship that were held by female functionaries, women were engaged in the religion on various levels, including the maintenance of sanctuaries and public places of worship. Furthermore, women were engaged in the popular business of divination. In this domain, associated with ritual activities (i.e., the functioning of oracles) and religious beliefs, women acted alongside men on equal footing. Divination was an economic factor in its own right since it included the selling of oracles and communication concerning divine guidance. Harald Haarmann See also: Ancient Religions: Athena; Delphic Oracle; Sibyls; Spirituality: Divination Further Reading Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Dillon, Matthew P. J. Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. London: Routledge, 2002.

R E L I G I O U S L E A D E R S H I P, A N C I E N T R O M A N RELIGIONS In the city of Rome, women held leading priestly and nonpriestly roles in religious rites for over 700 years (evidence extant from the third century BCE to the fourth century CE). They worshipped male and female deities and led and maintained civic and noncivic religious activities and property, and many acted “in their own right on behalf of the Roman people” (Schultz 2006, 79). Women presided over sacrifices (e.g., of animals, libations, grains, fruits, cakes, and incense) and were highly integrated into public religious rites and annual feriae (festivals), particularly for those of Juno, Venus, Ceres, Mater Matuta, and Bona Dea. Contrary to long-standing beliefs, women were not confined to marginal roles in domestic, private, or female-centered religious rites. The women who led religious rites were from diverse social classes, ranging from the most elite, as defined by birth, wealth, and relationships (e.g., female relatives of senior magistrates and emperors), to the nonelite (e.g., freedwomen and slaves), and came from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Important criteria for the religious leadership of elite and nonelite women were “pristine reputation and marital or sexual status” (Schultz 2007, 107), criteria typically irrelevant or absent for their male counterparts, with some notable exceptions. The Greek historian Polybius’s account of Tertia Aemilia (d. ca. 163 BCE), an elite woman and female relative of senior magistrates, is an exemplary witness to female religious activity, especially as Polybius almost certainly knew her: Aemilia, for that was this woman’s name, used to display magnificent circumstances in the women’s processions, since she had shared in the life and luck of Scipio [Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus]. For apart from the decorations of her clothing and of her four-wheeled carriage, all the baskets, cups, and instruments for the sacrifice—some of silver, some of gold—were brought along on the splendid processions with her, and the crowd of female slaves and household slaves following along was correspondingly large. (Polyb. 31.26.3–5; above translation by L. Webb)



Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions

Women were undeniably vital participants and leaders in the religious life of the city of Rome, as they were in other cities of the Roman Empire. Female priestly and nonpriestly roles “positioned them [women] right at the heart of civic community” (DiLuzio 2016, 118). Roman Republic (509–27 BCE)

Literary and epigraphic evidence indicate that women held leading priestly roles as virgo vestalis (vestal virgin), regina sacrorum (queen of the sacred rites), flaminica (she who burns, priestess), sacerdos (priestess), magistra (magistrate), and ministra (minister) for civic (e.g., Vesta, Juno, Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, Fortuna Muliebris, Ceres, and Liber) and noncivic (e.g., Bacchus) worship during the Republic. The regina sacrorum and rex sacrorum (queen and king of the sacred rites) were a priestly couple appointed for life by the pontifex maximus (chief priest) and the pontifical college. The couple were from elite Roman families and were married in an elaborate confarreatio ceremony, involving the sharing of panis farreus (spelt cake) and witnessed by priestly families. The regina sacrorum presided over public animal sacrifices for Juno on kalendae (first days of months) and supported her husband in his religious duties. Similarly, the flaminica Dialis and flamen Dialis (priestess and priest of Jupiter) were another priestly couple appointed for life by the pontifex maximus, were married by confarreatio, and were from elite Roman families. The flaminica Dialis presided over public animal sacrifices for Jupiter on nundinae (market days) and over purification rites in February, held a prominent role in pompae (religious processions), and supported her husband in his daily religious duties. She and her husband were subject to elaborate religious restrictions (related to dress, bodies, diet, sleeping arrangements, transport, and to seeing or coming into contact with certain people or objects), and her death led to the dissolution of her husband’s appointment. Less is known about the flaminica Martialis (priestess of Mars) and the conjectural flaminica Quirinalis (priestess of Quirinus), although they presumably supported their husbands the flamen Martialis (priest of Mars) and flamen Quirinalis (priest of Quirinus) in a similar way. These joint priesthoods and priestly roles indicate that “priesthood itself was a fundamentally cooperative endeavor” (DiLuzio 2016, 10). An elite woman may have served as sacerdos Fortunae Muliebris (priestess of Fortuna Muliebris), presiding over ritual activities for Fortuna Muliebris, but evidence for this priesthood is scant. Greek women (with Roman citizenship) from elite families in southern Italy served as sacerdos Cereris publica (public priestess of Ceres), presiding over public sacrifices for Ceres and engaging in the annual festival for Ceres in April. These women were reportedly celibate during their tenure and may have been elderly or widowed. Elderly women of unknown status also served as sacerdos Liberi (priestess of Liber), distributing liba (sacrificial cakes) to worshippers during the annual festival for Liber in March. Nonelite women served as sacerdos Bacchi (priestess of Bacchus), presiding over private sacrifices for Bacchus, and others served as magistra and ministra Bacchi (magistrate and minister of Bacchus), administering religious activities and property. Little is known about the exact nature of these latter roles, and they were curtailed after the Bacchic

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scandal, when the Roman Senate suppressed the noncivic worship of Bacchus in Italy in 186 BCE. Elite women also held leading nonpriestly roles in spectacular pompae (e.g., for Juno and Magna Mater), marking out their marital, sexual, and social status before all the people of Rome, with some like Quinta Claudia (204 BCE) memorialized in statues and on the stage for doing so. Particularly prominent individuals like Sulpicia (ca. 215 BCE) were selected by other women to dedicate statues of divinities (e.g., of Venus). Others sung hymns to propitiate (regain the favor of) deities, like the 27 girls who sung a hymn composed by the poet Livius Andronicus to Juno (207 BCE), or dedicated religious objects, or like Publicia (ca. first century BCE) built and restored religious structures out of their own money (e.g., for Hercules). Wives of senior magistrates like Terentia (63 BCE) and Pompeia (62 BCE) hosted the December rites for Bona Dea at their own homes, while other women organized large-scale donations: elite women to Juno (217 and 207 BCE) and lower-status freedwomen to Feronia (217 BCE). Some elite women like Sulpicia (186 BCE) even counseled senior magistrates on serious religious matters, such as the Bacchic scandal. The breadth and scale of female religious leadership attest to widespread female networks and influence in the Republic. Western Roman Empire (27 BCE–476 CE)

Female priestly roles expanded during the Empire, with literary and epigraphic evidence indicating that women continued serving as virgo vestalis, regina sacrorum, flaminica, sacerdos, magistra, ministra, and in other capacities in preexisting civic (e.g., Vesta, Juno, Jupiter, Quirinus, Fortuna Muliebris, Ceres, Liber, Venus, Bona Dea, and Magna Mater) and noncivic (e.g., Bacchus) rites of worship, while also taking up roles as flaminica, sacerdos, and other capacities in new civic (e.g., Imperial) and noncivic (e.g., Isis) rites. Elite and nonelite women served as sacerdos Veneris (priestess of Venus), sacerdos Bonae Deae (priestess of Bona Dea), sacerdos Matris Deum Magnae Idaeae (priestess of Magna Mater), and sacerdos Isidis (priestess of Isis), presiding over public and private sacrifices for these Goddesses. Furthermore, nonelite women served as magistra and ministra Bonae Deae (magistrate and minister of Bona Dea), administering worship activities and property. A small number of imperial women (female relatives of emperors) held privileged priestly roles for deified emperors of the Imperial religion, acting as flaminica and sacerdos Divi Augusti (priestess of Divus Augustus) and as flaminica Divi Claudi (priestess of Divus Claudius). Several imperial women were themselves deified after death, like Empress Livia (58 BCE–29 CE), receiving worship of their own. Outside the city of Rome, these roles were even more extensive, with many women serving as priestesses of various religions, particularly the Imperial religion. Women continued their leading nonpriestly roles in public religious rites (e.g., in pompae and feriae), with some elite women holding central and public places in exceptional ceremonies like the ludi saeculares (secular games) of 17 BCE, when 110 married women held sellisternia (religious banquets) for Juno and Diana and



Sappho (ca. 630–ca. 570 BCE)

prayed to Juno on behalf of the people of Rome, and 27 girls sung a hymn composed by the poet Horace to the Deities. Many others dedicated statues and religious objects. Imperial women like Livia constructed, restored, and dedicated elaborate religious structures, like those for Divus Augustus, Bona Dea, Concordia, and Fortuna Muliebris. Female religious participation and leadership in the Empire was vibrant and omnipresent. Lewis Webb See also: Ancient Religions: Diana; Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of; Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions; Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece Further Reading DiLuzio, M. A Place at the Altar: Priestesses in Republican Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Hemelrijk, E. Hidden Lives, Public Personae: Women and Civic Life in the Roman West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Hemelrijk, E. “Women and Sacrifice in the Roman Empire.” In Ritual Dynamics and Religious Change in the Roman Empire, edited by O. Hekster, S. Schmidt-Hofner, and Ch. Witschel, 253–67. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009. Holland, L. “Women and Roman Religion.” In A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by S. James and S. Dillon, 204–14. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Macrobius. Saturnalia. Vol. 2: Books 3–5. Translated by R. Kaster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Polybius. The Histories. Vol. 6: Books 28–39. Fragments. Translated by W. Paton. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Schultz, C. “Sanctissima femina: Social Categorization in Women’s Religious Experience in the Roman Republic.” In Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by M. Parca and A. Tzanetou, 137–68. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Schultz, C. Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

ROMAN WOMEN See Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of SAPPHO (CA. 630–CA. 570 BCE) Sappho was born on the island of Lesbos, four nautical miles from the coast of Asia Minor. Known as the greatest lyric poet of antiquity, her fame was equal to that of Homer, the greatest of the epic poets. Plato was said to have called her the “10th muse.” The library of Alexandria in the Hellenistic era collected her poetry in nine volumes, possibly 10,000 lines. It is estimated that up to 97 percent of her work has been lost. What we do have is gathered from quotations from Greek and Roman writers on the nature of poetry and from strips of papyri used to wrap

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mummies. Renaissance writers believed that Pope Gregory VII had her manuscripts burned in the 11th century. Little is known about Sappho’s life, as all extant biographies were written many centuries after her death. The poems mention a possible daughter named Cleis and two brothers. It is believed that she came from an aristocratic family and spent some time in exile in Sicily following a political conflict in Lesbos. While the first-person voice used in her writing cannot be assumed to be autobiographical, Sappho’s poems suggest that young women came from Asia Minor to learn from her. We know of several other female poets of her time, including Corinna of Boetia. Although Sappho is called a Sappho with a lyre and plectrum, accompanied by poet, she is equally a songwriter, Alcaeus, ca. 470 BCE. Sappho’s poems were typically set to music. Though most of her poetry has as her “lyrics” were meant to be been lost, what remains provides a unique look into sung to the accompaniment of ancient women’s spirituality. (Drawing by Valerie the seven-stringed lyre. Sappho’s Woelfel, courtesy of the Center for Hellenic Studies) lyrics have an intimate feeling created by her use of I and you and by her ability to capture a specific yet fleeting moment in time. Many of Sappho’s poems are addressed to Aphrodite and primarily female divinities; some of them are intended for use in weddings, others may have been used in rituals, and a large number describe the relationships of Sappho and the young women who studied with her, expressing women’s love for each other in terms we would call homoerotic. Still, it is believed that Sappho was married, and the poems suggest that though the young women longed for each other’s company after they parted, they returned to their homes to be married. Sappho may have created the Sapphic stanza and the ancient mixolydian musical mode, which is suitable for expressing emotions, including longing and loss. Sappho’s lyrics addressed to Goddesses, particularly Aphrodite, provide a unique opportunity to understand women’s spirituality in antiquity. Sappho calls Aphrodite to come “here to me from Krete to this holy temple / where is your graceful grove” in one of her most famous poems, and in another pleads, “I beg you / do not break with hard pains, / O lady, my heart.” Sappho’s Aphrodite is Goddess of Love and Beauty, and Sappho seems to either not know or not care about traditions of



Shamans in East Asia

Aphrodite’s subordination to Zeus on Mount Olympus or stories of her limping off the battlefield at Troy. In a complex poem addressed to Anactoria, a student or companion who may have gone back to Lydia to marry a soldier, Sappho states, “Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot / and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing / on the black earth. But I say it is / what you love.” Sappho “proves” this point in a reinterpretation of the story of Helen. Knowing that Helen’s choice to leave her husband was condemned as the act that launched the Trojan War, Sappho states that Helen was right to follow her heart. She then compares Helen’s choice, Paris, to Anactoria, stating that, like Helen, she does not care about power but would rather see Anactoria’s “lovely step / and the motion of light on her face / than chariots of Lydians or ranks / of footsoldiers in arms.” In this poem, Sappho not only provides an alternative to the heroic tradition but also explicitly criticizes it, asserting that it is better to make love than war. Carol P. Christ See also: Ancient Religions: Homosexuality; Judaism: Goddesses; Prehistoric Religions: Crete, Religion and Culture Further Reading Sappho. If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Bilingual ed. Translated and edited by Anne Carson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. (Quotations from this translation.) Sappho: A New Translation. Translated by Mary Barnard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works with an Introduction and Notes by André Lardinois. Translated by Diane J. Raynor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

SHAMANS IN EAST ASIA Female spiritual leadership is a very pronounced cultural pattern over most of East Asia. Women are especially prominent in the shamanic cultures, in contrast to state-backed priesthoods. The word shaman originates in the Tungusic languages of northeast Asia, among the Evenks and Manchu. It refers to a person who is able to access spiritual power through ecstatic ceremonies, after a calling and period of initiation, often marked by “spirit sickness.” The criterion for leadership is most often selection by spirits rather than possession of social rank. Many oral histories name a woman as the first shaman. The Puyuma of Taiwan credit a woman named Udekaw. The Jinuo of Yunnan say that it was two women, Mili Jide and Mupu Shaode. In the Baikal region of southern Siberia, the Buryat say that a shepherd girl was the first udgan. In Korea, Bari Gongju was the first mudang, while the oldest Japanese literature describes Ame-no-Uzume as the foundational mikogami. In the Siberian Arctic, a Chukchi proverb declares, “Woman is by nature a shaman” (Czaplica 1914, 243). Yet some scholars have slighted female spiritual leadership. Mircea Eliade believed that women shamans represented the degeneration of an originally masculine profession.

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Female shamans go back a very long way in northern Asia. The ancestors of the Chukchi engraved rock art of people crowned with the psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria on rocks along the Pegtymel River. Women are prominent in these petroglyphs, which are dated to 4000 to 3000 years ago. An old woman shaman was buried at Ekven, across the strait from Alaska, in the Old Bering Sea culture of 2,000 years ago. Among her ceremonial regalia was a magnificent wooden mask placed between her knees. In modern times, female shamans were active among the Evenk, Even, Manchu, and Numinchen (all Tungusic peoples using some form of the word shaman), the Ainu (tuskur), the Sakhá (utagan), and the Buryat and Mongolians (udgan). Many peoples from northern Asia used some variant of the udagan title for women, indicating its great age. An old Russian ethnographic photo shows Olga of the Evenk in full ceremonial regalia—shaman’s coat, knotted leather veil, “snake” streamers, amulet pendants, and medicine bag—holding a large frame drum. Siberians speak of the drum as a “horse” that conveys shamans across the worlds. Women predominated among the wu of ancient China. The archaic character for wu depicts shamans dancing around a pillar, waving their sleeves. Chinese writers describe the entranced wu receiving spirits into their bodies, healing and prophesying, speaking in tongues, swallowing swords, and spitting fire. In the third century BCE, the history classic Guoyu identifies wu as a female title. Several centuries later, the oldest Chinese dictionary, Shuowen Jiezi, underlines the word’s female signification, describing the wu as an invocator (zhu), “a woman who is able to render [herself] invisible, and with dance to invoke gods to come down” (Erickson 1994, 52). Chinese archaeology substantiates a strong pattern of female ceremonial leadership. Bronzes of the Warring States period (fourth century BCE) show women making offerings, playing drums on stands, striking gongs hung from the temple roof beams, and dancing among cranes. Some of them dance with raised staffs, others with bows and arrows. The wu are also depicted in the lacquer art of Chu and in a rare old silk painting showing a woman calling up a crane spirit—which hovers above her—and a dragon. The ancient Shan Hai Jing (fourth century BCE) describes the Goddess Xi Wangmu as a shaman in several places. She is a shapeshifter with tiger teeth and a leopard’s tail. She sits on Snake Wu mountain among spirit animals with a ceremonial headdress and staff. The Zhuangzi (fourth century BCE) casts her as an adept who realized the Tao: “Xi Wang Mu attained it and took her seat on Shao Guang mountain. No one knows her beginning and no one knows her end” (Feng 1974, 125). Tomb tiles and sculptures depict Xi Wangmu sitting on a tiger-and-dragon throne, surrounded by a host of shamanic spirits: the three-legged raven, ninetailed fox, dancing frog, and elixir-making hare. In Sichuan (100–200 CE), Xi Wangmu on her tiger-dragon throne is placed atop spirit trees whose stylized tiers of branches represent the planes of the world mountain, Kunlun, along which spirits and shamans travel. Other traditions connect the Goddess with shamanic initiation and cosmic journeys, especially on her festival of the Double Sevens, “the perfect night for divine meetings and ascents” (Cahill 1993, 167).



Shamans in East Asia

If the attributes of a shaman were ascribed to a goddess, some female mortals also came to be deified for their spiritual prowess. Chen Jinggu, born in Fuzhou in 767, was adept in rain making, spirit calling, and healing. She cured all kinds of diseases and injuries and was said to have founded a shamanic sisterhood who practiced the mystic arts of Mount Lü. Chen was later deified as the Lady of Linshui and venerated in a triad with her two sworn sisters. Temple statues, some from as early as the eighth century CE, depict her dancing with a noose and water buffalo horn, her ceremonial tools, or seated with a sword and snake. Japan

Haniwa figure of a shamaness, Japan, fifth–sixth century CE. Haniwa were ceramic statues placed in circles around tombs during the period 200–600 CE. (Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Marcus, 79.278.1)

Around 712 CE, the oldest Japanese chronicle, the Kojiki, describes the strong and fierce Ame-no-Uzume as the first mikogami. Wreathed with sacred plants, she danced with her torimono staff, stamping her feet and chanting and playing a catalpa bow (itako) while all the spirits kept time with clappers. She had adorned a sakaki tree with streamers and mirrors. The round bronze mirror was sacred to Sun Goddess Amaterasu (whom the miko was enticing to emerge from a cave). The catalpa bow, mirror, bell, and sword figured in the ceremonies of historic mikogami, who are attested in archaeology. Miko are prominent among the haniwa, ceramic statues that were placed in circles around tombs in the period 200–600 CE. They wear headdresses, necklaces, and sashes—and often face paint. Some of them have a mirror hanging from their belt; others offer libation cups or make ritual gestures. Chinese sources also refer to the shaman-queen Himiko (ca. 170–248 CE) of Yamatai (which they called Wa). They describe Himiko as engaged in magic and sorcery in unflattering terms that reflected a growing prejudice against such women in China. As the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write their own language, they rendered mikogami as shen zi (spirit child). These women invoked spirits into ritual pillars or living “spirit trees.” They did not marry and were considered to have spirit husbands.

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The mikogami were leaders in the temples up to the early Heian period (ca. 800 CE), when a male priesthood took over Shinto (Spirit Way) and reduced women to the role of assistants and temple dancers. However, Japanese women continued to act as spirit diviners and healers, especially in rural areas. They take many names and forms: the itako, blind old women who speak with the dead; the tataki miko, “drumming shamans”; and the ecstatic ichiko and kuchiyose and waka, to name a few. To the south, in the more sex-egalitarian society of Okinawa, women retained both priestly and shamanic powers, as noro priestesses and yuta (ecstatic healer-diviners). Manchuria

A woman is portrayed as the most powerful shaman in Manchuria in the epic Nishan Shaman (a 19th-century manuscript containing much earlier oral traditions). She is called upon to revive the son of a rich man after other shamans failed. She beats her drum, chants, and sinks as if lifeless while her spirit journeys to the otherworld. There she meets up with Omosi-mama, the “Divine Grandmother” who causes everything to grow and souls to be embodied. It was she who ordained that Nishan would become a great shaman. Nishan finds the soul of the dead boy and brings him back to the world of the living. She is hailed as a heroine and showered with riches. But afterward she faces repression from Confucian authorities on accusations of being a disobedient wife, and they burn her shamanic regalia and drum. Korea

An antlered crown with a spangled Tree of Life was one of several found in the royal tombs of Silla. Tomb 98 had been assumed to belong to a shamanic king, but an inscription of “a belt for Milady” is now recognized as identifying a queen. In later centuries, Korean women predominate in the long-standing tradition of Mugyo (Shaman Religion) or Musindo (Shaman Spirit Way). The female shamans are called mudang or mansin (10,000 spirits). In the kut ceremony, the mudang enters ecstasy to the music of drums, cymbals, and bell-sticks, chanting invocations, whirling, and rocking on her feet. She may use lengths of cloth, fans, tridents, or flag-sticks, assisted by mostly female attendants. Bari Gongju (Pali Kongju) is seen as the ancestor of all the mudang. Her name means “Princess Thrown-Away.” Her father cast her off at birth for being a girl, but she was rescued by turtles or dragons and raised by a peasant couple. She became a mudang. Later she journeyed to the underworld to get the elixir of life to heal her parents or her brother. Modern mudang reenact the story of her passage through the portals of the Underworld, wearing robes with rainbow-striped sleeves. Bari Gongju, who helps souls of the dead journey to the otherworld, was elevated to the rank of Goddess. But the modern mudang face social stigma in spite of the fact that many people come to them for healing, divination, and resolution of life problems. The East Asian pattern of female shamans extends across Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The Vietnamese then priestesses call in spirits from a wide pantheon, changing their costume and regalia for each divinity as the Koreans



Sibyls

do. In Burma, the dancing ecstatics are called nat kadaw (spirit wives) within a Nature Religion that coexists with Buddhism. In Laos and neighboring countries, Hmong healers wear ceremonial veils and journey in the spirit on benches called “flying horse.” The primary healers and seers in the Philippines are the babaylan (Visayan) and catalonan (Tagalog). Another name for them, aniteras, refers to their invocation of ancestral spirits (anito). Max Dashú See also: Ancient Religions: Sun Goddess; Daoism: Daoism in China; Goddesses; Healers; Indigenous Religions: Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures; Shamans in Korea; Prehistoric Religions: Burials; Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures; Shamanism; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices; Shinto: Priestesses; Shamans and Ritualists Further Reading Cahill, Suzanne E. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993, 167 Chuang Tsu: Inner Chapters. Translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. New York: Knopf, 1974. Czaplica, M. A. Aboriginal Siberia, a Study in Social Anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1914, 243. Dashú, Max. “The Wu: Female Shamans of Ancient China.” Oakland, CA: Suppressed Histories Archives, 2010. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/wu.html. Erickson, Susan N. “‘Twirling Their Long Sleeves, They Dance Again and Again’: Jade Plaque Sleeve Dancers of the Western Han Dynasty.” Ars Orientalis 24 (1994): 52. Fairchild, William P. “Shamanism in Japan.” Folklore Studies 21 (1962): 1–122. Nowak, Margaret, and Stephen Durant. The Tale of the Nishan Shamaness: A Manchu Folk Epic. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977. Sered, Susan Starr. Women of the Sacred Groves: Divine Priestesses of Okinawa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

SIBYLS In times of distress, men in antiquity sought the advice of an aged female prophet known as the Sibyl. She alone had the ability to communicate directly with the deities and forecast their future. Her prognostications changed the fate of nations. The Greeks even minted a coin that calls her “the Goddess Sibyl.” No other woman ever achieved such fame. The Greek poet Ovid preserved a legend that claimed the God Apollo promised the Sibyl would live as long as there were grains of sand on the seashore. However, she failed to ask him for eternal youth. Consequently, she gradually became a shriveled, shrunken old woman who lived for thousands of years. Yet, her soul revolved around the moon as she continued to deliver prophecies after her death. Over time, the number of Sibyls proliferated as many kingdoms of the ancient Near East and Europe believed this female prophet had lived in their midst. Her prophecies were first transmitted orally and eventually copied in books that became the most sacred of all Pagan writings.

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The collection of Sibylline Oracles kept in Rome was the most famous in the ancient world and aroused the greatest fear. The Romans banned anyone from reading them since they foretold the fates of rulers and nations alike. They entrusted these sacred books to a select body of loyal men who consulted them when the state faced a crisis, and only by official decree from the senate. When the temple of Jupiter in which they were housed was burned down in 83 BCE, the Romans traveled everywhere a Sibyl purportedly had lived to collect new Sibylline Oracles. These texts were written down in epic hexameters and contained the utterances of Sibyls from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. Because the Sibyl was so highly regarded in antiquity, Pagans, Jews, and Christians alike forged prophecies in her name. These books literally changed Western history. Roman emperors cited the Sibyl’s predictions to justify their embracing of Christianity and their persecutions of Pagans. Christian leaders for centuries, including the greatest theologians and popes alike, cited the Sibylline Oracles in their sermons and writings alongside the Bible. The influence of the Sibyl is evident in much medieval Christian literature and art: five Sibyls are painted in the famed Sistine Chapel. During the Middle Ages, people held the Sibyl in such high regard that many theologians fabricated Sibylline Oracles to prove their end-of-time predictions. Today, the Pagan Sibylline Oracles are mainly preserved in quotations of Pagan Greek and Latin writers. A large collection of Sibylline Oracles in Greek by Jews and Christians survives in 14 books that date from the mid-second century BCE to the seventh century CE. Christians continued to write oracles in the name of the Sibyl during the Middle Ages; many theologians, writers, and artists consulted them. Around 1600 CE, some Sibylline Oracles were even set to music, showing that this female prophet’s influence extended almost to the present day. Kenneth Atkinson See also: Ancient Religions: Delphic Oracle; Judaism: Hebrew Bible; Priestesses; Shinto: Shamans and Ritualists Further Reading Collins, John J. “Sibylline Oracles.” In Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James H. Charlesworth, 362–472. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1983. Parke, H. W. Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity. London: Routledge, 1988.

SUN GODDESS In the cultures of the world, the association of the major celestial body, the Sun, with gender is ambiguous. In some cultures, its personification is male oriented (e.g., Ra in ancient Egyptian Religion, Shamash in Mesopotamia, Mithra in Persia, Helios in ancient Greece). In Chinese mythology, the Sun is perceived as male and the Moon as female. In other cultures, the Sun is venerated as Goddess. This is true for Hittite society of the second millennium BCE. The Sun Goddess was a major deity for the Hittites, and her name was Wurushemu.



Sun Goddess

Arguably, the oldest tradition of religious practices associated with a Sun Goddess are found in Eurasian cultures, from Saami culture in northern Europe, via the cultures in the Arctic zone throughout the Siberian North as far as Japan. In the northern parts of Europe and Siberia, the Sun has preserved her prominent place in mythology into the modern era, whereas in those cultures with a long tradition of worship of a Sun God, old beliefs have been replaced by religions that do not recognize the Sun as a divinity (e.g., ancient Egypt, where polytheistic religion was overtaken by Christianity and later by Islam; ancient Greece, where the divinities of antiquity were replaced by the God of Christianity). In the Siberian tradition, the Sun is the Creatrix, the one who gives and maintains life. In the mythic tradition, the beginnings of the world are associated with the Sun. In the beginning, there was Mother Sun. The earliest depictions of this Divinity as a female figure can be seen on stone stelae from western Siberia. In some of those pictures, snakes are seen curling around the central Deity; their function has been identified as spirit helpers of the Siberian shaman. A popular motif on the Siberian stelae is the transcendental flight of reindeers to Mother Sun. These stelae are called “deer stones.” The Sun is radiant. Light and warmth stream from her. In the Arctic and sub-Arctic zones, Mother Sun provides the conditions for life to persist. The snakes, undulating as the flames of the Sun, are symbols of the regenerative potential of a deity who takes over the task of creation, the great labor of generating and regenerating life. Mother Sun is the Creatrix, the great Ancestral Mother, the force that generates all living things—human beings, animals, and plants alike. In the carved pictures of Siberian rock art, representations of the Creatrix are often associated with animals. In some Neolithic rock pictures from the Kuola Peninsula (in northernmost Europe), she is shown giving birth to a reindeer and feeding a reindeer calf. The image of the Creatrix may be associated with the generating energy of certain elements, such as fire. “In the shamanism of the Altaic peoples, the origin of all life was born from Ene, Goddess of Fire” (Dyakonova 2001, 64). In the communities of the Tungus, Mongol, and Turkic peoples of Siberia, there was a special professional group of female shamans, the udagan, whose rituals focused on fire worship. Pregnancy and life giving are the major themes of this deity, expressed in pictorial associations of the Primordial Goddess with the Tree of Life. It is important to emphasize that in the earliest north Asian representations of the Tree of Life, in the Okunevo culture, the figures [insofar as they are human] are female. Moreover, these women are often shown with protruding or pendant abdomens, i.e., pregnant or soon after giving birth. (Martynov 1991, 107)

The Sun, the source of light and life, is venerated in the mythic tradition of the Saami as a female divinity. Her name is Beaivvi nieida (Sun Maiden). When the shaman transcends the limits of the world of the living and flies to heaven, he or she has to be careful not to be burnt by the hot breasts of the Sun Maiden. In Saamic, as in all the languages of Finno-Ugric stock, there is no grammatical gender. Thus, the identification of the Sun with a female divinity is not induced by a marking of

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feminine gender as, for example, in German (Sonne f.). The conceptualization of the Sun as Goddess in Saami mythology is purely metaphorical. In the winter season, the Sun does not rise from behind the horizon during the day. This period (called kaamos in Finnish) lasts for more than three months. When the Sun finally reappears at the end of January, Saami people would bow to the divinity to honor her and, in former times, a reindeer—preferably a white one—was offered to the Sun Maiden as a sacrifice. The symbol of the Sun features on many shamans’ drums and is accompanied by various symbols of mythological significance. The personification of the Sun as Goddess has a long tradition among many of the peoples in northern Eurasia. For instance, in the canon of festivities and ceremonies, certain rites require offerings to the Solar Deity, among the Nganasan in central Siberia, for one. In a spring ceremony, elder women make offerings to the Mothers of nature, and among them is Mother Sun: Kóu-n´ámy “Mother Sun,” Móu-n´ámy “Mother Earth,” Nilu-n´ámy “Mother Life.” The veneration of the Sun as Goddess is also characteristic of an old culture on the other end of Eurasia, on its eastern periphery. The ancient tradition of animistic beliefs, called Shintoism, produced a unique pattern of Sun worship in Japan. The name of the Japanese Sun Goddess is Amaterasu, “Heavenly Shining One.” Amaterasu founded the Japanese nation by sending her grandson Prince Ninigi down from the Plains of Heaven to govern the islands. In the “Kojiki” [oldest written record in Japan from 712 CE], hi [sun and day] is used to designate both the names of gods in Amaterasu’s line as well as those ancient emperors who were her close descendants. (Schultz and Yamamoto 1993, 138)

In the Bronze Age (second millennium BCE), the Hittites (of Indo-European stock) in Anatolia worshipped a Sun Goddess under the name Wurushemu. The main religious center of her worship was Arinna. It is noteworthy that this Goddess was adopted by the Hittites from the Hurrians, who also influenced ritualistic practices in Hittite society. Once a year, the Hittite king would undertake a pilgrimage to Arinna to pay Wurushemu his respects. Harald Haarmann See also: Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion; Mesopotamian Religion; Shamans in East Asia; Shinto: Amaterasu Omikami; Kami Further Reading Dyakonova, Vera P. “Female Shamans of the Turkic-Speaking Peoples of Southern Siberia.” In Shamanhood—Symbolism and Epic, edited by Juha Pentikäinen, 63–69. Budapest, Hungary: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001. Haarmann, Harald, and Joan Marler. Introducing the Mythological Crescent: Ancient Beliefs and Imagery Connecting Eurasia with Anatolia. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2008. Martynov, Anatoly I. The Ancient Art of Northern Asia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Schultz, Elizabeth, and Fumiko Yamamoto. “The Sun in Japanese Art and Culture.” In The Sun in Myth and Art, edited by Madanjeet Singh, 137–51. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.



Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia

W R I T E R S A N D P O E T S , A N C I E N T M E S O P O TA M I A A rudimentary script was invented in ancient Mesopotamia about 3200 BCE. It was initially used only in large households to administer assets such as cattle and land as well as personnel. Thus, writing was used by people of means, kings and queens, courtiers and temple administrators included, and that was the case throughout the period of cuneiform culture (ca. 3200–200 BCE). Cuneiform, as we call the script, became more “democratized” over time though, and this meant that from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), the middle classes also began to use writing for economic and administrative purposes. From the beginning, most attestations of literacy are related to men, and that was the case until the end of the cuneiform culture. However, there are interesting data that inform us about female literacy, and some of it will be discussed here. The first attestation of a female scribe dates to the Sargonic period (ca. 2350– 2150 BCE)—that is, about 850 years after script was invented. Her name, NinUN-íl, along with her professional title of “scribe,” is found in a ration list from the Ekur temple in the city of Nippur (Westenholz 1999). Most attestations of female scribes date to the Old Babylonian period. The palace archives of the Old Babylonian kingdom of Mari have revealed at least nine female scribes (Meier 1991). These scribes were servants of the queen or other women at the court. The city of Sippar is an Old Babylonian site where information about some 20 female scribes has been unearthed. Here the scribes were working for a group of priestesses called nadıˉtu, and some of the scribes might have been nadıˉtu-priestesses themselves (Lion 2011). In the palace archives of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (744–627 BCE), the picture is somewhat different from that of the palace archives of Mari. Here the seven female scribes who are attested were only working for the queen, whereas the other women at the court used male scribes (Svärd 2012 Macgregor 2012). Since there were female scribes, it is likely that there were female pupils in the scribal schools. Sumerian is a gender-neutral language, though, and did not have gender-specific names. Therefore, it is not always possible to determine whether a person was a female or a male in Sumerian texts. However, traditions often developed regarding correlations between name and gender, and sometimes the context can inform us about the gender of the person in a text. There are four Old Babylonian school exercises that do give us information about the gender of the pupil; at the end of them, we read that that they were “written by a female scribe” (Lion 2011). The exercises range from the beginner level up to the most advanced level. Besides female pupils and scribes, there were also other women who could read and write. These women are mainly found in the upper classes, but some came from the middle classes. One example of literate middle-class women comes from the Old Assyrian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE). In that period, the wives of the male merchants active in Anatolia were also active in their husband’s trade. These women produced textile to be sold by their men, functioned as agents of their men in local business contracts, and wrote letters to their men when absent in trade business. Enheduana is probably the most prominent of the literate women in all cat˘ egories. She was the en-priestess of the Moon God Nanna and the daughter of King Sargon, the founder of the first Akkadian dynasty (ca. 2350–2150 BCE) in

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Mesopotamia. Enheduana is the first named author and poet known in history. ˘ Whereas Enheduana herself lived in the Sargonic period (ca. 2350–2150 BCE), the ˘ texts attributed to her (all in Sumerian) date to the Ur III (ca. 2112–2004 BCE) and early Old Babylonian (ca. 2000–1800 BCE) periods. It was common that older texts were copied throughout the cuneiform period, and these texts are understood as such copies. All the texts authored by Enheduana are so-called literary texts, ˘ which can be understood as belles lettres, or poetry, in the wide sense. Two of the texts attributed to Enheduana are hymns to Goddess Inanna. Another ˘ text that has her signature is a cycle of temple hymns, and a fourth is an alabaster plaque where she is depicted on one side and called “wife of Nanna and daughter of Sargon” on the other side. There is a further text where she is mentioned, which probably relates her enthroning as en-priestess, and another that depicts a love dialogue between the Moon God Nanna and his wife Ningal (Westenholz 1989). As the en-priestess of Nanna, Enheduana was seen as a representative of Ningal. ˘ At the same time, she was an intermediator between Ningal and the humans. Furthermore, she seems to have felt very close to Inanna, whom she identified with in her two hymns to the Goddess. Even though men were in the majority in the guild of scribes, Goddess Nisaba was their patroness up to the Old Babylonian period, when she was replaced by a male deity called Nabû. Thus, this replacement happened at the same time as there were more female scribes (attested) than ever before. Nisaba was closely related to several characteristics of the early agricultural bookkeeping, such as the measuring of fields and writing down of assets (Lion 2011). She was also Goddess of Grain, which was the staple of ancient Mesopotamia. Besides Nisaba, there were other literate Goddesses. One was Goddess Ninimma, whose profile was very similar to that of Nisaba (Rodin 2014). Also, the most prominent Goddesses in the pantheon—Ninhursagˆa, Ninlil, and Inanna—were ˘ literate. The scribe of the netherworld was also female. She was called Ninazimua, Gˆeštinanna, or Beˉlet-s.eˉri. Therese Rodin See also: Ancient Religions: Inanna; Mesopotamian Religion; Ninhursagˆa Mother ˘ Goddess; Ninlil; Prehistoric Religions: Sacred Script Further Reading Foster, Benjamin R. The Age of Agade: Inventing Empire in Ancient Mesopotamia. London: Routledge, 2016. Hallo, William W., and J. J. A. van Dijk. The Exaltation of Inanna. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968. Lion, Brigitte. “Literacy and Gender.” In The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture, edited by Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, 90–112. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Macgregor, Sherry Lou. Beyond Hearth and Home: Women in the Public Sphere in Neo-Assyrian Society. State Archives of Assyria Studies XXI. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2012. Meier, Samuel A. “Women and Communication in the Ancient Near East.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 111 (1991): 540–47.



Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia

Rodin, Therese. The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis: Historia Religionum 35. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-228932. Svärd, Saana. Power and Women in the Neo-Assyrian Palaces. Helsinki: University of Helsinki, Department of World Cultures, 2012. Westenholz, Aage. “The Old Akkadian Period: History and Culture.” In Mesopotamien: Akkade-Zeit und Ur III-Zeit, Part 1, edited by Pascal Attinger and Marcus Wäfler, 17–120. Freiburg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1999. Westenholz, Joan Goodnick. “Enheduanna, En-Priestess, Hen of Nanna, Spouse of Nanna.” In Dumu-e2-dub-ba-a: Studies in Honor of Åke W. Sjöberg, edited by Hermann Behrens, Darlene T. Loding, and Martha T. Roth, 539–56. Philadelphia: University Museum, 1989.

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Baha’i

INTRODUCTION The Baha’i faith was founded in 19th-century Iran. It arose out of Shi‘a Islam to become an independent religion, and it teaches that it is God’s will that all people eventually be united in peace and that all religions are expressions of the same spiritual sense and connection with the Divine. Baha’is believe that the founder of their faith, Bahá’u’lláh (1817–1892), was the recipient of revelations from God, which contrasts with what Muslims believe, that Muhammad (570–632) was the final prophet of God. This difference of belief has led to the persecution of Baha’is in some Muslim-majority countries. Currently, there are about 7 million Baha’i followers in more than 200 countries, although numbers are hard to determine due in part to the need for secrecy in some regions. Baha’is have no priesthood. They are organized by an elected administration that includes Spiritual Assemblies (local and national), and a Universal House of Justice located in Haifa, Israel. There is also an appointed counseling arm of learned individuals. Baha’i women serve in all appointments and on Spiritual Assemblies, but, according to scripture, only men are eligible for election to the Universal House of

Baha’i Place of Worship Baha’i houses of worship, also called Mashriqu’l-Adhkárs or temples, are built according to scriptural requirements, including that they be nine-sided circular structures with an entrance on each side. This design symbolizes unity in diversity and openness to everyone, regardless of differences. Of those built so far, all are domed and surrounded by gardens. In the interior, Baha’i writings are displayed, and seats face the qiblih, which is a shrine dedicated to Bahá’u’lláh located in Bahji, Israel. Baha’is worship with prayer and scripture readings; scriptures of any religion may be read in any language. There may be live a cappella singing. However, no musical instruments, sermons, lectures, ritualistic activities, images, pictures, statues, altars, or pulpits are allowed. While all are welcome inside, only Baha’is can contribute to the building or upkeep of the temples. Temples have been completed on every continent, and each is envisioned as eventually expanding into each neighborhood, so that the temple comes to be surrounded by adjunct institutions dedicated to social, educational, scientific, medical, and humanitarian purposes. Where there is no physical house of worship, devotional gatherings are encouraged in the spirit of the Mashriqu’l-Adhkár.

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Justice. Women’s ineligibility for the Universal House of Justice is sometimes seen as an example of inequality. However, the faithful tend not to view this exclusion as a form of gender inequality. Sitting on the Universal House of Justice is not a position of worldly power and status, but one of service, and the scriptures make clear that women are the spiritual and social equals of men, and are fully capable of leadership in the political sphere. Baha’i principles emphasize the sacred importance of equality between women and men, as the entries in this section demonstrate. Baha’i scriptures provide a foundation for equality that is meant to withstand shifting political and social conThe flower-shaped Lotus Temple, the Baha’i House of texts. In the article “Women in Worship in New Delhi, India, is visible behind the Baha’i Scriptures,” Susan Stiles throng of visitors. The building, composed of 27 mar- Maneck elaborates on this topic ble petals with 9 doors opening onto a central hall, in the writings of Bahá’u’lláh, serves as the Baha’i Mother Temple for the Indian including his book of laws, the subcontinent. (Luciano Mortula/Dreamstime.com) Kitab-i-Aqdas. In Baha’i worship, there is also equality between diverse groups. In the House of Worship, no one is segregated, and anyone is welcome regardless of physical, social, or ideological differences. Whether in temple or other settings, everyone may enter the place of worship, engage in prayer, read from scriptures, chant, sing, and play instruments. Women have been integral to the Baha’i faith. In the entry “Gender Roles” included in this section, Lynn Echevarria relates some of the ways Baha’i women participate in and contribute to the faith. Unique among women in Baha’i history is Tahirih. In the entry of that title, Maneck relates the moving story of this Baha’i heroine, who, though unique in her historical role, is one of many role models Baha’i women look up to. The work to implement gender equality in all areas of Baha’i life continues. Central to this goal is education; Baha’is have a scriptural mandate to ensure that girls receive a good education. Women are also central in educational development. In “Education,” Selena Crosson relates the significant



Divine Feminine

contributions of Baha’i women as founders, developers, and supporters of education for girls and boys. General Bibliography—Baha’i Bacquet, Karen. “When Principle and Authority Collide: Baha’i Responses to the Exclusion of Women from the Universal House of Justice.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 9, no. 4 (2006): 34–52. Bahá’í International Community. “Statements on the Advancement of Women.” Accessed July 18, 2017. https://www.bic.org/focus-areas/equality-men-and-women. Baha’i International Community (BIC). “Educating Girls—An Investment in the Future.” In The Greatness Which Might Be Theirs: A Compilation of Reflections on the Agenda and Platform for Action for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women: Equality, Development and Peace. New York: Baha’i International Community, 1995. https://www.bic​ .org/statements/greatness-which-might-be-theirs-educating-girls-investment-future. Banani, Amin. Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry, Selected Poems of Qurratu’l-’Ayn. Los Angeles: Kalimat, 2004. Maneck, Susan. “Women in the Baha’i Faith.” In Religion and Women, edited by Arvind Sharma. McGill Studies in the History of Religions, 211–27. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Osborne, Lil. “Female Representations of the Holy Spirit in Bahá’í and Christian Writings and Their Implications for Gender Roles.” Baha’i Studies Review 4, no. 1 (1994). https://bahai-library.com/abdo_female_holy-spirit. Ruhe-Schoen, Janet. Rejoice in My Gladness: The Life of Tahirih. Wilmette, IL: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 2011. Sours, Michael W. “The Maid of Heaven, the Image of Sophia, and the Logos: Personification of the Spirit of God in Scripture and Sacred Literature.” Journal of Bahá’í Studies 4, no.1 (Mar.–June 1991). Universal House of Justice. A Compilation on Women. Compiled by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice. n.p.: Project Gutenberg, 2006. http://www. gutenberg.org/files/19269/19269-h/19269-h​.html. Universal House of Justice. Women: Extracts from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice. Compiled by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice. Thornhill, ON: Bahá’í Canada, 1986. Walbridge, John. Sacred Acts, Sacred Space, Sacred Time. Oxford: George Ronald, 1996. Zabihi-Moghaddam, Siyamak. “Spousal Equality in Baha’i Law: The Emergence of Provisions on the Dissolution of Marriage in Iran, 1873–1954.” Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 3 (2017): 137–60.

DIVINE FEMININE The Divine Feminine is a reference to the Maid of Heaven (huri) said to have appeared to Bahá’u’lláh after he was thrown in the underground dungeon of SíyáhChál at the height of the persecution of Babis in 1852. This event is said to have marked the inception of the Baha’i revelation. Baha’is see the Maid of Heaven as representative of the Holy Spirit, understood not in Trinitarian terms but as the conduit of revelation, fulfilling the same function as the burning bush in Judaism, the dove in Christianity, and the angel Gabriel in Islam.

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The term huri is derived from a reference in the Qur’an to those said to serve the faithful in paradise. While this is one of the few Arabic words that carry no gender, huris have been almost universally described in Islamic traditions as dark-haired damsels. While Bahá’u’lláh will sometimes refer to the hur’in in the plural, these are described as veiled within their celestial chambers, seemingly representing the ultimate unknowability of the Divine. It is the huri in the singular, however, that plays the major role in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings representing revelation itself. The advent of revelation in Bahá’u’lláh’s early writings takes on the flavor of bridal mysticism, with that revelation appearing as a veiled bride, and much of those writings take the form of a dialogue between Bahá’u’lláh and the Maid of Heaven. Bahá’u’lláh’s spiritual ecstasy and longing are depicted while at the same time emphasizing his intense suffering, which brings distress to the Maid of Heaven. In these writings, Bahá’u’lláh is the lover, and the Maid of Heaven represents the beloved while sharing a symbiotic relationship, where the feminine usually represents the divine nature of Bahá’u’lláh and the masculine his human nature. At other times, the “spirit of Baha” is depicted as the mother who gives birth to the Maid of Heaven. Among the writings where Bahá’u’lláh describes his encounters with the Maid of Heaven are Tablet of the Temple, Tablet of the Deathless Youth, Ode of the Dove, Tablet of the Holy Mariner, Tablet of the Maiden, Tablet of the Wonderous Maiden, and Tablet of the Vision. Susan Stiles Maneck See also: Baha’i: Women in Baha’i Scriptures: Christianity: Sophia Further Reading Osborne, Lil. “Female Representations of the Holy Spirit in Bahá’í and Christian Writings and Their Implications for Gender Roles.” Baha’i Studies Review 4, no. 1 (1994). Sours, Michael W. “The Maid of Heaven, the Image of Sophia, and the Logos: Personification of the Spirit of God in Scripture and Sacred Literature.” Journal of Bahá’í Studies 4, no.1 (Mar.-June 1991). Walbridge, John. Sacred Acts, Sacred Space, Sacred Time. Oxford: George Ronald, 1996.

E D U C AT I O N Universal education is a core principle of the Baha’i Faith, and its sacred writings are notable for the priority they assign to the education of women and girls. Education is deemed the primary means of fostering the material, social, scientific, and spiritual advancement of humanity and is considered essential in bringing about the goal of the equality of women and men, without which, according to Baha’i teachings, the world cannot realize its full potential. Universal and collectively supported compulsory education, geared to the needs and capacities of individuals and communities, is prescribed, but if resources do not permit the education of all, preference must be given to girls. The same curriculum for males and females is suggested so that women, having enjoyed the same standard of education, can demonstrate their equal capacity and social and economic importance.



Education

Eastern Baha’i communities (est. 1844), the largest of which was in Persia (Iran), promoted literacy and modern methods of education, beginning with village-level schools in the 19th century. Independent investigation of truth is a primary Baha’i dictum, and literacy is required as, in the absence of clergy, adherents are expected to educate themselves about spiritual and theological as well as worldly matters. Persian Baha’is also enlisted the financial aid of Western Baha’i communities, in part through the Washington-based Persian-American Educational Society, supported by women such as artist and philanthropist Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931) and desegregationist Agnes Parsons (1861–1934). Between 1909 and 1933, despite being a stigmatized and persecuted community, Persian Baha’is established over 50 schools open to all religions, including several schools and vocational programs for females. A few Western Baha’is, such as Dr. Susan I. Moody (1851–1934), Lillian Kappes (1878–1920), and Dr. Genevieve Coy (1886–1963), were invited to assist as medical staff and educators with the Tarbiyat School for Girls in Tehran (est. 1911). Even though the schools achieved such excellence as to attract non-Baha’is, including children of the elite, by the mid-1930s most were shut down in a wave of official persecution (Armstrong-Ingram 1986). The best known of Baha’i heroines, Tahirih (1814/1817–1852), a Persian scholar, intellectual, and poet, remains an inspirational symbol of the power of female education as evidenced by her portrayal as one who disrupts conventional femininity by promoting literacy in Bahiyyih Nakhjavani’s 2015 novel, The Woman Who Read Too Much. The liberal-minded early Baha’i community in the West (est. 1898), comprised mainly of women, experimented with progressive education, striving for a “scientific pedagogy” that reflected Baha’i beliefs about the harmony of scientific and rational thought with spiritual and moral precepts. In contrast to common educational practices of the time, Baha’is were enjoined not to strike or verbally abuse children but rather to use praise, reason, and, if necessary, mild verbal correction. Among other methods, Dr. Maria Montessori’s (1870–1952) approach attracted Baha’is such as Louise Dixon Boyle (1875–1953) of Washington, D.C., who worked closely with Montessori and disseminated information about her techniques (Khan 2006). Montreal Baha’i May Maxwell (1870–1940) established one of the first Montessori schools in Canada (ca. 1914) to educate her daughter Mary, who later became international Baha’i representative Ruhiyyih Khanum (1910–2000). Since then, many Baha’i-inspired schools have drawn on innovative educational methods, although no particular pedagogy is endorsed. In accordance with the Baha’i principle of establishing a universal auxiliary language, many early Baha’i women also taught Esperanto, which helped to finance and provide a support network for their travels to promote internationalist ideals and other educational efforts. Baha’is have often suffered for their commitment to education. In some Muslim-majority countries, principally Iran, Baha’is have been denied education because they do not belong to one of the officially sanctioned religions. From the 1870s until the current era, the education of children and youth, especially girls, has been proscribed by governments and clerics in an effort to undermine the roots of the Baha’i community, leading to arrests and even executions. In 1983, teenager Mona Mahmudnizhad was tortured and hanged in Shiraz along with nine

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other women because she was charged, in part, for her efforts to teach Baha’i children who had been expelled from school. In the popular lore of the community, Mona has since become a modern martyr, symbolizing the resolute Baha’i commitment to education and justice. Resisting chronic persecution and ongoing arrests of educators and students, underground education efforts in Iran have continued, particularly with the establishment in 1987 of the coeducational Baha’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE), which is assisted by a global volunteer network of academics and supporters. BIHE graduates are now being accepted and earning scholarships in top-rated Western universities. `Abdu’l-Bahá, leader of the Baha’i Faith states, “The girl’s education is of more importance today than the boy’s, for she is the mother of the future race,” adding that all have a duty to care for and educate children (`Abdu’l-Bahá 1982, 91). In “Educating Girls—An Investment in the Future,” a 1995 statement to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the Baha’i International Community (BIC) notes that higher levels of education for girls improve social outcomes, in part because education gives girls “unique advantages” in their roles as mothers and educators of children that make them “the most effective diffusers of knowledge throughout society” and “transmitters of core cultural and social values.” The statement advocates for a rounded view of education that includes “material education” to improve physical and material well-being; “human education” in areas such as commerce, arts, sciences, and technical and institutional development; and “spiritual or moral education” aimed at inculcating good character and community values to promote world unity and the ethical, equitable use of knowledge and resources. The Baha’i International Community acknowledges that the support and resources of men are essential for the widespread advancement of education for women and argues that a critical component of the larger effort to educate females must be the “resocialization of males for partnership” (BIC 1995). To this end, the Baha’is recommend that a modest start be made by “educating boys from the earliest stage of their social development” to be aware that “the interests of men and boys are linked to those of women” (BIC 2004). Since the 1990s, Baha’is have promoted participation in a coeducational (Ruhi) curriculum emphasizing the study of the Baha’i writings and community-building service. In addition to acquiring formal education, youth are encouraged to contribute a period of service, at home or abroad, and increasing numbers of girls from regions that traditionally do not encourage young women to travel are engaging in this form of volunteerism. Baha’is are enjoined to work and ideally to choose vocations that suit their interests and capacities as well as contribute to the betterment of the world. Paid or unpaid work performed in “a spirit of service” in arts, sciences, trades, care labor, or other useful fields is accounted as worship. `Abdu’lBahá suggested that women should study nutrition, sanitation, health, and especially the industrial and agricultural sciences, thereby assisting humanity. In this way, women would demonstrate their capability and ensure recognition of their social and economic equality. Internationally, several Baha’i-inspired educational and vocational initiatives for women have been established. Although recognizing the challenges of achieving gender parity, Baha’is believe that when women enjoy



Gender Roles

the same education and prerogatives as men, they will be the greatest factor in advancing the larger goals of sustainable global peace and prosperity. Selena Crosson See also: Baha’i: Gender Roles; Women in Baha’i Scriptures; Islam: Education Further Reading `Abdu’l-Bahá. Abdu’l Baha in London. 1912. Reprint, London: UK Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1982. Armstrong-Ingram, R. Jackson. “American Baha’i Women and the Education of Girls in Tehran, 1909–1934.” In Studies in Babi and Baha’i History: In Iran (Studies in Babi and Baha’i History Vol. 3), edited by Peter Smith, 180–210. Los Angeles: Kalimat, 1986. Baha’i International Community (BIC). “Educating Girls—An Investment in the Future.” In The Greatness Which Might Be Theirs. New York: Baha’i International Community, 1995. https://www.bic.org/statements/greatness-which-might-be-theirs-educating-girls​ -investment-future. Baha’i International Community (BIC). The Role of Men and Boys in Achieving Gender Equality. New York, 1 March 2004. New York: Baha’i International Community, 2004. https:// www.bic.org/statements/role-men-and-boys-achieving-gender-equality. Cameron, Doug. “Mona with the Children.” 1985. http://bahaiblog.net/site/2014/12​ /doug-cameron-mona-children/. Khan, Janet A. “Louise Dixon Boyle and Maria Montessori.” Journal of Baha’i Studies 16, nos. 1–4 (2006): 61–87. Nakhjavani, Bahiyyih. The Woman Who Read Too Much. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.

GENDER ROLES The Baha’i Faith is a distinct world religion of modern times and is based on the teachings of the prophet-founder, Bahá’u’lláh (1817–1892). A unique feature of this religion is that Bahá’u’lláh abolished the institution of the clergy and gave a blueprint for a worldwide administrative order (governing assemblies) whose elected membership would be open to both sexes. The oneness of humanity and the equality of women and men are foundational Baha’i principles. The achievement of equality is a religious obligation of all followers, female and male. Specific mandates are given in the Baha’i texts to move people conceptually and practically toward equality. The stories of early heroic women of the East and the West model nontraditional roles for women and inspire subsequent generations of both sexes to work for social change. Women’s mandate is to prove their capacity, to be bold, to translate spiritual teachings into action, and to enter all fields of human endeavor, becoming especially proficient in the sciences and arts. Men are admonished to own equality, to see women as equal, to actively afford them opportunities in home and society, to assume responsibilities that nurture close family bonds, and to support women’s advancement in all ways possible. Parents must give preference to girls’ education, as they are the future mothers. The Baha’i view also sees women’s knowledge and contributions as essential for human affairs to reach a point of completion and perfection (Universal House of Justice 1986). This

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means that women and men are freed from past religious and scientific ideas about women’s supposed creational and biological inferiority—ideas that were used to subordinate, exclude, and marginalize. Women have taken on varied roles in the Baha’i community, and each can decide how best to follow a Baha’i pattern of living over a lifetime. Women’s identity is not devoted exclusively to either the private (domestic) or public realm. A woman chooses whether she wishes to marry and to be a mother or not. Her participation in the affairs of the world is seen as key to society’s evolution, and motherhood itself is viewed as sacred. In the propagation and consolidation of the religion, or within leadership positions in the administrative order, women are necessary. The roles of secretary, chairperson, and treasurer on Baha’i Assemblies are open to both sexes. These positions are seen as positions of service rather than positions of power over community members. Women acquire wisdom and spiritual understanding through daily prayer, meditation, the study of sacred writings, and service in everyday life. In Baha’i holy shrines, temples, and local gatherings, there is no segregation of women, and their presence at, and preparation and delivery of, devotional programs is expected and supported (Echevarria 2011, 72–78). Baha’i history shows that women have been at the forefront of the establishment of the Baha’i Faith, particularly in Europe and North America, and have participated in new roles as the religion’s institutions consolidated worldwide. Women historically and currently produce knowledge about the religion. They assume roles as educators: giving informal and formal study classes and public talks locally, nationally, and internationally; serving as translators, writers, poets, artists, and editors of books and materials about the Baha’i teachings; and providing insightful commentary on their societies (van den Hoonaard 1996). How the Baha’i spiritual principles and aims are realized has been a gradual learning process and continues to be so for individual women, families, communities, and countries that are resisting or divesting themselves of patriarchal traditions and values. The tools within the Baha’i administrative order (principles of equity, consultation, and a sacred electoral process safeguarded from interference) can support and protect women’s rights, agency, and roles in leadership and community (Baha’i International Community n.d.). Lynn Echevarria See also: Baha’i: Education; Tahirih; Women in Baha’i Scriptures; Islam: Reform Further Reading Bahá’í International Community. “Statements on the Advancement of Women.” https:// www.bic.org/focus-areas/equality-men-and-women. (The) Bahá’í Faith: The website of the worldwide Bahá’í international community. “What Bahá’í Believe/Essential Relationships/The Bahá’í Administrative Order.” https://bahai.org. Echevarria, L. Life Histories of Canadian Bahá’í Women: Constructing Religious Identity in the Twentieth Century. American University Studies Series 7, Vol. 316, Theology and Religion. New York: Peter Lang, 2011.



Tahirih

Universal House of Justice. Women: Extracts from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi and the Universal House of Justice. Compiled by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice. Thornhill, ON: Bahá’í Canada, 1986. van den Hoonaard, W. The Origins of the Bahá’í Community of Canada, 1898–1948. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996.

TA H I R I H All too often in religious history, paradigmatic women have served as auxiliaries to their more prominent male figures, whether as wives, mothers, or daughters. Tahirih, the best-known woman in Bábi-Baha’i history, offers a startling contrast to such models. A gifted poet in 19th-century Iran, Tahirih was no dutiful daughter; she opposed the theological positions of her father, Muhammad Salih Baraghani, a prominent Muslim cleric of Qazvin. She is also not admired as a successful wife and mother because she was estranged from her husband and thus forced to separate from her children as well. Yet in popular imagination of the Baha’i community, Tahirih serves as a paradigm of womanhood. Numerous biographies, many of them partly fictionalized, exist of her life, and her name is one of the most popular ones given to Baha’i girls, both in Iran and in the West. Tahirih was born in 1814 as Fatimah Baraghani and was known as Umm-iSalmih to her family. Her father was a leading cleric in the majority Usuli sect of Shi‘ism of Qazvin, while her mother was recognized as a Shaykhi scholar. She would later be known by the title Qurratu l-‘Ayn, meaning “Solace of the Eyes,” and more popularly Tahirih, “the Pure One,” within Baha’i circles. Shaykhism, founded by Shaykh Ahmad Ahsa'i (1753–1826), placed great emphasis on the end of times and the resurrection day but did not consider that resurrection to be physical. While most scholars have credited Tahirih’s education to private tutoring from her father and uncle, the fact that Tahirih later becomes an important figure within the Shaykhi sect suggests that her mother played the leading role in shaping her education and religious beliefs. Eventually she moved to Karbala, taking up residence in the home of the last Shaykhi leader, Sayyid Kazim Rashti, at the behest of his widow. She subsequently became the leader of those Shaykhis in Karbala who took up the Bábi cause. In 1844 (1260 AH), Siyyid Ali Muhammad al-Bab secretly revealed himself to be the Qa'im, the messianic figure expected by the Shi'ite Muslims. He selected 18 followers as his chief disciples and entitled them, along with himself, the 19 Letters of the Living. Tahirih immediately embraced his religion and was appointed a “Letter.” Because she had received an excellent education in all traditional Islamic sciences, Tahirih translated many of the Báb’s Arabic writings into Persian. Despite being the daughter of a cleric, Tahirih’s writings and poetry were fiercely anticlerical. Claiming an authority based on her inner awareness of God’s purpose, she instituted several innovations within the Bábi community. Claiming that much of Islamic law was no longer binding upon Bábis, she refused to perform the daily ritual prayers. But her most audacious act was appearing unveiled at key Bábi gatherings. During Muharram, for instance, Tahirih dressed in gay clothing and

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appeared unveiled in celebration of the birthday of the Báb instead of wearing the traditional mourning attire to commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. She later appeared unveiled at a Bábi gathering at Badasht to emphasize the Bábi Religion’s complete break with Islam, abrogating the shari‘a. Tahirih’s paternal uncle and father-in-law, Muhammad Taqi, violently opposed both the Bábis and the Shaykhi sect, inciting riots against them. A Bábi sympathizer retaliated by fatally stabbing him to death. Although the assassin insisted he acted alone, Tahirih’s own husband implicated her. With the assistance of Bahá’u’lláh, Tahirih was able to remain in hiding until she was captured in 1848 and brought to Tehran. Although imprisoned in the house of the chief of police there, she was able to hold meetings with the leading women of the city. Among them was Shams-i Finih, a Qajar princess who became a prominent Bábi and later a Baha’i. In 1850, the Báb was executed. Two years later, a handful of Bábis sought to avenge the Báb’s execution by attempting to assassinate the Shah. This ill-conceived plan failed and was followed by a general massacre of Bábis. While male Bábi leaders were brutally executed in public, Tahirih was taken in secret to a garden and strangled. Baha’i sources quote her last words as “You can kill me whenever you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.” Tahirih’s poetry has received considerable attention among both Baha’is and non-Baha’is. The general themes of her poetry include her ecstatic love for God and his manifestation, the Báb (and perhaps Bahá’u’lláh); her fascination with suffering and martyrdom; her messianic fervor and apocalyptic expectations for renewal of the social order; and her hostility toward the traditional clergy. Tahirih is by no means the only paradigm of womanhood for Baha’is. Some ideal figures like Navaab, Bahá’u’lláh’s wife, and Bahiyyih Khanum, his daughter, played more traditional auxiliary roles. Still, more attention is given to Tahirih within the Baha’i community. As an ideal for womanhood among Baha’is, her life suggests that women are encouraged to be assertive, intelligent, eloquent, passionately devoted to causes, and, yet, still beautiful. Absent are many of those qualities generally found in other feminine ideals: devotion to family, modesty, gentleness, and submissiveness. Susan Stiles Maneck See also: Baha’i: Education; Gender Roles Further Reading A¯ fa¯q¯ı, S· a¯bir. Táhirih in History: Perspectives on Qurratu’l-’Ayn from East and West. Los Angeles: Kalimat, 2004. Banani, Amin. Tahirih: A Portrait in Poetry, Selected Poems of Qurratu’l-’Ayn. Los Angeles: Kalimat, 2004. Momen, Moojan. “Usuli, Akhbari, Shaykhi, Babi: The Tribulations of a Qazvin Family.” Iranian Studies 36, no. 3 (2002): 317–37. Ruhe-Schoen, Janet. Rejoice in My Gladness: The Life of Tahirih. Wilmette, IL: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 2011.



Women in Baha’i Scriptures

W O M E N I N B A H A’ I S C R I P T U R E S The writings of Bahá’u’lláh unequivocally proclaim the equality of men and women, asserting that men and women are to be considered equal and on the same plane. He also suggested that differences between the sexes were the result of vain imaginings and idle fancies that have been destroyed with new revelation. Kitab-i-Aqdas, the book that contains Baha’i sacred law, was written in Arabic, a language that requires the use of the male gender for collective terms. For that reason, most of its admonitions and laws appear to be addressed to men. However, Baha’is have generally understood the greater part of the Aqdas as addressing both males and females. Shoghi Effendi, who led the Baha’i community between 1921 and 1957, stated that women have the same rights as men to sue for divorce and that in most cases the laws in the Aqdas apply mutatis mutandis to persons of both sexes except when the context makes this impossible. For instance, since the Aqdas allows but does not encourage a man to divorce his wife if she falsely represented herself as a virgin before marriage, a woman may divorce a man for the same reason. However, Bahá’u’lláh considered it more meritorious for both to conceal the matter entirely. Only in the case of membership in the Universal House of Justice has the male-oriented language been taken literally. When read within the context of 19th-century Iran, the Kitab-i Aqdas presents startling contrasts to the norms of male-female relations. Although the Aqdas makes it optional for women to perform the obligatory prayers or fast during their menses, within Islam they are not permitted to do so at all because they are regarded as ritually unclean at such times, a concept that is absent from Baha’i teachings. Perhaps more surprising is Bahá’u’lláh's treatment of sexual issues. The sexuality of women has historically been seen as a potentially dangerous force that threatens the honor of the family and indeed the entire social fabric. For this reason, adultery often carried very high penalties, usually death. In contrast, according to the Aqdas, adulterers are subject to a fine, not the death penalty. There are some minor disparities between men and women in matters of inheritance, with the presumption being that men will provide the major means of support for the family. However, the laws in the Aqdas apply only to cases in which the deceased did not leave a will as required by Baha’i law. This leaves Baha’is free to make adjustments according to their individual situations. The Kitab-i Aqdas appears to allow bigamy; however, Bahá’u’lláh insisted only monogamy was conducive to tranquility. His son, `Abdu'l-Bahá, insisted that bigamy was conditioned on equal treatment of both wives, an impossibility that made monogamy alone permissible. As in Islam, women have independent property rights even when they are married. The dowry or bride-price is presented by the groom to the bride, but there are strict limits on the amount of the dowry, making it a largely symbolic payment. Couples are required to obtain parental permission before marriage but are expected to select their own partners. Monogamous marriage between members of the opposite sex is regarded as the only acceptable outlet for sexual relations; thus, both premarital sex and homosexual conduct are not allowed. Procreation is

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regarded as the primary purpose of sex. Baha’is place no value on celibacy for its own sake, and monasticism is forbidden. Baha’is are encouraged to marry and live productive and reproductive lives. It has been argued that the exclusive use of the male gender in referring to God leads to a perpetuation of male dominance. Although Bahá’u’lláh’s Arabic writings necessitated the use of the male gender in reference to God, the Persian language has no gender. However, thus far, references to God have been translated using the male gender regardless of the original language. Perhaps more interesting is Bahá’u’lláh’s treatment of the symbol of the Heavenly Maiden, or huri. In the Qur’anic vision of paradise, black-eyed damsels, or huris, are thought to serve believers. Within the Baha’i context of fulfilled eschatology, the huri comes to symbolize the Holy Spirit, the personification of Bahá’u’lláh’s revelation and the vehicle through which he receives it. While Bahá’u’lláh proclaimed the spiritual equality of women and men, `Abdu'lBahá applied to the social and economic dimension, especially during and after his trip to the United States in 1912. There he insisted that there should be no difference in the education of males and females and that women may develop equal capacity and importance with men in social and economic life (`Abdu'l-Bahá 1972, 184). While Bahá’u’lláh insisted on the education of girls, `Abdu'l-Bahá took that requirement further by giving girls preference in cases where only some children could be educated. He further asserted that women should enter political affairs. The only area (aside from membership on the Universal House of Justice) where `Abdu'l-Bahá did not extend full and equal participation was in military endeavors, since he regarded the taking of human life as incompatible with women’s role as mothers. The exclusion of women from the Universal House of Justice is based on a reference in the Kitab-i Aqdas to the men (rijal) of the House of Justice. `Abdu'l-Bahá, in answer to a question regarding the exclusion of women from the Chicago House of Justice, replied that the House of Justice, according to the explicit text of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, was confined to men and that the wisdom of this would be known later (`Abdu'l-Bahá 1972, 80). Seven years later, `Abdu'l-Bahá ruled that this exclusion applied only to the as-yet-unformed Universal House of Justice and allowed women in the United States to serve on local bodies. Susan Stiles Maneck See also: Baha’i: Divine Feminine; Education; Gender Roles Further Reading `Abdu'l-Bahá. Paris Talks. London: Baha’i Publishing Trust, 1972. `Abdu'l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi, and the Universal House of Justice. Women: Extracts from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh. Thornhill, ON: National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Canada, 1986.

Buddhism

INTRODUCTION Buddhism arose in India in the late sixth to early fifth century BCE. Today it is the religion of nearly half a billion people, including millions in North America and hundreds of millions in Asia, with the largest numbers in China, Japan, and Thailand. The three main branches of Buddhism are called Theravada, meaning “teachings of the elders,” referring to the original branch of Buddhism; Mahayana, meaning “great vessel,” in reference to the expanded body of practices that developed over time; and Vajrayana, the “diamond vehicle” or “adamantine vehicle” of esoteric Tantric methods, rituals, and yogic disciplines. The veneration of female deities is practiced by many Buddhists. In “Female Deities,” Miranda Shaw examines the Goddesses of Buddhism, from the Indian Prithivi, who made the Buddha’s enlightenment possible according to Buddhist hagiographies, through the savioress Tara in Mahayana Buddhism, to Hariti in Nepal. Major Goddesses and their transformations in Buddhist iconography are related in separate entries, including “Tara,” “Guan Yin,” and “Prajnaparamita.” Not all Buddhists venerate deities, but all see the Buddha as a human being who found the answers to life’s suffering. According to Buddhism, to become a Buddha is to become awakened to reality as it truly is. Once awakened, a person no longer suffers and need no longer be reborn. Another kind of figure, found in Mahayana Buddhism, is the bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is a person on her or his way to becoming a Buddha; instead of jumping off the wheel of rebirth, a bodhisattva chooses rebirth, spending lifetime after lifetime helping others become awakened. Brigitte H. Bechtold explains in “Bodhisattvas” that women can become bodhisattvas and take the bodhisattva vow of commitment to liberating all living beings from suffering. While bodhisattvas are beings of great compassion, an engaged Buddhist is a compassionate person who engages politically for the benefit of people in this world. To be an engaged Buddhist is to address social issues and the living conditions of communities rather than the enlightenment of individuals. As Bechtold explains, the movement begins with “an understanding that individual salvation or enlightenment cannot be the sole purpose of Buddhist practice” (“Engaged Buddhism”). Women in Buddhist literature are often cast in a negative light, especially in early texts emanating from the male monastic sector. Women’s roles in Indian society during the founding and early years of Buddhism were typically restricted to

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the domestic sphere, and women were viewed as dependents with little worth beyond their service to men, attitudes that are reflected in early Buddhist texts (see “Sacred Texts on Women”). Despite the limited perceptions of some men, women exhibited spiritual attainment within Buddhism from the beginning. When the Buddha first created a monastic order, the sangha, only males were allowed to join. The Buddha’s foster mother, Pajapati, prevailed on the Buddha to allow women to take monastic vows, and she counted hundreds of women as her followers. From this first generation of female Buddhist renouncers, the lineages of ordained Buddhist nuns originated, and the path to enlightenment was recorded in women’s own voices. The Therigatha is a collection of poems composed by the earliest nuns. Entries relating women’s roles in early Buddhism include “Pajapati,” “Therigatha,” “Women in Early Buddhism,” and “Nuns, Theravada.” In “Feminine Virtues,” Pascale Engelmajer relates how motherhood is the ultimate ideal for women in much Buddhist thought. While providing a positive role for women, not all women want marriage and motherhood, which typically preclude a life of spiritual devotion. Yet, even when a woman is unmarried and chooses to dedicate her life to religious discipline, low social status and restrictions on ordination may limit her success. Where women are not ordained, female novices (who have taken vows but not been ordained as nuns) are commonly perceived as less worthy of social support than monks. The same attitude extends to fully ordained nuns in some regions. With lower social status comes fewer benefits, and both nuns and novices struggle from lack of financial support for nunneries. Entries that address Buddhist women’s ordination include “Gender Roles,” “Laywomen in Theravada,” “Ordination,” and “Women’s Buddhist Networks.” Other entries look at women’s roles in various Buddhist contexts. Women in specific Buddhist traditions and settings are discussed in “Zen,” “Mahayana,” “Tantra,” “Soˉka Gakkai,” and “Buddhism in the United States.” “Tea Ceremony” relates women’s special connection to the ancient Japanese Buddhist art of making tea as a contemplative and ritual practice. Finally, in “Dance,” Shaw relates an engaging history of women, art, music, and dance in Buddhism, and in “Dance of Tara,” Susan de-Gaia and Phyllis Moses describe the formation and practice of a new form of Buddhist movement meditation for women, the Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara. General Bibliography—Buddhism Allione, Tsultrim. Women of Wisdom. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2000. Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: NYU Press, 2015. Anderson, Jennifer L. “Japanese Tea Ritual: Religion in Practice.” Man 22, no. 3 (1987): 475–98. Aral, Paula Kane Robinson. Women Living Zen; Japanese Soˉtoˉ Buddhist Nuns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. Women under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Beyer, Stephan. The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.



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Blackstone, Kathryn R. Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1998. Boucher, Sandy. Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Cabezon, Jose Ignacio, ed. Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Caplow, Zenshi Florence, and Reigetsu Susan Moon, eds. The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2013. Chau, Adam-Yuet. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Chen, Fan Pen Li. Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Cho, Eun-su, ed. Korean Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen: Hidden Histories, Enduring Vitality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Collett, Alice. Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. DeVido, Elise Anne. Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Engelmajer, Pascale. Women in Pali Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Paths in Mutual Dependence. New York: Routledge, 2018. Faure, Bernard. The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity and Gender. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Gregory, Peter N., and Susanne Mrozik. Women Practicing Buddhism: American Experiences. Boston: Wisdom, 2008. Gross, Rita M. Buddhism after Patriarchy: A Feminist History, Analysis, and Reconstruction of Buddhism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Hallisey, Charles, trans. Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Havnevik, Hanna. Tibetan Buddhist Nuns. Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1990. Karetsky, Patricia Eichenbaum. Guanyin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Meeks, Lori. Hokkeji and the Reemergence of Female Monastic Orders in Premodern Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. Mohr, Thea, and Jampa Tsedroen, eds. Dignity and Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns. Boston: Wisdom, 2010. Murcott, Susan. The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentaries on the Therigatha. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 1991. Ohnuma, Reiko. Ties That Bind: Maternal Imagery and Discourse in Indian Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Rinpoche, Bokar. Tara: The Feminine Divine. San Francisco: ClearPoint, 1999. Ruch, Barbara, ed. Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Schireson, Grace. 2010. Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters. Somerville, MA: Wisdom. Shaw, Miranda. Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Shaw, Miranda. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Simmer-Brown, Judith. Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Shambhala, 2001. Tisdale, Sallie. Women of the Way: Discovering 2,500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

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Tsomo, Karma Lekshe, ed. Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Willson, Martin. In Praise of Tara: Songs to the Saviouress. London: Wisdom, 1986. Yü, Chün-fang. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokites´vara. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

ABORTION For the nearly 500 million Buddhist followers worldwide, there is limited direction on abortion in scriptural and sacred texts. The first Buddhist precept is to avoid killing, and some specific references to abortion appear in the Vinaya Pitaka, the monastic code for men and women. Buddhist leaders do not often make strong statements about abortion. In a recent interview on the topic of birth control and abortion (Dreifus 1998), the Dalai Lama took on a secular view that is consistent with the Buddhist precepts, explaining that, while “abortion, from a Buddhist viewpoint, is an act of killing and is negative, generally speaking,” there are circumstances when it is not disapproved, notably “if the birth will create serious problems for the parent.” State policies in Asian Buddhist countries and culture affect abortion rates and often trump religious ethics. This is especially the case in China, where the onechild policy combined with son preference has resulted in both high abortion and infanticide. The Chinese government has also promoted this policy in neighboring Tibet, and there are reports of women forced to undergo abortions and sterilizations.

These mizuko statues represent the bodhisattva Jizo, caretaker of infants and children who have died. Mizuko ceremonies are rituals of memorial and mourning, and can be performed for those who have had abortions or have suffered the death of a child. (Bettmann/Getty Images)



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While Korea and Japan both have very high rates of abortion, the procedure has been legal in Japan since 1948 but is only allowed under limited conditions in Korea. In Japan, the mizuko ceremony helps women and some men deal with conflicted emotions and sadness about abortions. The ceremony includes prayers to the Jizo Bodhisattva, who is revered by Mahayanists as the caretaker of infants and children who have died. Parents bring toys and age-appropriate gifts to the dead child, as if it had grown up since the death or abortion took place. Mizuko ceremonies have become big business in Japan, and a similar type of ceremony has recently become popular in Korea. In Thailand, Buddhism is the state religion, and abortion is not normally permitted, although therapeutic abortions are easy to obtain. With the high rate of prostitution among young women in the country, it may seem surprising that most abortions are performed on married women who use it as a form of birth control. Thai prostitutes often carry pregnancies to term because they see their own gender as the result of bad karma and believe that this can be ameliorated if they raise a son to become a monk (Keown 1999). Where Buddhist views have been adopted outside Asia, women’s views on abortion are influenced by the mainstream culture in addition to Buddhist traditional values. Overall, abortion practices vary widely among Buddhists around the world, and the decision is influenced by balancing religious and cultural beliefs and economic circumstances. Brigitte H. Bechtold See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Gender Roles; Christianity: Abortion; Confucianism: Women’s Changing Roles Further Reading Bays, Jan Chozen. Jizo Bodhisattva: Guardian of Children, Travelers and Other Voyagers. Boston: Shambala, 2003. Craig, Mary. Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000. Dreifus, Claudia. “Interview with the Dalai Lama.” New York Times, November 28, 1998. Keown, Damien, ed. Buddhism and Abortion. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999.

B O D H I S AT T VA S In Mahayana Buddhism, a religious belief system that sees everyone as (potentially) enlightened, a female bodhisattva is a woman who has dedicated herself to a life of compassionate service to sentient beings. Rather than seeking enlightenment just for herself, she seeks to serve others by skillful means. To become a bodhisattva, a woman takes the following four basic vows: (1) sentient beings are uncountable, and I vow to save them all; (2) suffering and attachments in the form of desires and dislikes are endless, and I vow to overcome them; (3) the dharma gate is boundless, and I vow to enter it; and (4) the Buddha way is beyond measure, and I vow to become (attain) it (Fronsdal 2000). These four vows correspond to the four basic truths in Buddhism (suffering is everywhere, it is due to attachments, there is an end to suffering, and this end is attained by following the way of the Buddha)

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and are supplemented by the precepts, which are taken on by the bodhisattva upon basic ordination (Fronsdal 2000). When her vows are taken in a formal ceremony, the bodhisattva receives a set of precepts or life rules (16 in Zen) from her teacher or master, who may also bestow a bodhisattva name on the recipient. The first three precepts are to take refuge in Buddha, dharma, and sangha, while the following three are not to increase evil, to practice good, and to do what is good for others. The 10 remaining precepts are related to not killing, not abusing sex or intoxicants, and others. Buddhism originated in the Iron Age, and women were at that time considered devoted wives and child bearers, on the one hand, and as wicked and adulterous and the cause of problems on the other. They were not afforded high standing in religious hierarchies nor in the various narratives of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisattva, notably the Jataka tales (Pandey 2015). Since the beginning during Buddha’s life, and increasingly so, women have practiced Buddhism, and one of the major historical bodhisattvas—the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokites´vara (Guan Yin in Chinese)—has over time become more frequently depicted as a female, especially in the East, notably China. She is depicted with numerous arms, each of which carries a tool (symbolic of a skillful means). In Northern Buddhism, the origin of Guan Yin goes back to Tara, Goddess of Compassion, who grew out of Avalokites´vara’s tears. The so-called green Tara is said to be the original among several Taras and is thought to have emanated from the self-born Buddha Amitabha and to have reincarnated as the wife of one of the Tibetan kings. The bodhisattva vows and precepts are to a large extent commensurate with the roles women play as giving nurturers and mothers and do not appear overwhelming to many women. In today’s world, it is generally easy for women to take the bodhisattva vow. Ordination into the orders of nun or monk, however, and recognition in the long direct lineage of monks going back to the Buddha Sakyamuni is more difficult. Brigitte H. Bechtold See also: Buddhism: Engaged Buddhism; Female Divinities; Feminine Virtues; Guan Yin; Mahayana; Ordination; Sacred Texts on Women; Tara; Daoism: Goddesses; Spirituality: Sex and Gender; Women of Color Further Reading Adler, Joseph A. “Daughter/Wife/Mother or Sage/Immortal Bodhisattva? Women in the Teaching of Chinese Religions.” ASIANetwork Exchange 14, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 11–16. Fronsdal, Gil. “Bodhisattva Vows and the Four Noble Truths.” Lecture given October 14, San Francisco Zen Center. Palo Alto, CA: Insight Meditation Center of the Midpeninsula, 2000. Olson, Carl. The Different Paths of Buddhism: A Narrative-Historical Introduction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pandey, Neelima. “Women in Primitive Buddhism.” Clarion 4, no. 1 (February 4, 2015): 134–39.



Buddhism in the United States

B U D D H I S M I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S Women have played a role in American Buddhist institutions since their inception in the mid-19th century up to the present day, establishing Buddhist women’s associations, engaging in translation and scholarship about Buddhism, and teaching as Buddhist monastics and lay practitioners. Although American Buddhist communities are incredibly diverse and complex, scholars have proposed three categories of American Buddhists: Asians, Asian Americans, and non-Asian American Buddhists, who may be Euro-American, African American, Hispanic, or multicultural (Tsomo 2008). In each group, women have made significant contributions by assuming leadership roles, discussing how to integrate Buddhism with everyday life, seeking to reestablish ordination lineages for all Buddhist women, and emphasizing the need to clarify boundaries to prevent sexual misconduct between teachers and students. Chinese immigrants first brought Buddhism to the United States in the mid19th century, establishing Buddhist temples in an effort to preserve and transmit their cultural identity to their descendants. While we have no record of women participating in the religious life of these institutions, we do know that some temples were dedicated to Guan Yin, the Chinese bodhisattva of compassion. In the 1880s, Japanese immigrants also established Buddhist institutions in the United States, and wives of Buddhist priests sent by the group later known as the Buddhist Churches of America often acted as liaisons between the Japanese and Euro-American communities. They also formed women’s leagues that would clean temples, provide flowers and other ritual offerings, organize fund-raising events, and operate the Sunday dharma school and Japanese-language schools. Their temples attracted some Euro-American converts, such as Sunya Pratt (1898–1986), who became head of the Tacoma Buddhist Society in 1934, was ordained in 1936, and was appointed as minister in the Buddhist Churches of America in 1953. In the 19th century, Euro-Americans encountered Buddhism through Transcendentalist and Spiritualist movements as well as the World’s Parliament of Religions. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804–1894) published the first English translation of a Buddhist sutra in her Transcendentalist periodical, The Dial, in 1844, and Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) traveled with Henry Steele Olcott (1832– 1907) to Sri Lanka in 1880, where they became the first Euro-Americans to officially convert to Buddhism. They encouraged the young Sri Lankan Buddhist Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) to attend the World’s Parliament of Religions in 1893, and he converted several Euro-American women to Buddhism, including Marie deSouza Canavarro (1849–1933) and Mary Elizabeth Mikahala Foster (1844–1930). Women assumed leadership positions within American Zen groups in the early and mid-20th century. Beatrice Erskine Hanh Lanee Suzuki (1870–1939) founded and coedited Eastern Buddhist with her husband D. T. Suzuki and published work about Mahayana Buddhism. Ruth Fuller Everett Sasaki (1892–1967), one of the first Western women to train at a Zen monastery in Japan, taught meditation

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alongside Sokei-an at his First Zen Institute in New York in the early 1940s. Mary Farkas (1910–1992) carried out the administrative work of the First Zen Institute; edited its journal, Zen Notes, that recorded Sokei-an’s teachings; and became its general secretary in 1949. Elsie Mitchell (1926–2011) cofounded the Cambridge Buddhist Association with her husband in 1957. Women also played an instrumental role in establishing the Vipassana movement in the United States. Otherwise known as insight meditation, Vipassana trains students to observe their thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations in a nonjudgmental way to develop insight into impermanence, suffering, and the insubstantiality of self. Ruth Denison (1922–2015) trained in Burma, began teaching meditation in the United States in 1975, and established the Dhamma Dena Desert Vipassana Center near Palm Springs, California. Sharon Salzberg (b. 1952) and Jacqueline Schwartz (b. 1954)—now Jacqueline Mandell—returned from Asia in the mid-1970s and cofounded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in 1976. Salzberg remains affiliated with IMS and Theravada Buddhism and focuses her teachings on the idea of loving-kindness. Tara Brach (b. 1953) founded the Insight Meditation Community in Washington, D.C., and Sylvia Boorstein (b. 1936) is another prominent teacher who writes popular books on Vipassana meditation and teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California. Following a liberalization of immigration policy, in the 1970s and 1980s, many Southeast Asians immigrated to the United States and brought Theravada Buddhist traditions with them. Most Theravada Buddhist institutions claim that women cannot be fully ordained in their tradition; however, many American Buddhist women have sought to reestablish ordination of Theravada nuns. An example is Ayya Khema (1923–1997), who became a U.S. citizen after having survived incarceration in a German concentration camp, was ordained at a Chinese Buddhist temple in Los Angeles in 1988, and became a prominent spokeswoman for ordination of Theravada nuns. While Tibetan Buddhist teachers have largely been men since its introduction to the United States in the 1970s, increasingly, women have been given authority to lead meditation practices, retreats, and workshops as either laywomen or nuns. These include Tsultrim Allione (b. 1947), ordained as a Buddhist nun in 1969; Pema Chödrön (b. 1936), resident teacher and abbess of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia; Thubten Chodron (b. 1950), founder and abbess of Sravasti Abbey—the only Tibetan Buddhist training monastery for Western nuns and monks in the United States; and Karma Lekshe Tsomo (b. 1944), Tibetan Buddhist nun, professor at the University of San Diego, and president of Sakyadhı¯ta¯: The International Association of Buddhist Women, an organization founded in 1987 that brings together millions of women nuns, scholars, lay practitioners, and activists worldwide to work toward gender equity and world peace. Women in American Zen groups have assumed greater leadership responsibilities than their earlier Asian predecessors who could not receive dharma transmission—which gives one the authority to teach students—because it was passed from fathers to sons. Peggy Jiyu Kennett (1924–1996), the first female Zen teacher in the United States officially recognized by the Soto Zen sect in Japan,



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founded the Shasta Abbey Zen Monastery in 1970. Deborah Hopkinson (b. 1952) and Susan Murcott (b. 1952), members of the Diamond Sangha led by Robert Aiken (1917–2010) in Hawai‘i, began the journal Kahawai Journal of Women and Zen in 1979. Recently, women have not only represented the majority of Zen practitioners but have increasingly attained dharma transmission and occupied more prominent positions, such as head abbess of large and well-established American Zen centers. These women leaders include Sherry Chayat (b. 1943), the first American woman to receive official Rinzai dharma tradition and current abbess of the Zen Center of Syracuse and the Zen Studies Society; Zenkei Blanche Hartman (1926–2016), who studied with D. T. Suzuki and served as abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center from 1996 to 2002; Linda Ruth Cutts (b. 1947), who served as coabbess of the San Francisco Zen Center from 2000 to 2007 and became central abbess of the center in 2014; and Wendy Nakao (b. 1948), who became abbess of the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1999. These women have focused especially on how to integrate Buddhist practice with everyday life and have adopted a more horizontal approach to leadership instead of the hierarchy characteristic of the Zen tradition. Women have also played an important role in drawing attention to significant issues facing American Buddhist communities, including sexism and racism. They have highlighted the need to clarify boundaries between teachers and students, an issue that came to the fore in the wake of sexual scandals in American Zen centers during the 1980s. Sandy Boucher (b. 1936) addressed sexual exploitation by male teachers and sexual misconduct in Zen groups in her book Turning the Wheel in 1988, and Rita Gross (1943–2015) criticized Buddhist patriarchal values and began identifying Buddhist women role models in Buddhism after Patriarchy in 1993. bell hooks (b. 1952), a Zen practitioner, has drawn attention to the racist tendency to marginalize African Americans and Asian immigrants in American Buddhist groups, and Jan Willis (b. 1948) has emphasized the need to nurture more racially integrated American Buddhist groups. Beverley McGuire See also: Buddhism: Guan Yin; Mahayana; Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Women’s Buddhist Networks; Zen Further Reading Findly, Ellison Banks, ed. Women’s Buddhism, Buddhism’s Women: Tradition, Revision, Renewal. Boston: Wisdom, 2000. Gregory, Peter N., and Susanne Mrozik. Women Practicing Buddhism: American Experiences. Boston: Wisdom, 2008. Gross, Rita. “Helping the Iron Bird Fly: Western Buddhist Women and Issues of Authority in the Late 1990s.” In The Faces of Buddhism in America, edited by Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka, 238–52. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Sakyadhı¯ta¯. International Association of Buddhist Women. 2016. http://www.sakyadhita​.org/. Tsomo, Karma Lekshe. “North American Buddhist Women in the International Context.” In Women Practicing Buddhism: American Experiences, edited by Peter N. Gregory and Susanne Mrozik, 15–31. Boston: Wisdom, 2008.

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DANCE Female dancers have had an enduring presence in Buddhist history. Their roles have varied according to the religious settings in which they appear, reflecting the ideals and practices of different movements, communities, and cultural settings. Literary and visual sources make it possible to trace the evolving roles of female dancers as Indian Buddhism developed through the formative period (third century BCE through second century CE), Mahayana movement (first century CE onward), and Tantric tradition (7th to 12th century CE). As Buddhism spread beyond India, the roles of dance established in these three paradigms of Buddhist practice underwent regional variations and flowed into living traditions, several of which will be touched on below. In early Buddhism, female dancers (nartaki) represented the sensory pleasures that detract from meditative serenity. The life of Shakyamuni Buddha as a prince growing up in a palace included entertainment by female dancers and singers. On the night he set forth on his quest for truth, he stepped among the sleeping bodies of the royal singers and dancers, symbolizing the worldly enjoyments he was leaving behind. In early Buddhist literature, female dancers epitomize the feminine beauty that challenges the equanimity of male renunciants. The tempting allure of dancers garlanded in flowers, wearing tinkling ornaments and colorful raiment, with swaying hips and fragrantly oiled skin, tested the detachment of monks who encountered them in the open-air settings and processions in which they performed. Dancing was prohibited for monks and nuns. The contrasting ways of life of a dancer and a nun drives the plot of a beloved Tamil Buddhist literary classic. Named after its heroine, the Manimekhalai (ca. sixth century CE) centers on a divinely lovely dancer who eludes the amorous demands of a prince and her future as a courtesan to pursue a life of study, contemplation, and service as a nun. Although dance was unsuitable for nuns, dance was part of the homage due to South Asian royalty and exalted persons. The dancers who honored the Buddha were the Celestial Goddesses who danced in their heavenly realm to celebrate his enlightenment and the Buddha relic in their possession. Turning to the Mahayana movement, there are scant references to female dancers in sources dating from the first through fifth centuries CE, and dance is absent from the many Mahayana guidelines for devotional worship. The sixth century, however, saw a new role for female dancers in Buddhist settings as part of a pan-Indian trend to bring the courtly arts of music and dance into religious ceremonial life under royal patronage. Historical records from far-flung sites across India where Buddhism flourished at different periods between the 6th and 12th centuries attest to female dancers in residence at Buddhist temples. These women were Buddhist counterparts of the well-documented Hindu temple dancers known as devadasis. A composite description gleaned from pilgrim accounts and inscriptions shows the Buddhist dancers to have resided on temple grounds and participated in the regular round of worship by dancing, singing, and offering flowers, food, lamplight, and other votive gifts of homage two or three times each day.



Dance

Signaling this shift in the religious import and status of dancing women is a sixth-century relief at the Buddhist cave complex at Aurangabad, where a female dancer and six female musicians and drummers are sculpted along the entrance to a Buddha chapel. The dancer’s lightly clad, voluptuous body curves into a sinuous pose as she gestures toward her suggestively parted thighs. This portrayal and its placement proclaim that the sensuous grace of the female dancer no longer epitomizes worldly temptation but now befits a sanctified ritual specialist and heralds the threshold of enlightenment. With the advent of Tantric Buddhism, or Vajrayana, dance moved to center stage as a visual motif and religious practice. In Tantric imagery, Buddhas in peaceful repose gave way to dynamic Buddhas in dancing form. Some of the Tantric gurus were female dancers. In Tantric writings, female dancers are among the groups of women to be included in Tantric circles and to receive honor and ritual worship. Foundational Tantric scriptures of the seventh and eighth centuries CE, such as the Hevajra Tantra and Cakrasamvara Tantra, promoted dance as a meditative and yogic discipline for both male and female practitioners. The main purpose of Tantric dance was to cultivate divine qualities and enlightened awareness by dancing in a state of union with one of the deities of the Tantric pantheon. The practitioner adopted the appearance of the deity, meditated on the inner nature of the deity, and channeled the presence of the deity through the dance movements. Because the pantheon included female Buddhas, a woman could don the raiment and ornaments of a female deity and dance, evoking the Goddess within herself and bodying forth the presence of the Goddess through her movements. A living Tantric dance tradition is found in the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. Charya Nritya, translatable as “dance as a spiritual discipline,” is a sacred art of those of Tantric priestly lineage, known as Vajracharyas. In the highly esoteric rituals that are their preserve, dance is an essential element used as a way to make the deities bodily present in the ceremonies. Men may learn and perform the dances of female deities and vice versa. In a formal ritual setting, however, such as in initiation, women dance the part of female deities as one of many ritual roles in which women channel the powers and blessings of Tantric Goddesses. Still on the whole a secret art, Charya Nritya is now widely taught and performed in Nepal in the form of a small repertoire of dances appreciated for their cultural significance rather than undertaken as a Buddhist contemplative and yogic practice (Shaw 2011). Girls and women predominate among those who pursue the dance in these public venues. As Buddhism spread across Asia, other dance traditions and roles for female dancers arose in different cultural and geographic settings. There is a long tradition of female dancers honoring the national treasure of Sri Lanka, a Buddha relic housed in the Temple of the Sacred Tooth. Reliefs lining the temple walls represent the women, including the queen, who danced in the temple in centuries past (George 1999, 67–68). In modern times, women dance in public processions during the main national celebration and holy day of Sri Lanka, the Festival of the Sacred Tooth. A spectacular female dance tradition is immortalized on the temple and palace walls of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where scores of

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12th- and 13th-century carved reliefs of dancing figures and women in exquisite dance raiment and intricate ornaments represent heavenly dancers (apsaras) and their human counterparts. These sculptures bear witness to a dance tradition that flourished under royal patronage for centuries and was ceremonially essential for channeling divine blessings for a harmonious, prosperous Buddhist kingdom. The delicate gestures and symbolic crowns and other adornments of the sculpted figures reveal continuities with Cambodian dance today. In the United States, where Buddhism has influenced literary and visual arts since the 1960s, the last decade has seen increasing Buddhist inroads in the overlapping realms of dance, performing arts, and conscious movement modalities. As in the dance world at large, women are more numerous than men among those who study traditional Asian dance forms as well as among those who integrate Buddhist themes, symbolic elements, and practices with Western dance styles and somatic disciplines. This trend is seen in a recent collection of essays by pioneers and practitioners of Buddhist and Buddhist-inflected dance and movement practices, in which 20 of the 26 contributors are women (Blum 2016, 267–69). Charya Nritya is one of the Asian dance forms taught in the United States, in a Buddhist temple setting in Portland, Oregon, where the meditative and ritual dimensions of the dance are emphasized. A chapter in the aforementioned anthology is by the woman instrumental in establishing and promoting Charya Nritya in the West (Blum 2016, 155–63). Miranda Shaw See also: Buddhism: Buddhism in the United States; Dance of Tara; Female Divinities; Mahayana; Tantra; Hinduism: Devadasis Further Reading Blum, Harrison, ed. Dancing with Dharma: Essays on Movement and Dance in Western Buddhism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. Cravath, Paul. Earth in Flower—The Divine Mystery of the Cambodian Dance Drama. n.p.: DatASIA, 2014. Danielou, Alain, trans. Manimekhalai (The Dancer with the Magic Bowl) by Merchant-Prince Shattan. New York: New Directions, 1989. George, David E. R. Buddhism as/in Performance: Analysis of Meditation and Theatrical Practice. New Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 1999. Shaw, Miranda. “Tantric Buddhist Dance of Nepal: From the Temple to the Stage and Back.” In Nepal: Nostalgia and Modernity, edited by Deepak Shimkhada, 101–10. Bombay: Marg Foundation, 2011.

D A N C E O F TA R A The Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara (Dance of Tara) is a meditative movement and dance practice for women in honor of the Goddess Tara. The dance was the inspiration of Prema Dasara, a trained classical Indian Odissi dancer, who introduced the dance in 1986 and established over 90 circles for its practice around the world. Prema is the founder and spiritual and creative director of Tara Dhatu, a



Dance of Tara

nonprofit organization dedicated to awakening humanity through the sacred arts. The main purpose of the Mandala Dance of Tara is to encourage each participant to manifest her or his enlightened potential. Engaging in the dance can produce a powerful experience of meditative absorption. Esteemed lamas have declared this dance to be an accumulation of wisdom, compassion, and merit, all necessary on the path to awakening. The dance is based on a Tibetan sadhana, a mind treasure revealed by Chokjur Lingpa, devoted to Goddess Tara. Prema Dasara explains that while translating the 21 Praises of Tara into English, she was spontaneously moved to dance to the verses and was prompted to develop the Dance of Tara in collaboration with another dancer, Lauryn Galindo (Dasara 2010, 5–9). Prema first performed the dance with friends on Maui, where she lives. When word of it spread, she was invited to travel throughout the world and teach the dance to communities of women. Although the dance is primarily a dance of empowerment for women of all ages and abilities, men are invited to participate in supportive roles as protectors. Goddess Tara is revered in Tibetan Buddhism as Mother of Perfected Wisdom and Great Mother of Liberation. She is the Ultimate Mother who uses her omniscience and divine powers to awaken inherent wisdom and compassion in practitioners to realize their true nature. Legends circulating in India and Tibet tell of the many lifetimes in which Tara ascended to her role as Savioress and Enlightener. In one much-told tale, Tara was born from the tears of Avalokites´vara as a bodhisattva, one who has vowed to hold back from enlightenment and continue to serve until every being is liberated. Another account tells how, in a former life in an age long past, Tara vowed to be reborn as a woman throughout her spiritual journey as aspirant and Divine Liberator. A group of 21 Taras is widely worshipped in Tibetan Buddhism and is a popular object of artistic and literary treatment. A lengthy prayer devoted to the 21 forms, known as the 21 Praises of Tara, provides the theme and pattern of the Tara Dance, in which each woman embodies one of the forms of Tara. Prema has modernized and refined the invocations and language of the prayers that accompany the dance to enhance their meaning Women perform the Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises and impact. of Tara. (Courtesy of Tonasket Buddhist Center)

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The Dance of Tara is what is known in Tibetan Buddhism as a terma (hidden treasure), a sacred teaching revealed at a specific historical moment to an individual who is sensitive enough to receive it and sufficiently skilled to transmit it for the benefit of his or her generation and the world. The person who receives a terma, often in the form of a vision or a dream, is vested thereby with authority to introduce a new practice or teaching. Many teachings passed down for generations originated as termas. Prema’s story resembles those of women in ancient India who received revelations of sacred dances and practices, adorned themselves in colorful costumes, and offered the dances as inspiration within temples and charnel meeting grounds. The Tara Dance has been performed in the presence of eminent Tibetan Buddhist leaders, including the Dalai Lama, who have encouraged Prema Dasara to continue the dance, teach it to others, and protect its lineage. The Dance of Tara begins with the dancers invoking Tara within a crescent moon mandala. After calling on Tara to be present and share her blessings, the dancers walk in a spiraling pattern that forms a set of concentric circles. As the dance proceeds, they move through profound geometric shapes, such as the peace symbol. Following the spiral formation, each dancer progresses to the point of being “birthed” out of the spiral to dance her praise. As the dancers move through their self-choreographed ritual, they undergo mental, emotional, and spiritual transformation and an expansion of consciousness. Dancers lose their identification with their smaller, or everyday, self and reveal their inner nature as Goddess Tara. The body moves, and Tara appears through their expressive dance. The dance is rooted in the practice of Tantric Buddhism, which includes all the senses of the body revealed as divine. During formal offerings of the dance, colorful costumes, such as saris, are worn. Diverse Dancing Tara groups around the world have designed a range of elegant costumes. Each of the Taras appear in sacred colors with symbolic meanings. These correspond to the qualities of the forms of Tara to which the dancer is assigned and help to embody the quality. For instance, reds are for magnetizing; black symbolizes wrath, the force needed to accomplish enlightened activities; yellow is for increasing; and white is pacifying. The dance symbolically enacts and represents the journey of awakening. The 21 Praises of Tara can be correlated with 21 “knots” in the subtle energy system of the body. Saying the mantras and doing the dances begins to untie the knots. The dance unfolds in the traditional order of a complete sadhana, or spiritual practice, which starts with invocation, motivation, refuge, and bodhisattva vows. It then goes into the main body of the practice—dancing of praises, meditations with mantra. It proceeds through a confirmation of the benefits of the dance and a dissolution practice (all is empty). The dancers arise again as the deity and the merits of the practice are dedicated to the benefit of all beings. The dance is believed to bring blessings to those who dance and witness it, and to manifest the presence of Tara and spread her inspiring, empowering, and enlightening influence. Susan de-Gaia and Phyllis Moses



Engaged Buddhism

See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Dance; Female Divinities; Guan Yin; Mahayana; Sacred Texts on Women; Tara; Hinduism: Durga and Kali; Spirituality: Meditation Further Reading Dasara, Prema. “Dancing the Goddess Tara: Praise Her, Embody Her, Discover Your Own Perfection.” In Dancing on the Earth: Women’s Stories of Healing through Dance, edited by Joanna Leseho and Sandra McMaster, 66–80. Forre, Scotland: Findhorn, 2011. Dasara, Prema. Dancing Tara: A Manual of Practice, How to Live the Dream. Phoenix: Tara Dhatu, 2010. Dasara, Prema. “The Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara.” In Dancing with Dharma: Essays on Movement and Dance in Western Buddhism, edited by Harrison Blum, 164–69. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. Rinpoche, Tulku Urgyen, and Trulshik Adeu Rinpoche. Skillful Grace—Tara Practice for Our Times. Translated and edited by Erik Pema Kunsang and Marcia Binder Schmidt. Hong Kong: Rangjung Yeshe, 2007. Sherab, Khenchen Palden, and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal. Tara’s Enlightened Activity: An Oral Commentary on the Twenty-One Praises to Tara. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2007. Tara Dhatu. Dance the Goddess. 2018. www.taradhatu.org.

ENGAGED BUDDHISM Women who are Engaged Buddhists extend the bodhisattva vow to save all sentient beings to social action. The term Engaged Buddhism was coined by Thich Nhat Hanh in the 1960s and describes techniques and actions to channel the religious teachings of the dharma to the resolution of numerous social problems that exist in societies and in the natural environment and that accompany globalization. It would not be correct to say that Buddhism was not engaged with social issues from its beginnings through the middle of the 20th century, because the four types of Buddhist ethics include discipline, virtue, altruism, and engagement, and these virtues overlap and are cumulative. From the middle of the century, however, the combination of the effect of world wars; the Korean and Vietnam Wars; international human rights legislation under the auspices of the United Nations; and the increased communication, forced migration, gender injustice, poverty, human trafficking, and deterioration of the environment that accompanied globalization led to an understanding that individual salvation or enlightenment cannot be the sole purpose of Buddhist practice. Consequently, increasing numbers of Buddhists are extending their bodhisattva commitments to social action (Romberg 2002, 167– 68). Women are very prominent in this movement and in areas that range from meditation techniques on one end to political movements on the other. Consistent with traditional gender roles, some Engaged Buddhist nuns and dharma masters apply meditation techniques to help actualize compassion and their vow to save suffering beings, while others are founders of entire organizations devoted to compassionate relief. In one of the typical Western Engaged Buddhist approaches, Sharon Salzberg (1995) advocates the use of metta or loving-kindness, a meditation technique in which practitioners express loving thoughts and well-being, beginning with themselves and then extending them to

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others, including those they may once have considered inimical. In this fashion, each person can learn to cultivate love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Others channel engaged practice into comprehensive compassionate organizations; for example, Taiwanese nun Cheng Yen founded the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation in 1966 (see www.tzuchi.org.tw). In the United States, female Engaged Buddhists have founded and contributed to organizations that address the spectrum of social problems and humanitarian causes. Notably, Project Dana, founded in 1989 by Rose Nakamura, combines the efforts of several temples in Hawai‘i and California to serve those who are elderly or disabled and is the only Buddhist organization in the National Association of Volunteer Interfaith Caregivers. At the Upaya Zen Center (www.upaya.org), emphasis is placed on compassionate service related to death and dying, prisons, and the environment. The founder, main teacher, and abbess of Upaya, Joan Halifax (b. 1942), received a PhD in medical anthropology and has delivered numerous lectures on death and dying. In the early 1970s, she worked with dying cancer patients and developed support mechanisms for the dying with her then-spouse. She is one of many women who came to Buddhist practice in the process of their professional work. Her social engagement has led her to found the Project on Being with Dying, the Nomads Clinic in Nepal, and the Upaya Prison Project. Prison reform and so-called prison dharma (contemplative programs for inmates) is an area in which many women Buddhists have been active. While it is easier for women to serve female prison populations as dharma teachers, some tend to all-male populations. Although the Buddha did not reproduce the Hindu caste system in the sangha and allowed women to practice, the concern with gender and social hierarchy has been part of the sangha since early Buddhism, and misogyny affecting the sangha is a reality. It has been persistently manifested in differential rules for women practitioners and even denial of full ordination in some settings. Engaged Buddhist women work individually and in transnational networks to open full ordination to women. Like Thubten Chodron (b. 1950), an American Tibetan Buddhist who is a student of several masters and obtained full ordination in Taiwan, some Engaged Buddhist women practitioners use parallel and sideways lineages. A slightly different approach is embodied in the actions of persons such as Chatsumarn Kabilsing (b. 1944) (Ven. Dhammananda), who seek to obtain gender equality in ordination and directly establish or reestablish female clerical orders. This is particularly critical in Thailand, where women clergy are severely subordinate to male monks, the latter of whom receive numerous privileges, including free public transportation. This gender hierarchy in religious practice in Thailand is being gradually eroded by the Network of Thai Bikkhuni Sangha, opening the way to enlightenment and escape from future rebirths for women practicing in the Theravada tradition. What’s more, since gender hierarchy in Buddhist practice corresponds with cultural and social disempowerment of women in Buddhist societies, such movements may help to address the massive human rights violations against women in lay society. Several women have been actively engaged in nonviolent Buddhist political liberation movements, particularly in Tibet, Vietnam, and Myanmar. When Sister Chan Khong (b. 1938) was a teenager, she already worked for the underprivileged



Engaged Buddhism

in the city slums in Vietnam. Later, she became the first full-ordained monastic disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh (b. 1926). Khong organized the Buddhist Peace Delegation at the Paris Peace Talks in 1969, and at the end of the Vietnam War she organized humanitarian help to rescue the boat people and led numerous sponsorship programs for thousands of orphans in Vietnam. Together with Thich Nhat Hanh, she started Plum Village monastery in southwestern France, and she serves as the elder nun there (www.plumvillage.org). In Burma (now Myanmar), Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945) became the leader of the National League for Democracy after she returned in 1988 from her studies abroad. The military junta that had ruled the country since the early 1960s was overwhelmingly defeated at the ballot box in 1990 but refused to yield power, and Suu Kyi spent 15 years under house arrest, during which time she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights. She now holds a government post similar to that of prime minister. In the United States, Paula Green brings her background in meditation, intergroup counseling, and nonviolent activism to international conflict resolution at the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding in Massachusetts (Green 2000). Compassion for the dignity of all sentient beings also requires activism aimed at the protection of the environment and the realization that human beings are part of nature together with all its other manifestations, and several well-known Engaged Buddhists, including Joanne Macy, have drawn attention to deep ecology and the need to preserve the natural environment. Macy focuses on both the despair and empowerment that accompanies environmental decline, especially in relation to the potential of nuclear disaster, and draws attention to the need for nuclear guardianship. Engaged Buddhist women have contributed to numerous publications and play leadership roles in several networks and academic programs. Joanna Macy (b. 1929) and Stephanie Kaza (b. 1947) are active in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and Sandra Jishu Holmes (1941–1998) cofounded the Zen Peacemaker Order. Naropa University in Boulder offers an accredited master of arts degree in Engaged Buddhism that is headed by Judith Simmer-Brown (b. 1946), and Susan Moon (b. 1942) edits the Buddhist Peace Fellowship quarterly Turning Wheel. The emphasis in these centers, programs, and publications is not on religious Buddhist practice per se but on the development of nonviolent, compassionate approaches to healing the ills of the world and the building of communities infused with social justice. While the social activism of many notable women is mentioned above, Engaged Buddhism is practiced by numerous unsung heroines who are either laypersons or ordained practitioners, whose compassion and altruism address assaults on human dignity and social and environmental injustice and who unceasingly emphasize the equivalence of genders, of races/ethnicities, and of human and other sentient beings. Brigitte H. Bechtold See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Buddhism in the United States; Gender Roles; Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Women’s Buddhist Networks; Zen; Hinduism: Caste

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Further Reading Green, Paula. “Walking for Peace: Nipponzan Myohoji.” In Engaged Buddhism in the West, edited by Christopher S. Queen, 128–58. Somerville MA: Wisdom Publications, 2000. Queen, Christopher S., ed. Engaged Buddhism in the West. Boston: Wisdom, 2000. Romberg, Claudia. “Women in Engaged Buddhism.” In Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2002): 161–70. Salzberg, Sharon. Lovingkindness; The Revolutionary Art of Happiness. Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Boston: Shambala Publications, 1995.

FEMALE DIVINITIES Buddhist history reveals an ongoing and profound engagement with the Feminine Divine. From the beginning, Buddhism advanced female figures for reverence alongside the Buddha and other exalted male figures. The female pantheon developed along with the tradition as a whole, evolving to reflect the distinctive theologies and practices of the early, Mahayana, and Tantric movements. Over the centuries, female deities filled every echelon of the divine hierarchy, from Nature Goddesses embedded in the landscape to Cosmic Goddesses representing the highest truths and attainments of the tradition. As Buddhism expanded beyond India, regional and local variations of the pantheon emerged. An Indic Goddess might be adapted to the new cultural setting by absorbing features of indigenous female divinities. In some cases, new female deities were introduced to reflect the geographical terrain and long-standing social, ritual, and cosmological patterns. Following an overview of the core Indian Buddhist pantheon, several regional developments beyond India will be addressed to convey the pan-Asian scope, historical dynamism, and ongoing vitality of Buddhist reverence for Goddesses. In the earliest Buddhist sources, dating from the third century BCE through the second century CE, divine females long venerated on the South Asian subcontinent were integrated into Buddhist art, narratives, and devotional life. One such Goddess is Prithivi, Mother Earth, heralded as a guardian of truth and holder of the throne of world sovereignty. The Buddha-to-be took his seat at her navel, the site of her throne, for his final attempt at enlightenment. When a demonic detractor, Mara, sought to taunt, tempt, and force the seeker from the hallowed seat, Prithivi herself emerged from the earth and banished Mara, making possible the enlightenment event and foundation of Buddhism. Lakshmi, the Lotus Goddess, was incorporated into early Buddhist worship for her familiar benefits of life-giving rains, plentiful harvests, and glowing health and good fortune. Most prominent in early Buddhist veneration were Nature and Tree Goddesses known as yakshinis, bestowers of vegetative fertility, abundance, and all manner of blessings. Yakshini images graced the railings encircling early Buddhist stupas, the monuments built to commemorate Shakyamuni Buddha. Pilgrims to the stupa sites rendered offerings to the yakshinis, whose portrayal as voluptuous beauties with ample hips and jeweled hip-belts proclaimed their life-enhancing powers. One yakshini rose from the ranks and became a permanent mainstay of Buddhist institutional life. An elaborate legend relates how Hariti was driven by grief at the



Female Divinities

loss of a child to prey on the children of others until the Buddha consoled and converted her, eliciting her vow to guard his monasteries. The stone statues of Hariti installed on monastic premises portray her as a stately matron with children clinging to her body and playing at her feet. Monks and nuns offered her a portion of every meal, while laypersons flocked to the shrines to pray for healthy children, prosperity, and cure of disease, a pattern that endures throughout the Buddhist world. The Mahayana movement, which gained momentum in the first and second centuries CE, introduced new female divinities to meet perennial needs and embody explicitly Buddhist ideals and attainments. The exalted female pantheon was supported by Mahayana theology, which envisions reality as a wondrous, infinitely creative womb. A philosophy grounded in nondualism disallowed the body-mind, matter-spirit, and nature-culture dualities that in other religious systems serve to relegate femaleness to the devalued categories of body, matter, and nature. Accordingly, Mahayana literature includes many exalted female figures and voices of wisdom. At the outset, in the original literature of the movement, a female deity was installed at the head of the pantheon as the eternal source of wisdom and mother who gives birth to all Buddhas. The radiant wisdom-mother Prajnaparamita inspired lavish devotion as the Goddess who embodies the feminine quality of nondual wisdom (prajna) that crowns the spiritual quest. She holds a scripture in her hand or supported on a lotus, representing her role as the font of liberating wisdom. Mahayana Goddesses proliferated in her wake. They are envisioned as regal, serene benefactors of extraordinary wisdom, compassion, and miracle-working powers. Each has a sphere of human need to which she responds when invoked with mantras, prayers, and offerings. Details of a Goddess’s appearance reflect her specific powers and gifts. The role of Vasudhara as a bestower of sustenance, abundance, and agricultural plenty is conveyed by her golden hue, the presence of vases overflowing with gems and grain, and an upraised hand displaying a sheaf of rice, the staff of life. Marici, glowing archer of the dawn, circles the earth on her golden chariot to ward off thieves, armies, wild animals, stormy seas, and other mortal perils. Sitatapatra is a formidable protector, with her thousand heads, arms, and legs. She is invoked to overcome supernatural dangers such as sorcery, negative astrological influences, and harmful spirits and demons. The savioress Tara gained special prominence in this galaxy of maternal nurturers. Like the northern star after which she is named, Tara became the brightest light in the Mahayana firmament. Introduced as an emissary of compassion in the sixth century, she quickly rose in status to become a universal mother of cosmic expanse, with every perfection and power at her command, garnering unequaled popularity in the Indian and Himalayan Buddhist worlds. With the advent of the Tantric movement, beginning in the seventh century CE, a new type of female divinity made her debut, namely, the Tantric female Buddha. Unlike the elegant, maternal Mahayana Goddesses with their circumscribed qualities and roles, the Tantric female Buddhas embody the state of full awakening, or enlightenment. They are dynamic figures shown in poses of flight and dance.

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Proclaiming their inner freedom, they are naked except for a tiara, bone ornaments, flowing scarves, and long hair swirling around them. They blaze with intensity and flaming wisdom that consumes all negativity and illusion. Their appearance reflects their ultimate attainments rather than specific gifts they bestow. Tantric female Buddhas embody differing facets of supreme enlightenment. The primary and by all evidence original Tantric female Buddha is Vajrayogini, meaning “Adamantine Yogini,” designating her as a female who attained perfection through the practice of yoga and became a divine, all-knowing yogini. Her body is brilliant red, signifying her passionate nature as she embraces all the energies of life. She brandishes a curved knife symbolizing nondual wisdom and a bowl brimming with bliss-bestowing nectar. The female Buddha Nairatmya is blue, the color of the sky, signifying the vastness of her being as she flows through the universe without impediment, for she has transcended self-centered mind-states and is at one with infinite space and all reality. Simhamukha, the lion-headed female Buddha, embodies the untamable sovereignty and freedom of the enlightened state. Female Buddhas figure in advanced yogas and esoteric rituals aimed at attaining Buddhahood in the present lifetime and body. For women on the Tantric path, female Buddhas offer the inspiration of Buddhahood in female form. A woman can focus her practice of deity yoga (deva-yoga) on a female Buddha and cultivate the enlightened awareness of her divine exemplar by meditative, yogic, and ritual means, including sacred dance. In the 12th century, when Muslim invasions displaced Buddhism in India, worship of these Goddesses had already taken root in varied settings across Asia, and the female pantheon continued to evolve. In what follows, I highlight the distinctive contours and cultural inflections of the living Goddess traditions of Himalayan and East Asian Buddhism. The Buddhism of Nepal, which is practiced by the indigenous Newar population, is marked by the prominence and omnipresence of female deities in the sacred landscape, ritual life, and communal celebrations. The geography of the country is a matrix of female manifestations and powers. The Buddhist origin story of the Kathmandu Valley begins with a vast primordial lake, the womb-waters of Goddess Guhyeshvari. Her sacred waters still flow underground. Two shrines where her subterranean springs emerge draw crowds of worshippers to seek the life-enhancing blessings of her waters each day. Tantric female Buddhas reign supreme and preside over the valley in four far-flung temples whose inner shrines are carefully guarded to preserve their potent powers. Shrouded in mystery, these Goddesses are entrusted with matters of state and communal well-being and hold sway over Tantric rites. The Goddess Hariti, introduced above, is a mainstay of Buddhist devotional life in Nepal. She heals and safeguards children and holds every aspect of familial well-being in her maternal purview. Her blessings are sought at thriving temple sites and channeled through female trance mediums known as dyah-ma (divine women), who voice Hariti’s counsel and dispense her cures. These and other Goddesses of the Newar Buddhist pantheon represent life-giving, creative, transforming powers that women share. Women striving to make progress on the spiritual



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path need not renounce or transcend their femaleness but rather seek to awaken their innate divine qualities. Newar Buddhists have many practices, ritual occasions, and public festivals that evoke the divinity of women as embodiments of the Divine Feminine. Augmenting the pantheon inherited from India, Tibetan Buddhism introduced new female deities suitable for Himalayan heights and climes and a terrain replete with natural and demonic dangers. Most prominent among the deities of Tibetan inspiration is Palden Lhamo, a wrathful demon tamer more fearsome in guise than any Indic Goddess. A preexisting political pattern wherein royal clans claimed descent from a divine ancestress arguably prompted the selection of Palden Lhamo as supreme guardian of the Dalai Lamas when they became leaders of the nation. When the current Dalai Lama escaped Chinese captivity and made his way to India, the only possession he took with him was a treasured painting of his divine protector. He attributes his safe passage through Chinese troops, mountain ranges, and hazardous river currents to the prophetic guidance and interventions of Palden Lhamo. The Tibetan landscape, too, shaped the Buddhist pantheon. Long-revered mountain Goddesses who preserved the sanctity and ecological integrity of their slopes were enlisted to support the Buddhist presence in their domain. Under Buddhist influence, they were personified as beatific females in voluminous robes suitable for frosty heights and endowed with animal mounts, an affinity with their equestrian populace. Mount Everest was personified as Tashi Tseringma, the Auspicious Mother of Long Life, a sparkling beauty riding a white snow lion with a turquoise mane, while four lower peaks were cast as her sisters. The Buddhist ritual repertoire expanded to include invocation of the mountain Goddesses and techniques of divination and trance possession that came within their purview. In East Asia, Avalokites´vara, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion introduced in the Lotus Sutra (first or second century CE), was initially adopted in the male form featured in the scripture but reenvisioned as female beginning in the ninth century to become the preeminent female deity of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. In China, Guan Yin (also spelled Kuanyin) is a serene Goddess whose tender smile, delicate beauty, and flowing robes convey her compassionate heart and harmonious spirit. Guan Yin is often shown floating on a lotus, the pan-Buddhist symbol for spiritual purity and transcendence. She also acquired a dragon, a creature revered in East Asia, to deliver her swiftly through bodies of water and celestial heights to wherever she is needed. Local legends, miracle tales, and pilgrimage sites accrued to Guan Yin. Her identity merged with that of women famed in folk traditions for their exemplary lives and deeds. The preeminent example is Princess Miao-shan, a cultural heroine whose life evinced extraordinary compassion, self-sacrifice, and miraculous powers. Both figures are revered at Mount Putuo, a scenic island studded with temples, overseen by a towering statue of Guan Yin, and host to celebrations that draw millions of pilgrims each year. In Japan, the same Goddess of Compassion is the foremost Buddhist deity. Addressed as Kannon or Kannon Bosatsu, she is enshrined in virtually countless shrines and temples. A set of 33 forms of Kannon gained currency and is replicated

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on varying scales, from a group of statues assembled in a single temple to 33 shrines spread through the grounds of a temple, village, town, or entire region. The grandest scale is groupings of 33 temples, each devoted to one of the forms, located along pilgrimage routes spanning many miles and varied terrain. Three such routes (the Saigoku, Bando, and Chichibu), with one temple added, form the 100 Kannon Pilgrimage, an ambitious undertaking and expression of the profound devotion Kannon inspires in Japan. Further afield, Guan Yin, or Kannon, was embraced across the pan-Pacific Buddhist domain, with specific trajectories and worship profiles in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Korea. Any survey can only highlight major figures and overarching themes of such a burgeoning pantheon. The above-mentioned Goddesses and numerous others would reward investigation into their complex histories and multifaceted practice traditions. Miranda Shaw See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Dance; Dance of Tara; Guan Yin; Mahayana; Prajnaparamita; Tantra; Tara; Hinduism: Durga and Kali; Lakshmi Further Reading Michaels, Axel, Cornelia Vogelsanger, and Annette Wilke, eds. Wild Goddesses in India and Nepal. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1996. Shaw, Miranda. Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Shaw, Miranda. “Palden Lhamo: Supreme Guardian Goddess of the Dalai Lamas.” In As Long as Space Endures: Essays on the Ka¯lacakra Tantra in Honor of H. H. the Dalai Lama, edited by Edward Arnold, 155–70. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2008. Yu, Chun-fang. Kuan Yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteshvara. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

FEMININE VIRTUES The virtues associated with women in Buddhist texts are predominantly those associated with women’s social roles as wives and mothers. This is not surprising since Buddhist textual sources describe the ideal woman as the perfect wife, implying that the natural role for a woman is to be a wife. On the other hand, the same texts describe the activities that mothers engage in as deeply rooted in Buddhism’s ultimate virtue, compassion. It is therefore in the context of women as mothers that the most striking feminine (and Buddhist) virtues fully emerge. In the Pali texts (the texts of Theravada Buddhism), the dominant feminine qualities appear in descriptions of the ideal woman and focus on her beauty, her faithfulness, and, most significantly, her obedience to her husband. The ideal woman is the woman-jewel, a woman who appears in the world as the perfect wife for the wheel-turning monarch, a mythical emperor who lives righteously and spreads the Buddhist teachings to all corners of the Indian continent. The woman-jewel epitomizes all feminine virtues. She is physically beautiful and morally pure. Notably, she is perfectly faithful and obedient: she would never betray the emperor whether in thoughts, words, or deeds, and, to emphasize that, she embodies obedience;



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the texts describe her in the same terms used to describe a servant or slave. Significantly, the Buddha uses the same description in a sutra (Buddhist discourse) to describe the good wife who deserves a good rebirth and is lauded as one who obeys her husband’s every word (Engelmajer 2014). Taken together, these passages indicate that, in the context of the canonical scriptures, feminine virtues are intrinsically related to a woman’s status as wife and that obedience is the feminine virtue par excellence: an obedient wife is a virtuous woman. These qualities are clearly inscribed in the patriarchal framework of religious texts written by men for men in which women’s voice is barely heard, if at all. These texts portray women in ways that justify and perpetuate their subordination to men. However, other descriptions reveal different qualities that women, and especially mothers, uniquely display. In Buddhist thought, inasmuch as women are given attention, motherhood appears as a natural role for them, and therefore virtues associated with mothers are intrinsically feminine virtues. These arise not only in women’s descriptions of their social roles as wives and mothers but also in metaphors and narratives in which maternal attitudes and behaviors related to nurturing and protecting are the ideal against which all others are compared. Mothers exemplify nurture by giving their children milk and food. The Buddha’s own stepmother is a vivid example: after his mother died, a few days after his birth, his stepmother nursed and raised him, saving him from certain death. The Buddha himself recognized her crucial role by addressing her as “mother” and recounting how she fed him with the milk from her own breast. Maternal milk further appears as a symbol for nurturing and great kindness. The Buddha encourages his listeners to consider that the amount of maternal milk one has drunk over the course of one’s many rebirths exceeds the amount of water contained in all the earth’s oceans to emphasize the great kindness of mothers and therefore of all beings who, at one point or another, have been one’s mother. In some passages, he even refers to the Buddhist teachings as “Dharma-milk,” comparing them to maternal milk that gives and maintains life (Engelmajer 2014). This nurturing activity is not limited to its material aspect. In many instances, mothers encourage their children to listen to the Buddha’s teachings or to pursue the spiritual path, whether by sending them to study with a teacher or urging them to relentlessly pursue the ultimate spiritual goal. In addition to encouraging them, mothers also nurture their children spiritually by offering a role model. For example, all the Buddha’s mothers are portrayed as having achieved the greatest virtues and being perfect role models. His birth mother, Ma¯ya¯, is portrayed as morally pure, living a semiascetic life within the confines of the royal palace. One of his mothers in his penultimate incarnation, Queen Phusatı¯, manifests her great generosity by building almshouses all over the kingdom and distributing food, drink, and money daily. In contemporary Theravada countries, women are usually the main sponsors of boys’ ordination, extending their nurturing activities (both material and spiritual) to the monastic community itself by the giving of a son and providing material

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support to the monks. The generosity they demonstrate toward the monastic community raises their status as celebrated members of the community. Several metaphors are based on mothers’ protective attitude toward their children. A common one enjoins a monk to watch his breath like a hen watches over her eggs. A wife who guards her husband’s wealth and does not squander it is compared to a mother who protects her only child. Narratives, especially in the ja¯takas (accounts of the Buddha’s previous lives), tell of mothers protecting their children from dangers often at great risk to their own lives. A striking metaphor is contained in the Metta¯ Sutra, a sutra still recited today to develop loving-kindness (metta¯) and compassion for all beings. In the sutra, the Buddha enjoins his followers to develop loving-kindness toward the whole world and to have an unbounded mind toward all beings, just like a mother protects her child with her life. Furthermore, the motivation for mothers’ nurture and protection is identified as loving-kindness, the basic building block of compassion. This virtue is perfectly embodied in a mother’s care for her child. In fact, many of the narratives and metaphors discussed above stipulate that a mother’s actions spring from compassion. This clear relationship between mothers and compassion is exemplified when the Buddha is compared to a mother because he teaches the dharma out of compassion for the welfare of all beings, like a mother protects her child out of compassion. In Mahayana Buddhism, compassion even becomes personified in the female bodhisattvas Tara and Guan Yin, manifestly revealing that the ultimate Buddhist virtue, compassion, is a distinctively feminine virtue. Pascale Engelmajer See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Gender Roles; Guan Yin; Mahayana; Tara Further Reading Eberhardt, Nancy. Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. Engelmajer, Pascale. “Motherhood in the Ancient Indian Buddhist World: A Soteriological Path.” In Motherhood in the Ancient World, edited by Dana Cooper and Claire Phelan, 55–76. London: Palgrave, 2017. Engelmajer, Pascale. Women in Pa¯li Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Path in Mutual Dependence. Critical Studies in Buddhism Series. New York: Routledge, 2014.

FUNERAL PRACTICES Funeral practices, and more generally the veneration paid to the dead, are closely connected with Buddhism in East Asian countries. The funerals in Buddhist societies are based on the idea of continuation of the existence of the deceased, as death is not considered the end of life. The relationship between the living and the dead is reciprocal; with the death of a person, a series of rites are initiated to change the status of the deceased, notably from being polluted to being purified, allowing the person’s reincarnation. Despite the fact that every Buddhist society has its own way of organizing funeral ceremonies (with a myriad of local variations due to



Funeral Practices

coexistence with other beliefs), the principal features are the same in each society. In Japan, Buddhist funerals are used by almost everyone when death occurs, while in China, people usually call on different religious specialists. Because Buddhism is often described as a male religion, in this sense the man’s role is strongest during formal ritual occasions like funerals, while women have less of a role in funeral practices. However, funerals are also considered to be a domestic duty, especially with regard to the treatment of the corpse, and consequently within the area of women. To understand women’s major role in funeral practices in East Asian countries, it is necessary first to consider funerals not only as a religious practice but also as a social event. According to Adam Yuet Chau (2006), event production typically consists of two parallel aspects: the liturgical aspect and the hosting or social aspect. It is more common to invite monks rather than nuns to perform the funeral ceremony (liturgical aspect), while traditionally, women play an important role through the hosting aspect, expressing a gendered division of responsibilities. However, in some cases, as in contemporary China, Buddhist laywomen may be called by a family to conduct the liturgical part of the ritual. In East Asian countries, when someone dies, a date is fixed for the burial or the cremation. Then, a series of rites is set in motion, with three main sequences: a postdeath treatment of the corpse, a funeral service, and memorial services conducted by religious specialists. Ideally, this last part is held on the day of the death each week for seven weeks. The period between cremation and the 49th day is the time when death pollution is thought to be at its strongest. The several tasks necessary to prepare the dead for the burial are usually carried out by women and require knowledge and training. Traditionally, death was an event that usually took place at home, and the care of the body was seen as an extension of nursing the sick, which is a responsibility of women. They have to sew the death clothes and prepare the body of the dead by bathing the corpse, plugging all orifices, closing the eyes, covering the face with a white cloth, and sometimes shaving the beard. During the funeral service, friends, neighbors, and relatives of the dead come over to attend the ceremony. This part of the ceremony is considered as the hosting aspect of the funeral: women prepare tea, receive visitors, and cook food for a shared meal. Even if the liturgical aspect of the ritual changes according to local variations, liquor and food are always provided. The quality of the hosting, considered as a social obligation and relying on women, highlights the social prestige and symbolic capital of the deceased and close family members. Women may also be involved in other practices during the funeral. In China, for instance, a custom known as kusang (literally “crying during funeral”) consists of women gathering around the corpse and crying and shouting loudly. Through this regulated practice, they both frighten bad spirits that roam around the corpse and express their sorrow. It could also be considered a way to accumulate merit, one important role for women in Buddhist societies, and transfer it to the dead. In contemporary times, funeral practices in East Asian countries are caught between a historical continuity in ritual practices and changed and invented traditions. In several Buddhist societies, as in Japan for example, modernization and

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urbanization have led to a shift from community-sponsored rites to more isolated urban individual family events. The funeral service, which was universally held at home, is now increasingly conducted at a Buddhist temple hall. Consequently, the functional role played by female relatives gradually decreased. For instance, women are no longer obligated to sew the death clothes, since they can now be purchased. However, even if the privatization of the funeral is more and more widespread in East Asian countries, the double attitude toward a dead body— respect and fear—remains popular, and certain special duties relying exclusively on women, such as the postdeath treatment of the deceased, will not disappear as long as doing everything in the name of the dead remains important for the living. Julie Remoiville See also: Buddhism: Gender Roles; Nuns, Theravada Further Reading Chau, Adam-Yuet. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Chen, Gang. “Death Rituals in a Chinese Village: An Old Tradition in Contemporary Social Context.” Thesis, Ohio State University, 2000. Wijayaratna, Mohan. “Funerary Rites in Japanese and other Asian Buddhist Societies.” Japan Review 8 (1997): 105–25. Williams, Paul, and Patrice Ladwig. Buddhist Funeral Cultures of Southeast Asia and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

GENDER ROLES Buddhism does not prescribe essentially gendered roles for women, be they monastics or laywomen. However, as in other religions, gendered attitudes and roles have developed in several societies and historical times. A religion or spiritual path becomes either patriarchal or friendly toward women to the extent that the society in which it is practiced is patriarchal or views women as equal to men, and this may be exacerbated where Buddhism is also the state religion, creating expectations and roles for women that are subservient to men. In countries where Theravada or Tibetan Buddhism is practiced, we see that monks and male teachers are revered, and the teachings and practices of women are diminished. Gendered roles that are created in a patriarchal environment may consist of subservience in assigned monastic duties, assignment of less prestigious duties, systems of volunteering that coax women into the more subservient duties, outright denial of full ordination, and the creation of stark gender discrimination in lay society based on the example of the religious community. Nowhere is this more the case than in Thailand, where novice nuns or mae chi are required to wear white robes in stark contrast to the ochre ones worn by monks. They can never achieve full ordination, at least not in the Thai lineage, and they are used as spiritually and materially inferior handmaidens by monks. What’s worse, due to the belief that one’s karma leads to birth or rebirth as a woman, women and girls outside the monastic community are prone to be violated and sexually abused by



Gender Roles

men because they think that abuse in this life may cause rebirth as a man in the next. Thus, “Thai society is a particularly egregious example of hijacking religion in the name of a pro-male status quo” (Hay 2014, 2). Today, the rising bikkhuni movement that seeks to ordain women and establishes monasteries for women is effectively challenging the gender hierarchies within both the Buddhist tradition and the lay society. Variations of the dynamic of differential gender roles are found around the world but with some notable exceptions and harbingers of change. Whether or not a particular monastic task is gendered depends on two factors: whether the monastery has both female and male monks and how the particular task figures in both the culture and the religious practice. For example, purity and cleanliness are central in Japanese life. In Japanese Zen, since the body and mind are considered one and the same, polishing the floor is both physical and spiritual, and cleaning is a crucial part of monastic life that embodies the religious teachings. In a Western monastery where men and women practice together, however, assignment of cleaning tasks to women and more prestigious tasks to men is distinctly gendered. The ability to view the task as a way to practice compassion can either be seen as an opportunity by women or become one of the ways in which they work for change in the monastery. A significant aspect of Buddhist practice is teaching and dharma transmission. The major lineages of revered teachers and masters contain few, if any, women’s names, and it is seldom that a woman stands out as a teacher in Tibetan Buddhism, even though numerous women study, practice, and teach in that tradition. Pema Chödrön is one of the exceptions. Not many women are recognized in the Theravada tradition, although women abbots like Dhammananda are likely to have their name included in revered lineages. In the history of Buddhism in China and Japan, several women teachers and masters stand out. From the seventh century, there were powerful women in both political and religious realms. Empress Koˉmyoˉ (701–760) arranged to have national temples established for male and female monks in each province. The national women’s temples were assigned the responsibility to pray for absolution of sins, while the men’s temples were to focus on praying for protection. The empress also supervised the copying of the Lotus Sutra, which contained the story of a princess who turned into a Buddha—proof of the possibility that one can become enlightened while in a woman’s body. Women’s Buddhist activities were influential and received support from influential male members of society until Confucian patriarchal values were adopted by edict in the middle of the seventh century CE. Master Doˉgen, who founded the Soˉtoˉ Zen School in Japan, wrote in the Bendoˉwa (his discourse on the practice of the way) in the early 13th century that male and female practitioners are equal and that women are competent as teachers of both women and men. One of Doˉgen’s successors, Keizan Joˉkin continued his gender-inclusive teachings, and women monastics have been a solid presence in Soˉtoˉ Zen (Aral 1999). However, the names of female teachers are not typically included in lineages recited in Zen monasteries today. When Buddhism developed in the West, it was prone to patriarchal interpretations and translations of religious scripture. When the word for monk or priest

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was translated to French, English, and other languages, translators used terms thought to be equivalent in the Christian Religion. Thus, while words for monks or priests may have female or male endings in an Asian language (e.g., shukke or bikkhu/bikkhuni), translators would choose monk for the male monastic and nun for the female monastic, thus imbuing the very terms with patriarchal interpretations and the inferior societal status that is afforded to nuns compared to monks in Western culture (Boucher 1993, 141–42). In addition to translation and interpretation, Western social hierarchies were installed in monasteries, with male abbots or masters, and tasks were often divided according to traditional gender lines. In the Western culture, the task of cleaning does not equate with cleansing the soul as it does in Japan, and subtle or not-so-subtle gender distinctions have developed. Even in monasteries or retreats where tasks are assigned on a volunteer basis, it is not unusual for women to volunteer for traditionally female tasks, such as serving and cleaning. Beyond the gendered assignment of tasks, numerous large monasteries, notably Zen centers, were exposed in the 1980s for sex scandals, with masters or priests abusing their religious power to coerce women practitioners into sexual acts. Richard Baker, a prominent Zen priest in the United States, whose influence stretched well beyond the monastery into politics and celebrity status, was found to be one of the most egregious offenders. Gendered tasks in Buddhist monasteries and centers, and abuse by male teachers, have been written about extensively, in particular by Sandy Boucher (1993). Sexist interpretations and gender-role assignments in Buddhism are not characteristic of the religion itself but of the society and culture in which it is practiced. Certainly, the pendulum will not swing to the opposite end, with the overwhelming majority of teachers and priests being female. Rather, a more equitable balance is likely to be reached, even in Theravada traditions. Availability of both male and female teachers is crucial where disciples follow a single master on the path to enlightenment. In Thailand, the road to gender equivalence in religious practice is being forged nowadays by female monks who establish monasteries of their own and thereby lead the way to a more equitable society overall. In the West, the scandals of the 1980s and gender-equity considerations in the society at large are bringing about some crucial changes. After the middle of the 1980s, American Buddhism has become a scene where more monasteries have women teachers and abbesses who work together with both female and male monks in environments where tasks are rotated regardless of gender (Boucher, 1993). To create a Western Buddhism in which women can find their true selves free from early-instilled notions of gender inferiority requires maintaining contact with experienced traditional teachers as well as a need to understand Western culture. That is, women must search for a form of old teaching that fits in today’s society, and the same holds for women Buddhists in non-Western societies. Brigitte H. Bechtold See also: Buddhism: Buddhism in the United States; Mahayana; Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Women’s Buddhist Networks; Zen



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Further Reading Aral, Paula Kane Robinson. Women Living Zen; Japanese Soˉtoˉ Buddhist Nuns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Boucher, Sandy. Turning the Wheel; American Women Creating the New Buddhism. Updated and expanded edition. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Hay, Mark. “Female Monks in Thailand Challenge Buddhism’s Misogynist Tendencies.” Daily Good, November 21, 2014. https://www.good.is./articles/feminist-buddhism. Tomalin, Emma. “The Thai Bikkhuni Movement and Women’s Empowerment.” Gender and Development 14 (2006): 385–97. Wetzel, Sylvia. The Heart of the Lotus; A Buddhist Perspective on Women’s Inner and Outer Liberation. First published in German by Fischer Spirit (Frankfurt). Translated by Jane Anhold. Berlin: BoD, 2015.

GUAN YIN Guan Yin, a popular female bodhisattva, is known by many names. Avalokites´vara (Sanskrit), Guan Yin or Kuan Yin (Chinese), Kannon (Japanese), and Guan-eum (Korean) are but a few, yet all denote the same meaning: perceiving sound, denoting the cries of sentient beings’ yearning for aid in their journey toward enlightenment. Though originally a male bodhisattva from early Indian Buddhism, Guan Yin became a popular female deity in Buddhism revered throughout East Asia as the Goddess of Mercy and Compassion. Guan Yin originated as Avalokites´vara, a male bodhisattva appearing in the Heart Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, two Mahayana (Great Vehicle) texts of great popularity and influence. Early depictions of Avalokites´vara in China tend to show the bodhisattva as male, and some Buddhist traditions outside East Asia, especially Southeast Asian countries in which Theravada Buddhism is practiced, continue to portray the deity in male form. The Dalai Lama is considered within Tibetan Buddhism as a living incarnation of Avalokites´vara. However, by the Song dynasty (960–1279), Chinese iconography of Avalokites´vara generally displayed the bodhisattva in either female or androgynous form, and Korean and Japanese depictions followed suit. The impetus behind this shift may lie in the Lotus Sutra’s description of Avalokites´vara as able to take any form to save sentient beings, the primary goal of a bodhisattva. In addition, much of the folklore surrounding Guan Yin portrays this bodhisattva as taking the form of a woman. For instance, Guan Yin may appear as a female human and marry a man to save him from his karmic debt, revealing herself as a bodhisattva only later. The medieval legend of Miaoshan, a princess who sought to become a nun in spite of her father’s wishes, toiled in hard labor, sacrificed herself, and turned hell into a paradise, was soon connected to Guan Yin, with Miaoshan considered a manifestation of the bodhisattva and transforming into her at her bodily death. The popularity of these stories may also have had a hand in solidifying the impression of Guan Yin as a female deity. Many folk legends in East Asia concern Guan Yin’s miraculous deeds, especially in taking the place of another in injury or death or forging karmic links between

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people. For instance, several medieval Japanese stories feature a devout person who prays to Kannon and a would-be murderer who tries to kill the worshipper but later discovers the person alive, while a statue of Kannon is found covered in stab marks or blood. In other tales, a dream or sign from Kannon causes an individual to take another path or seek an object, which leads to a reunion or a new connection that brings joy and success to the dreamer. In Japan, famous Buddhist historical personages, such as Prince Shoˉtoku and the nun Chuˉ joˉ-hime, were considered to be manifestations of the bodhisattva after their death. Guan Yin takes many forms, and all are related to her association with compassion. Among these is the 11-Headed and/or 1,000-Armed Guan Yin, whose additional appendages allow her to better hear and respond to the needs of sentient beings. Known as the protector of women and children, she is also entitled as Loving Mother and Child-Granting Guan Yin. As protector of fishers and seafarers, Guan Yin is often portrayed standing on the head of a dragon, a mythical being long connected to the sea in many Asian traditions, or holding a basket of fish. While revered throughout much of Buddhism, Guan Yin plays particularly strong roles in sects that emphasize the Lotus Sutra, such as Tientai, Tendai, and Nichiren as well as Pure Land Buddhism. In the Pure Land school, the Buddha Amita¯bha brings all sentient beings who call his name before their death to the Pure Land, a world where they may practice and attain enlightenment in their next incarnation. In Pure Land imagery, Guan Yin is often seated beside Amita¯bha in recognition of her role as a compassionate bodhisattva who aids in bringing people to the Pure Land. Guan Yin’s popularity and appeal is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that she also appears as a figure in religions other than Buddhism. In Daoism, she is treated as a human woman who became an immortal. In Chinese folk religion, she is revered independently as Goddess, especially in coastal regions where her protection of those at sea is particularly valued. Certain new religious movements in China and Taiwan, such as Yiguando and Zailism, feature Guan Yin as a primary deity. During the Edo period (1600–1868), when Christianity was forbidden in Japan, Christians took advantage of Guan Yin’s connection to children to disguise their worship of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, revering statues of Guan Yin holding a child. These statues are referred to as Maria Kannon or Mary Guan Yin. Emily B. Simpson See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Female Divinities; Feminine Virtues; Guan Yin; Mahayana; Tara; Daoism: Goddesses Further Reading Karetsky, Patricia Eichenbaum. Guanyin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Schumacher, Mark. “Kannon Notebook.” A to Z Photo Dictionary of Japanese Buddhist Statuary: Gods, Goddesses, Shinto Kami, Creatures and Demons. n.p.: Onmark Productions, 2016. http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/kannon.shtml. Yü, Chün-fang. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokites´vara. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.



Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism

L AY W O M E N I N T H E R AVA D A B U D D H I S M In Theravada Buddhism, a form of Buddhism practiced principally in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar (Burma), lay religiosity focuses on making merit, a concept based on the idea of karma, which posits that every action is ethically motivated and has corresponding positive or negative consequences. The goal of merit making is, put simply, to build up a store of positive actions to achieve better conditions in this lifetime and, eventually, a better rebirth. Merit making centers on two types of activities: da¯na, communal and individual giving to the monastic community, and devotional activities. Laywomen in Theravada societies are active participants in the whole range of these activities and, more recently, have also become more involved with meditation and Buddhist doctrine, both as students and as teachers. Giving to the sangha (the Buddhist monastic community) is the basis of religious life in Theravada countries and takes many forms. Theoretically, men and women both give to the monastic community, although women engage more frequently in lay activities, in part because they are encouraged to fulfill their role as mothers and, later, as care providers for their parents and, in part, because they have traditionally been barred from entering the monastic order as fully ordained nuns. At home, women usually organize and perform daily worship activities. For example, in a Shan community in Thailand, after they have prepared food early in the morning, and before anyone has eaten, women typically take a small amount from each dish they have prepared to make an offering to the household Buddha altar, along with a glass of water. They then take some of the food to the local monastery to make food offerings to the monks. Similarly, in the evening, the oldest woman in the household lights a candle and incense for the house altar and recites a prayer. Women also often attend temple services more regularly, and during vassa, the Buddhist monastic rain retreat, pious women don white robes (usually associated with novices) and come daily to chant at the temple. They also contribute to regular religious festivals and celebrations by giving food and money and, overall, they are major donors of the four requisites (food, lodging, clothing, and medicine) necessary for monastic life. While most devotional activity takes place at home and at the local temple, women, especially in recent years, are increasingly taking part in pilgrimages to religious sites, usually places associated with the life of the Buddha, or temples that hold relics of the Buddha or relics of Buddhist saints (usually people who are believed to have attained nirvana [awakening]). This means that women travel to other Theravada countries and to India on a regular basis. Another aspect of laywomen’s religious life is related to their role as mothers. Frequently, women whose sons are monks participate actively in the life of the monastery, for example, by preparing food in the monastery kitchen and organizing the daily maintenance and cleaning chores. Actually, women perceive their role as mothers as a critical part of their religious and spiritual life. The care they bestow on their children is understood to stem from compassion, a fundamental Buddhist value. The compassion of a mother is often given as the ideal to emulate

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to develop compassion for all beings as the Buddha did. In addition, the sangha is dependent on mothers for their new recruits, and it is usually women who plan, organize, and fund ordination ceremonies at which young boys and men are inducted into the sangha. In this way, women extend their motherly role from their own children to the whole monastic community, both through the giving of sons and through support of monastic life. A woman’s social status is therefore enhanced through her sponsorship of an ordination ceremony and through her son’s rank in the monastic hierarchy. In recent decades, laywomen who seek deeper religious involvement have started attending meditation and dharma (Buddhist doctrine) classes. In all Theravada countries, there has been an increase in lay meditation, mainly due to women. In fact, a number of laywomen have become prominent teachers and have acquired large followings of students and even disciples. For example, in Thailand, Upa¯sika¯ (female lay devotee) Ki Nanayon (1901–1978) was a famous dharma teacher who attracted a large following. Another Thai woman, Khun Mae Siri Krinchai (1917–2011), who founded the Young Buddhist Association of Thailand, became very respected and honored as a meditation teacher who taught her own version of Vipassana (insight) meditation. Her meditation method is used in hospitals across Thailand to help support patients with a range of conditions. Their followers claim that Khun Mae Siri Krinchai, and other Thai female teachers, have reached a high level of spiritual development described in the canonical scriptures as ariya puggala (noble person), which is said of one who has shed defilements and who is undoubtedly on her path to nirvana. This indicates that society at large values and recognizes women’s spiritual abilities even though women are still outside the conventional establishment of the male monastic institution. In fact, some of these female teachers opted to pursue the monastic life by becoming mae chis (Thailand), dasa sil mata (Sri Lanka), or thila-shin (Burma), the only monastic-like status available to Theravada Buddhist women until recently. Because this status is not recognized canonically and these “nuns” do not benefit from the same advantages as the monks, there have been efforts to reinstate full monastic ordination for women in the Theravada tradition. These efforts have received a lot of scholarly attention, which has resulted in a scarcity of research on the religious life of laywomen, obscuring the fact that, through their daily worship, their active and generous support for monastic institutions, their involvement with festivals and celebrations, and, more recently, their engagement with doctrine and practice (as teachers and followers), laywomen play a most crucial and essential role in Theravada Buddhist life. Pascale Engelmajer See also: Buddhism: Feminine Virtues; Gender Roles; Nuns, Theravada; Pajapati; Women’s Buddhist Networks; Spirituality: Meditation Further Reading Collins, Steven, and Justin McDaniel. “Buddhist ‘Nuns’ (mae chi) and the Teaching of Pali in Contemporary Thailand.” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 6 (2010): 1373–408.



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Eberhardt, Nancy. Imagining the Course of Life: Self-Transformation in a Shan Buddhist Community. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i, 2006. Seeger, Martin. “The Changing Roles of Buddhist Thai Women: Obscuring Identities and Increasing Charisma.” Religion Compass 3/5 (2009): 806–22.

M A H AYA N A Mahayana refers to one of the major existing approaches to Buddhist thought and practice and the most popular Buddhist school in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Tibet, Bhutan, and Vietnam. While Vajrayana, or Himalayan Buddhism, is sometimes associated with Mahayana, it is frequently considered a distinct school. Women in the Mahayana Buddhist traditions of East Asian and Himalayan countries—as well as in the West—have a complex and sometimes ambiguous relationship with religious texts, rituals, and communities of practice. While women in many Mahayana traditions are granted opportunities for full ordination and participation in monastic life as bhikkhunis, or fully ordained nuns (something they are officially barred from in Southeast and South Asian Theravada traditions), they are told that to achieve full Buddhahood, they must first be reborn in a male body. In addition, Mahayana Buddhist texts and devotees simultaneously venerate enlightened nuns and laywomen alike while casting aspersions on women’s bodies and moral capacities. Despite this, Mahayana traditions venerate a number of female enlightenment beings and Buddhas. Mahayana (Sanskrit: Great Vehicle) Buddhism encompasses a number of interrelated traditions and local approaches to practice that developed in South and East Asia beginning in approximately the second century CE. Like other schools of Buddhist practice, Mahayana maintains that women can attain full enlightenment through moral discipline, meditation, and compassionate action. Over and above this, however, Mahayana thought and practice emphasizes the ideal of full Buddhahood—as opposed to individual enlightenment—as its ultimate philosophical and soteriological aim. In addition to religious communities of nuns, monks, and lay Buddhist practitioners of all genders, Mahayana practice valorizes the role of the bodhisattva, a being who takes a vow to become a fully enlightened Buddha in some future time. However, bodhisattvas vow to delay their own Buddhahood to first usher all sentient beings toward full enlightenment. There are a number of prominent female bodhisattvas in Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan traditions, with Guan Yin and Tara being arguably the most popular. Guan Yin (Chinese: one who perceives the sounds of the world) is a bodhisattva depicted in female form in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean traditions. In her Indian male form, she is referred to as Avalokites´vara in Sanskrit, or the Lord Who Looks Upon the World with Compassion. However, since at least the Tang dynasty in China (608–907 CE), she came to be associated with a female form in East Asian Mahayana traditions (Reed 1992, 161). Called Goddess of Mercy, she is associated with compassionate action, possessing the power and mercy to act on behalf of sentient beings who call on her for help out of suffering or ignorance. Guan Yin is widely venerated in a number of different forms and local adaptations

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for her compassionate wisdom and willingness to intercede on behalf of the suffering of all sentient beings. Tara, a popular bodhisattva in Tibetan practice, is also associated with Avalokites´vara. In one popular legend, Avalokites´vara worked tirelessly to empty the hell realms of all the sentient beings there, but even with 11 heads and innumerable hands, he lamented that the task was too great and began to weep. Out of his tears was borne Tara, an incarnation of the bodhisattva who comes to offer her compassionate assistance. With the rise of Tantric practice in Tibetan Buddhism, she came to be referred to as Mother of All Buddhas for her enlightenment wisdom (Shaw 2006, 315). Tara is unique among female bodhisattvas. Having cultivated the motivation toward enlightenment as a woman, Tara is said to have vowed to attain Buddhahood in the form of a woman on behalf of all sentient beings (Williams 2009). This is unusual because orthodox Mahayana practice maintains that human beings are only capable of attaining Buddhahood in male form (Shaw 2006). Nevertheless, Tara is frequently regarded as a female Buddha. Unlike Theravada traditions of South and Southeast Asia, and Vajrayana traditions of Himalayan Asia, Mahayana practice is unique for its large and highly respected communities of fully ordained nuns. While there are official prohibitions in place in the Theravadin countries of Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka against the full ordination of nuns, since the Chinese Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279 CE), the full-ordination lineage for Buddhist nuns—known in Sanskrit as bhiks· un·¯ı and in Pali as bhikkhuni—enjoys widespread patronage and respect in many East Asian Mahayana contexts, notably in South Korea and in Taiwan. Recent efforts at reviving the full-ordination lineage for Buddhist nuns in Theravada and Vajrayana traditions have relied on East Asian Mahayana bhikkhuni. In South Korea, Mahayana ordination lineages originating in southern China expanded over the intervening centuries, and a record of female monastic ordination, missionization, and exchange between Japan and Korea exists as early as 588 CE (Cho 2011, 18). With the introduction of women’s full ordination and the standardization of ordination procedures and Buddhist practice during the Silla period (676–935 CE), Buddhism thrived and became the state religion before going through several periods of decline and revival. Contemporarily, fully ordained bhikkhunis comprise approximately half of the ordained Chogye order of Korean monastics. Korean bhikkhunis enjoy widespread social status and prestige in Korean society. Eun-su Cho (2011) attributes much of this to factors including collective power, an ideology toward practice that emphasizes meditation first, and favorable economic conditions for robust Buddhist institutions. In Taiwan, after the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in 1949, a number of initiatives seeking to strengthen and purify Buddhist practice led to the creation of a dual-ordination lineage for nuns along with their recognition as ritual and ordination masters in recent decades (DeVido 2010). Fully ordained nuns are at the center of prominent monastic centers like the Foguangshan monastery in southern Taiwan, which has hundreds of nuns and monks and operates a global network of centers and even a Buddhist university in California.



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Despite thriving and well-respected communities of female monastic practitioners in these and other Mahayana practice contexts, Buddhist women are seen in the tradition more generally in an ambivalent light. Alan Sponberg has argued that Buddhist texts that contain negative portrayals of women reveal an oftentimes discordant multivocality of perspectives regarding women’s moral and spiritual capacities. He identifies four trends in textual references to women and the feminine in Buddhist literature: soteriological inclusiveness, institutional androcentrism, ascetic misogyny, and soteriological androgyny. The perspective of soteriological (doctrines of salvation) inclusiveness holds that the path to enlightenment is the same for women and men, a teaching in line with the Buddha’s rejection of caste (class) distinctions (Sponberg 1992). Institutional androcentrism reflects the tradition’s attempt to corroborate a radically inclusive social message of spiritual liberation with the institutional and social realities of what is conventionally acceptable in Buddhist cultures. Ascetic misogyny refers to depictions of women’s moral inferiority as agents of temptation for otherwise virtuous male monastics, an attitude that according to Sponberg goes beyond the attempt to grapple with the realities of a new renunciant order for women. Finally, soteriological androgyny refers to later depictions of enlightenment as a state of liberation that is inherently at odds with dualistic (and thus gendered) self-conception (Sponberg 1992). Sponberg argues that, in this view, gender is not merely something to be abandoned through pursuit of enlightenment but is ultimately a provisional salvific springboard toward Buddhahood. Thus, women are located in a paradox. On the one hand, in Mahayana practice, the fully enlightened state is understood to be beyond mundane dualistic conceptions such as gender. On the other, a male form is generally understood as a prerequisite for the full attainment of Buddhahood, which in Mahayana is held out as the higher aspiration unique to its paths of practice. Tyler A. Lehrer See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Buddhism in the United States; Engaged Buddhism; Female Divinities; Feminine Virtues; Gender Roles; Guan Yin; Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Pajapati; Sacred Texts on Women; Tara; Women in Early Buddhism; Women’s Buddhist Networks; Hinduism: Caste Further Reading Cho, Eun-su, ed. Korean Buddhist Nuns and Laywomen: Hidden Histories, Enduring Vitality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. DeVido, Elise Anne. Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Reed, Barbara E. “The Gender Symbolism of Kuan-yin Bodhisattva.” In Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender, ed. Cabezón, José Ignacio, 159-80. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Shaw, Miranda. Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Sponberg, Alan. “Attitudes toward Women and the Feminine in Early Buddhism.” In Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender, edited by Jose Ignacio Cabezon, 3–36. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Williams, Paul. Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations. New York: Routledge, 2009.

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N U N S , T H E R AVA D A There is an account in the Pali Tipitaka, the scriptures, of how the ordination of females came to be. The Buddha’s stepmother (also sometimes referred to as his foster mother), Maha Pajapati Gotami, desired to live the life of a disciple. The Buddha refused her request. She had been a queen living in a palace of a small kingdom, so perhaps the Buddha did not think she was ready for the difficult life of a homeless disciple. However, Maha Pajapati Gotami did not give up. With other women from the Buddha’s home city, she started wearing a robe of sewn-together rags, as did her male counterparts. Her determination, and a question from the monk named Ananda, who was also Buddha’s relative, finally led Buddha to change his mind and allow for the start of a bhikkhuni (ordained female monastic) sangha. Ananda had asked if females were as able to achieve spiritual enlightenment as males. Yes, was Buddha’s answer. The Buddha did insist on some extra discipline rules for the bhikkhunis. Some of these rules imply a need to recognize the males as their leaders. The bhikkhunis are not supposed to teach the males, and they are to be guided by males (as well as senior bhikkhunis). Despite the subordination expected of them as females, nuns have equal spiritual status in that their title, bhikkhuni, is the same term as bhikkhu (ordained male monastic) but with a feminine ending. The senior nuns of early Buddhism authored some of the most moving of all early Buddhist writings. These writings take the form of poems about their lives as nuns and especially their deeply spiritual, personal experiences. The canonical book Therigatha contains many of these poems about the freedom of monastic life and of enlightenment experiences. Like their male counterparts, Theravada nuns shave their hair once a month and typically wear bright yellow robes dyed with flowers from the saffron plant. They typically live together in a monastic setting, following the same simple lifestyle as the monks. And like monks, they are not allowed to have close personal contact with members of the opposite sex, except for close relatives. They meditate both as a congregation and in solitude, and their leaders conduct the devotional services in respect to the Buddha. The bhikkhuni sangha spread in the third century BCE from India to Sri Lanka by King Ashoka’s daughter, who had become a bhikkhuni. The women’s sanghas continued in India, Sri Lanka, and mainland Southeast Asia until they faded away around a millennium ago. Some Theravada women have found ways to follow a full-time spiritual life even though they were not entitled to call themselves bhikkhunis or even female novices. They have voluntarily undertaken a lifestyle that bridges the gap between being a laywoman and a bhikkhuni. They do this by following the “10 precepts” (dasa sila), whereas lay Buddhists normally follow only the five basic precepts in which one abstains from harming, stealing, sexual misconduct, incorrect speech, and intoxicants. The list of 10 precepts, which is normally followed by novices, adds abstentions from eating after noontime, from going to see entertainment, from wearing bodily adornments, from sleeping on luxurious beds, and from accepting



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gold or silver (money). The 10 precept practice has helped fill the void left by the demise of full ordination for women as bhikkhunis. The 10 precept women are greatly respected in Theravada countries where they exist, such as Sri Lanka and Thailand. Recently there have been efforts to reestablish the bhikkhuni sangha among Theravada Buddhists in several countries. These newly created orders have gained some acceptance among lay Buddhists in Sri Lanka and Thailand. However, the position of the bhikkhu sangha councils has mostly been to refuse recognition of the new female orders because a valid ordination requires an ordaining committee of senior Theravada bhikkhunis. Since there are no senior bhikkhunis, this makes it impossible to restart a defunct ordination lineage, unless one is willing to make an exception to the traditional rule. Roy C. Amore See also: Buddhism: Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Ordination; Pajapati; Sacred Texts on Women; Therigatha; Women in Early Buddhism; Women’s Buddhist Networks Further Reading Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. Women under the Bo Tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Boucher, Sandy. Opening the Lotus: A Woman’s Guide to Buddhism. Boston: Beacon, 1997. Collett, Alice. Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

O R D I N AT I O N In Buddhism, a woman’s ordination refers to the process and/or ceremony through which she takes on a number of religious precepts and becomes a female monk or nun, committing to monastic life. While such ordination may include dharma transmission, the latter is usually the result of further study and additional ordinations. Dharma transmission is the event in which she is established at the end of an unbroken lineage of teachers and disciples going back to the Buddha. In the Zen tradition, this dharma transmission and accompanying document is referred to as shiho, and the recipient becomes a roshi who can then teach her own disciples in a temple setting and transmit the dharma. Becoming ordained and especially having received dharma transmission positions the recipient in a long Buddhist lineage. Because today there are many forms of established practice, there are numerous living monks—but fewer nuns—with such a high level of recognition. It confers significant status on those who have it, and this status is sometimes abused, especially by male roshis toward female nuns or laywomen who are their disciples. It has also created a few situations where acknowledged lineages and teacher-disciple relations are unclear. In European Soˉtoˉ Zen, for example, this has created a kink in the lineage, where Taisen Deshimaru is venerated in the spiritual if not official lineage following Kodo

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Sawaki but actually received shiho from a different master (Robert 2009, 100). Moreover, since Deshimaru did not convey shiho to any of his close disciples, some of his male followers obtained it in Japan from a successor of Kodo Sawaki. His female disciples did not have that option, since Japanese monasteries are gender segregated. In a religion that originated more than two millennia ago and that has many traditions, it is not surprising that there are many lineages containing breaks, kinks, and parallel lines. This is even more so for women’s lineages, which are often ignored altogether or rebuked for not having a documented solid line going back to the Buddha. In patriarchal societies, dominant male sanghas are intolerant of such “imperfections.” This is the case in Tibet, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, which have Theravadan traditions, but to a lesser extent in China, Japan, and the Western world, where the Mahayana tradition is common. The majority of monks in Tibet still do not agree that an exception can be made for women who want to become nuns or bhikkhunis, since no preceptor is available in the female monastic tradition. Tibetan Buddhist women can only become novice nuns, taking on only a limited number of precepts, and therefore may receive the highest ordination in a different tradition. The definition of female and male monks in Japanese tradition is more adaptable to women because during its Buddhist history most have not taken vows in the full set of monastic disciplinary rules contained in the Vinaya Pitaka (scripture). This designation is flexible in not hinging on which precepts one has taken or lineage in which one is ordained (Arai

Women in Thailand go through an ordination ceremony to become nuns, despite opposition from Thailand’s all-male council of elders, 2015. (Psisaa/Dreamstime.com)



Pajapati

1999, 9). In Sri Lanka, some Buddhist women who reject monks’ self-proclaimed monastic monopoly have taken to wearing orange monks’ robes and have established significant monastic communities. They trace their spiritual lineage back to Sanˇghamitta¯, viewed by tradition as Emperor Asoka’s daughter, who traveled from northern India with a branch of the Boˉ tree to the island in the third century BCE (Bartholomeusz 1994, xii). In Thailand, where women are unequivocally refused ordination beyond the novice level, one particular nun’s temple has challenged the male hierarchy of 300,000 Theravadan monks. Ven. Dhammananda obtained her ordination in Sri Lanka, encouraged other women to take the same path and elicited the government’s help in this endeavor. Although the council of elders has the final say and continues its opposition, there is increasing acceptance of the growing female clergy. Dhammananda’s grandmother preceded her in this activism, having established a female order of monastics in the 1920s—outlawed by the king in 1928 following the council of male Buddhist elders. Local women have expressed that they find it easier to connect with women monastics because they understand and are interested in women’s issues (Sara 2013). Notwithstanding the sometimes-persistent periods of misogynistic stances on ordination and dharma transmission for women, women will continue to find ways to devote their lives to Buddhist monastic life, transmit their practices, and ordain other women. Brigitte H. Bechtold See also: Buddhism: Gender Roles; Mahayana; Nuns, Theravada; Pajapati; Women in Early Buddhism; Women’s Buddhist Networks; Zen Further Reading Arai, Paula Kane Robinson. Women Living Zen: Japanese Soto Buddhist Nuns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. Women under the Boˉ tree: Buddhist Nuns in Sri Lanka. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Robert, Brigitte. “The Association Zen de Montréal: A Case Study in Soˉtoˉ Zen Nonviolence.” Thesis, McMaster University, 2009. Sara, Sally. “From TV to Temple: Female Buddhist Monk Walks a Pioneering Path.” Mama Asia, June 30, 2013. www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03028/mama-asia-thailand/4599176. Schireson, Grace. Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2010.

PA J A PAT I Pajapati, the Buddha’s foster mother (both his stepmother and aunt, she cared for him after his birth mother died), was ordained as the first bhikkhuni (nun) and became the most venerable leader and liberator of women. Pajapati was bestowed with the title “Mahapajapati” (Great Pajapati), the founder of the first women’s sangha. Her story, among many other nuns who chanted songs about their joyful liberation, is preserved in the Therigatha (Songs of Elder Nuns), which is classified in the Sutra Pitaka (Basket of Discourses) section of the Pali canon.

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According to the Cullavagga (Lesser Division, part 5) of the Vinaya Pitaka (The Basket of Monastic Rules), the Buddha was initially reluctant to allow women into the order because he felt that the presence of women in the sangha would shorten the “pure period” of the dharma from 1,000 years to 500 years. When pressed by his foremost disciple and cousin, Ananda, regarding whether women had the same potential to realize enlightenment as men did, the Buddha answered in the affirmative. During the fifth century BCE, women in Indian society were given secondary status and relegated to domestic duties as wives, mothers, cooks, and even courtesans and prostitutes, in some cases. Women’s options were limited, and their sustenance and identity were dependent on their husbands, who provided for them. Hence, there was concern about women renouncing their home life and joining the sangha, thereby causing domestic turmoil and upsetting the existing social order. More significantly, male practitioners viewed women as temptresses who caused men to accumulate bad karma (consequential actions), to lose self-control to satiate their lustful desires, and to abandon their single-minded and devoted practice. The woman who played a significant role in the Buddha’s life and for all future nuns was Pajapati. With her persistence, sincerity, and commitment, Pajapati, who had gained a following of 500-plus beckoning women, repeatedly requested that the Buddha ordain her. Ananda also interceded on Pajapati’s behalf, reminding the Buddha how she selflessly took care of him after his mother, Maya (Pajapati’s sister), died shortly after giving birth to him. Thereupon, the Buddha agreed to ordain Pajapati as the first nun on the condition that women follow eight cardinal rules (Sanskrit: garudhammas; heavy rules). Kenneth Lee See also: Buddhism: Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Therigatha; Women in Early Buddhism Further Reading Horner, I. B., trans. Book of Discipline (Vinaya-Pitaka). Part 5 (Cullavagga), Sacred Books of the Buddhists. London: Pali Text Society, 1975. Murcott, S. First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 1991.

P R A J N A PA R A M I TA Wisdom—clear insight, the ability to see reality as it is—has from the beginning of Buddhism been recognized as the primary liberating force, the way to become free from suffering and attain full awakening. Shakyamuni Buddha, the founder of the tradition in the fifth century BCE, was the iconic face of Buddhism in the early centuries. The rise of the Mahayana movement in the first and second centuries CE brought a paradigm shift in teachings and practices. The feminine quality of wisdom (designated by the feminine noun prajna) and Goddess embodying that wisdom, rose to supremacy in Buddhist religiosity. Goddess Prajnaparamita, or



Prajnaparamita

“Perfect Wisdom,” shares her name with the literature in which she appears and the luminous wisdom she personifies. Prajnaparamita was introduced in a foundational and centrally important Mahayana text, 8000-Line Perfect Wisdom Scripture, compiled in the first century CE. The text expands on what wisdom reveals about reality and overflows with devotion for Mother Prajnaparamita, praising her as the source of knowledge and spiritual awakening. With motherhood as her defining characteristic, Prajnaparamita nurtures seekers of wisdom by extending comfort, safety, and moral guidance. She is the ultimate teacher and font of revelation. One of her titles is Mother of All Buddhas (Sarva-buddha-mata), for she is the origin and content of their teachings. The scripture elevates her as the most worthy object of worship, greater even than Buddha, on the premise that the birth giver is greater than the one who is born. A Buddha may teach for a single lifetime, but Prajnaparamita’s wisdom flows for eternity. Over the centuries, texts were continually added to the Prajnaparamita corpus, extolling the wisdom, elaborating the philosophy, and glorifying the power of the Goddess to bestow virtue, inner peace, and a compassionate heart. The physical form, or body, of Prajnaparamita was originally understood as reality itself when viewed with the pure vision that dissolves the illusion of solid objects into a diaphanous panorama of swirling, intertwining energy patterns. Beginning in the seventh century, the Goddess was envisioned in bodily form as golden in color, royally adorned and crowned, seated in a meditative posture, and displaying a teaching gesture. Variations were introduced over time, but a blossoming lotus supporting a book of wisdom remained her identifying feature. Prajnaparamita established an ongoing association between wisdom and female figures. In Mahayana, female wisdom was paired with male skillfulness (upaya) in liberating beings from suffering and illusion. Enduringly popular Mahayana texts feature female seekers and revealers of wisdom. Lion’s Roar of Queen Shrimala, a second-century scripture, celebrates a queen whose majestic eloquence set her citizenry on the Buddhist path. The women and girls were the first to accept her message, followed by her husband and the male populace. The second-century Flower Ornament Scripture tells of the teachers encountered on a pilgrim’s quest for wisdom. More than half of the narrative, spanning hundreds of pages in translation, is devoted to female guides—laywomen, nuns, queens, courtesans, young girls, and female deities—who voice their practices, accomplishments, and insights. The female exemplars in these and other classics supported the Mahayana goal of broad accessibility and contributed to the embrace and wide circulation of these works in India, China, and Japan. With Prajnaparamita installed at the summit of the Mahayana pantheon, many female divinities arose in her wake. They inherited the titles of “Prajnaparamita” and “Mother of all Buddhas” and continued her legacy. When the Tantric movement emerged in Indian Buddhism in the seventh and eighth centuries, female deities and human women retained an association with liberating wisdom. Tantric annals feature female practitioners and enlightened masters, known collectively

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as yoginis and dakinis, who excel at devising unique lessons on the spot to spark a direct experience of reality. In Tibetan Buddhism, enlightened women may be recognized as human embodiments of Prajnaparamita. A renowned example is Machig Labdron (1055–1153), who mastered Prajnaparamita philosophy by adolescence and later introduced Chod, an important practice in all Tibetan Buddhist sects for healing, exorcism, and fostering nondual wisdom (Allione 2000, 165–220). Miranda Shaw See also: Buddhism: Female Divinities; Mahayana; Sacred Texts on Women; Tara Further Reading Allione, Tsultrim. Women of Wisdom. 1984. Revised, Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2000. Cleary, Thomas, trans. The Flower Ornament Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, Vol. 3. Boston: Shambhala, 1987. Conze, Edward, trans. The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and Its Verse Summary. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1975. Shaw, Miranda. Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Wayman, Alex, trans. The Lion’s Roar of Queen Srimala: A Buddhist Scripture on the Tathagatagarbha Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

SACRED TEXTS ON WOMEN Stories of how the first women in Buddhism—homemakers, mothers, educators, seekers, and even courtesans and prostitutes—became liberated/enlightened through the dharma can be found in First Buddhist Women, by Susan Murcott (1991). For Theravada texts, preserved in the Cullavagga (Lesser Division, part 5) of the Vinaya Pitaka (The Basket of Monastic Rules) and in As´vaghos· a’s Buddhacharita (part 3, ch. 1), there is the account of the Buddha’s initial reluctance and permission to allow women into the order, beginning with the ordination of Pajapati, his stepmother and aunt. Another rich source concerning women is the ja¯takas (stories of the Buddha’s previous lives), which were mostly written from a misogynist point of view. For Mahayana texts, the Lotus Sutra tells the story of the ­daughter of the Dragon King who cleverly transforms herself into a man before realizing enlightenment. Finally, in contrast to Theravada and Mahayana texts, the Tibetan Vajrayana texts provide a positive view of women with the appearance of female Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Among Theravada Buddhist texts, the earliest sources are called ja¯takas (ca. fourth century BCE), and they contain stories about women that were mostly written from a misogynist perspective that reflected the prevailing view of women in India during the fifth century BCE. Preserved in the Khuddaka Nikaya of the Sutra Pitaka section in the Pali Canon, the ja¯takas described women as seductresses, sources of temptation, and potential threats to men’s spiritual welfare, particularly endangering monks’ vow of celibacy. Women were also portrayed as angry, ungrateful, and treacherous characters who are base, fickle, deceitful, and not to be trusted. In the Kun·a¯la ja¯taka (536), for instance, a story claims,



Sacred Texts on Women

The mind of women is like that of a monkey, going from one place to another like the shadow of a tree. The heart of women is unsteady like the rim of a wheel. Women are [sticky] like gum, are all-devouring like fire; they are clever deceivers and impetuous like a river. They go both to the man they love and to him they dislike just as a boat goes to both banks of a river. They do not belong to one man or two: they are laid out like goods in the bazaar. He who should think “they are mine” might just as well try to catch the wind in a net. (Bollee 1970, 160)

Although some ja¯takas provide a positive view of women, mainly in leadership and independent roles, as in the case of Yas´odhara¯ (Vessantara ja¯taka; Janaka ja¯taka) or Uppalavan·n·a¯ (Mudulakkhan·a ja¯taka) and the ascetic Bheria¯ (Mahosadha ja¯taka), the vast majority of early Theravada texts provided a negative view of women. In As´vaghos· a’s Buddhacharita (Life of Buddha; ca. second century CE; part 1, ch. 18), there is the story of Sujata, the village girl who played an important role in Siddhartha’s serendipitous realization of the Middle Way. After he meditated and performed various austerities to seek enlightenment for six years in the forest among yogins, Siddhartha, having attained superior meditative abilities through the path of self-denial, received a kind food offering from Sujata, who had compassion on Siddhartha’s emaciated condition. According to legendary accounts, when Siddhartha reluctantly accepted the milk porridge, the five yogin followers were disappointed with Siddhartha’s decision and left him with disgust. However, Siddhartha, upon eating, gained strength and clarity of mind and realized that the path was the Middle Way between self-indulgence and self-denial, the core principle in Buddhism. He then threw the bowl into the river where it went upstream, foreshadowing women’s plight and success. Women had to go against the stream of a male-dominated world in their effort to become enlightened. Among Mahayana Buddhist texts, the story of Longnü, the daughter of the Dragon King, is recorded in the Lotus Sutra (ch. 12), where the Buddha explains that a woman can indeed attain enlightenment, contrary to prevailing views of women in India during the fifth century BCE. In the story, the Buddha tells how the bodhisattva Mañjus´rı¯ (a.k.a. bodhisattva of wisdom) went to the Dragon King’s palace in the bottom of the ocean to preach the Lotus Sutra, which contained the most venerable dharma on attaining enlightenment. The central teaching in the Lotus Sutra is the tathagata-garbha (womb of Buddha), which claims that Buddha nature is inherent in all sentient beings. Mañjus´rı¯ recounts the story of the precocious eight-year-old daughter of Shaktsura, the Dragon King, who was a clever and earnest girl. Despite the prevailing view of women’s inability to attain Buddhahood, but having wholeheartedly embraced the teaching in Lotus Sutra, the Dragon King’s daughter transformed herself as a man before attaining Buddhahood and flying away to the heavens. It is said that she later appeared in the south, sitting on a lotus, endowed with the 32 auspicious signs and 80 characteristics of a Buddha and teaching the dharma in the Lotus Sutra to all the people of that land. In popular Buddhist understanding, to be born a woman is itself the result of bad karma. In the Bahudha¯tuka Sutra, a Theravada text, it clearly states that it is impossible for a woman to be a bodhisattva or become a female Buddha; a bodhisattva can be a human, animal, serpent, or deity, but never a woman. According to

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Theravada Buddhism, women can at best aspire to be reborn as male by accumulating merit. In Mahayana texts, there are both negative and positive images of women. In some texts, women are argued to be inherently weak in intellect and virtue, traits that limit their capacity for Buddhahood. Mahayana texts maintain that a woman can become enlightened, only not in female form; for example, the Bodhisattvabhuˉmi (ca. fourth century CE) also state that a woman about to attain enlightenment will be reborn in the male form beforehand. In Vajrayana texts, particularly with respect to the Tantric iconography of the Vajrayana practice, female Buddhas do appear. Female Buddhas such as Vajrayogini, Tara, and Simhamukha appear as the central figures of Tantric sadhanas (spiritual practice), or they may be the consorts of the main yidam (deity) of a mandala. Vajrayana texts also recognize many female yogini practitioners, such as Yeshe Tsogyal (ca. 796–805 CE)—one of the five Tantric consorts of Padmasambhava— as achieving the full enlightenment of a Buddha. The Karmapa lineage (Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism or “Red Hats”) says that Yeshe Tsogyal emerged from an isolated meditation retreat as a fully enlightened Buddha (samyak-sam · buddha) some 30 years before her passing. Kenneth Lee See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Feminine Virtues; Gender Roles; Mahayana; Tara; Women in Early Buddhism Further Reading Appleton, N. Ja¯taka Stories in Therava¯da Buddhism. London: Ashgate, 2010. Bollee, W. B., trans. Kunala-jataka. n.p.: Pali Text Society, 1970. Murcott, S. First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 1991.

ˉ KA GAKKAI SO Soˉka Gakkai is a Japanese, lay Nichiren Buddhist, new religious movement founded in 1930 by Makiguchi Tsunesaburo (1871–1944) and Toda Josei (1900–1958) as a society for championing educational reform. It gained religious status in 1952. Long the subject of controversy, the organization now claims 12 million members worldwide (Soˉka Gakkai 2015) and is politically influential through Koˉmeitoˉ, a political party that was founded by Soˉka Gakkai members in 1964 and formed part of Japan’s coalition government between 1999 and 2009. As with many new religious movements, women are disproportionately represented in membership figures of Soˉka Gakkai (Trzebiatowska and Bruce 2012). The religion, grounded in concepts of individual empowerment and anticipated personal reward, places the Lotus Sutra, with its teaching that women can attain Buddhahood, at its center. This is particularly important as the goal of Buddhism is to gain enlightenment, to reach Buddhahood, something that Haga Akira (1998, 158) notes should not be, but unfortunately has been, viewed as exclusive to a particular gender. Grounding his thought in this theological tradition, the



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president of Soˉka Gakkai, Daisaku Ikeda (b. 1928), has championed women’s rights through his modern rereading of the Lotus Sutra and Buddhist history more generally (Kurihara 2009). Ikeda’s theology affirms that women are first and foremost human beings, rather than a societally defined gender role such as mother or wife (Toynbee and Ikeda 2007, 102). Haga goes so far as to assert that it is Ikeda’s praise of women and of the organization’s Women’s Division in particular, alongside his theological thought that views women as human beings capable of anything, that inspires women to convert to the religion and pursue self-improvement therein (Haga 1998). Nevertheless, it is not only an egalitarian theology that has attracted women members; the religion’s Youth Division and Women’s Division have allowed women to enter leadership roles, develop initiatives, and perhaps most importantly have provided autonomy in a society that privileges men. On a more individual level, the organization and its doctrines’ support of women has led many to greater self-confidence (Fisker-Nielsen 2012). Tied together, Soˉka Gakkai’s theology and organizational structure have spurred women in general and the Women’s Division in particular to wield a large amount of influence in the organization. Soˉka Gakkai’s theological tradition and practices are more complicated than a simple championing of gender equality. Indeed, some aspects of the organization appear to illustrate the opposite; the division of men and women into separate suborganizations and the underrepresentation of women in public leadership roles reflect wider societal, patriarchal practices. Similarly, many women employed by the organization are expected to leave their roles upon marriage, as the financial support of a husband will allow her to partake in voluntary religious activities in her community (Fisker-Nielsen 2012). Ikeda’s thought is also less clear than it first appears. For example, he argues that in choosing to abandon the roles of housewife and mother, a woman risks losing her strongest feature (Toynbee and Ikeda 2007), thereby suggesting that traditional gender roles are inherently correct. Illustrating a possible disconnect between word and deed, Ikeda has also been the subject of a number of alleged sex scandals. Drawing on such points, Anne Mette Fisker-Nielsen (2012, 155) writes that in Soˉka Gakkai, “appreciating women’s work is not the same as according her the same status or power as men.” Whether or not Fisker-Nielsen’s conclusion is accepted, it is clear that the Soˉka Gakkai conception of women is a multifaceted one. While gender equality, or more specifically equality of opportunity and pay, is an important tenet of the religion, so, too, is the societal role of women. Men are to be the breadwinners, but women are viewed as unparalleled in their ability to cultivate and care for the young, to teach and guide their children. For Haga (1998), such teachings give men the advantage and perpetuate a patriarchal system in which the man rules the home. On the one hand, women in Soˉka Gakkai are numerous, hold extraordinary influence, and are celebrated for their important role in society. On the other hand, the way in which they are conceived both theologically and socially is complicated; the equality of women is championed, their traditional social roles praised, but the combination of these two positions risks the perpetuation of an

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unequal status quo in which women are appreciated but in which ideals of equality are little more than lip service. James Harry Morris See also: Buddhism: Feminine Virtues; Gender Roles Further Reading Fisker-Nielsen, Anne Mette. Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan: Soka Gakkai Youth and Komeito. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. Haga, Akira. “Women and Soka Gakkai.” In Women and Religion in Japan, edited by Akiko Okuda and Haruko Okano, 151–78. Translated by Alison Watts. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. Kurihara, Toshie. “Buddhism and Women: Soka Gakkai International’s Viewpoint.” Journal of Oriental Studies 19 (2009): 51–60. Soka Gakkai International. SGI: A Snapshot. Soka Gakkai International Website. 2015. http://www.sgi.org/snapshot/. Toynbee, Arnold, and Daisaku Ikeda. Choose Life: A Dialogue. Edited by Richard L. Gage. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Trzebiatowska, Marta, and Steve Bruce. Why Are Women More Religious Than Men? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

TA N T R A Women were pioneers of the Tantric movement, or Vajrayana Buddhism, that flourished in India from the 8th to 12th century CE, and they retain significant roles in the Tantric Buddhism of Nepal and Tibet. In contrast to the bodhisattva path in Mahayana Buddhism, which may require eons of merit making and compassionate deeds to reach enlightenment, the Tantric path offers potent esoteric methods meant to accelerate progress toward Buddhahood. The word tantra derives from the Sanskrit verbal root tan, “to weave.” Under the guidance of a Tantric master, the practitioner learns to “weave” the Buddha’s body, speech, and mind into her own to realize enlightenment in one lifetime. Tantric practices are often grouped into three categories as mudra (bodily gestures), mantra (sacred syllables), and mandala (a circular diagram depicting an enlightened being and her retinue and sacred environment), which serve in the goal of attaining a Buddha’s body, speech, and mind, respectively. Women hold a special place in Tantric Buddhist history as founders, famed gurus, and adepts who helped to shape its ethos and practices. The Tantric tradition promotes respect for women, includes a practice of ritual worship of women, and offers a lay path of practice in which men and women may practice together as spiritual companions. These features may well bear the mark of the female influence on the traditions during their formative centuries. Tantric annals also report all-female gatherings and the transmission of Tantric teachings from female gurus to female disciples. The authority of a teacher stemmed from his or her character and deportment; there was no institutional bar on female leadership.



Tantra

Biographies of the female adepts of Indian Buddhist Tantra include many selfstyled gurus whose eccentric ways and creative teaching methods bespeak the freedom from convention sought through Tantric practice. A female master could follow any way of life she chose. There were those who secluded themselves in a cave or remote hut, those who dispensed their wisdom as perpetual wanderers, and those who maintained their former occupations as arrow makers, wine pressers, and tavern owners. One theme that emerges from their collective stories is that a seeker of Tantric teachings could not predict what kind of woman might offer them. The Tantric pantheon includes female deities among the powerful objects of visualization for Tantric practitioners. One of the main divinities is the beautiful Tara, who often appears with an emerald-green hue and nurturing persona, seated on a lotus. As a cosmic female Buddha in Vajrayana Buddhism, Tara is a liberator par excellence who helps practitioners overcome obstacles to spiritual progress and attainments. Another powerful figure featured in Tantric visualizations is the female Buddha Vajrayogini, a crimson-red divinity with dark flowing hair. She dances gleefully atop vanquished forces and wears a tiara of skulls while drinking from a skull cup filled with blood, symbolizing her clear, nondualistic, and blissful mind. Vajrayogini aids practitioners in gaining yogic mastery and fosters their realization of the emptiness, or illusory nature, of all phenomena. Both men and women meditate on male and female deities, but the female deities have special importance for women, providing inspiring models of Buddhahood in female form. The sexual symbolism that pervades Tantric discourse and imagery has many layers of meaning. Sexual union can refer to an internal process wherein the practitioner envisions, imagines, and meditates on the female and male energies within her own body and mind. The union in this case is a balance and equilibrium between wisdom (understood as a female quality) and skillfulness in compassionate activities (the male half of this metaphorical equation). Tantric meditation can help the practitioner bring these two qualities to fruition. The sexual imagery also alludes to sexual union undertaken as a meditative and yogic practice between partners who integrate their relationship into their spiritual path. Meditative stability and progress in karmic purification are required to refine and channel the powerful energies of desire that are heightened through sexual union. Today, Tantric Buddhist practices may be among those taught at the Tantric yoga seminars and retreats (including woman-only retreats) that draw Western seekers to India and other centers around the world, in such far-flung locales as Indonesia, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. The rubric of Tantra in a given case may, however, refer to teachings of Hindu or intermixed Hindu-Buddhist provenance. The Tantric training usually devolves on time-honored yogic practices, such as asanas (yogic postures), control of breathing and bodily energies, and mantra recitation. It is rare to find teachers of the advanced sexual practices, which were traditionally transmitted by a female or male master to a small circle of advanced disciples. In the United States, the label of Tantra is commonly misapplied to teachings and

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techniques aimed at enhancing couples’ sexual experience. In India and the Himalayas, where Tantra originated, such practices would fall in the category of erotic arts described in the Kama Sutra and other writings of that genre, to distinguish them from spiritual disciplines with enlightenment as their aim. Kenneth Lee and Miranda Shaw See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Dance of Tara; Female Divinities; Prajnaparamita; Hinduism: Tantra Further Reading Allione, Tsultrim. Women of Wisdom. Revised and enlarged ed. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2000. Shaw, Miranda. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Simmer-Brown, Judith. Dakini’s Warm Breath: The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Shambhala, 2001. Yeshe, Lama. Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2001.

TA R A Tara is the most beloved Goddess of the Indo-Himalayan Buddhist world. She is a paragon of maternal compassion who responds unstintingly to every human need. In a history spanning the seventh century to the present, Tara has inspired an immense body of artistic images, meditative and ritual practices, metaphysical writings, devotional poetry, and tales of her marvelous deeds and powers. She is revered as Divine Mother who cherishes all beings and acts in myriad ways to deliver them from suffering and lead them to enlightenment. Her name means both Star Lady and She Who Carries Across—that is, Savioress. Like the northern star (after which she is named), Tara is a beacon and guiding light for those tossed on the stormy seas of life. She is comparable to the Virgin Mary by virtue of her prominence in the religious landscape, maternal persona, ready response to prayer, and miracle-working powers. Tara made her historical debut in the seventh century CE, appearing as an attendant of Avalokites´vara, the lord of infinite compassion. Within decades, however, Tara came to the fore as an object of reverence in her own right. Buddhist writings of the seventh and eighth centuries celebrate her as a cosmic figure and Supreme Savior. Tara was endowed with unlimited powers, from the most intimate ministration and maternal attention to personal and familial well-being through miraculous rescue to bestowal of supreme liberation, or enlightenment. Each generation added new meditations, liturgies, and rituals to elicit Tara’s blessings, a process that continues to this day. Tara is so prominent in the religious landscape that she came to the notice of Indologists in the late 19th century, who seized on Tara’s association with Avalokites´vara and concluded that she was his wife or consort. That view stood uncorrected for almost 100 years; therefore, one still finds it in circulation and repeated from time to time in studies that touch on Tara.



Tara

A hallmark of Tara worship is her direct and immediate accessibility. Anyone may call on her by intoning a prayer or mantra, voicing her name, or simply bringing her to mind. Tara’s answer to prayer is said to be as unfailing and swift as a mother attending to the cry of an only child. The petitioner need not be a devotee of Tara or even Buddhist. One finds many instances in which a person in need simply calls on the Holy Mother for assistance or deliverance, eliciting a miracle. Stories abound of her miraculous interventions and timely deliverance from danger, disease, and disaster. Many a fortunate has been snatched from the proverbial jaws of death and rescued from one of the “eight great fears” from which she offers salvation, namely, lions, elephants, venomous snakes, demons, thieves, fire, drowning, and captivity. Tara is most commonly envisioned as green in color and seated on a lotus blossom with her right foot extended and resting lightly on a lotus, poised to spring into action. Her right hand rests on her knee with an open palm to dispense blessings. Tara is envisioned as the epitome of feminine beauty, with a moonlike face, gentle smile, lustrous tresses, and splendid attire. The treatment of her facial features and bodily proportions varies widely, for she embodies the feminine bodily ideals of the geographically and culturally diverse peoples who have revered and portrayed her. Tara also appears in other colors and bodily forms. Her primary form is often designated as Green Tara. Second in popularity to her green form is White Tara, who is especially important for her powers of healing and prolonging life. The outpouring of devotion inspired by Tara has given rise to a profusion of visual representations, from tiny talismans and portable shrines to large stone effigies and bronze statues installed in public worship spaces. Paintings abound, from detailed compositions glimmering with golden accents to hastily executed portraits. Simple effigies of clay are mass-produced, White Tara, a popular manifestation of Tara associated while royal wealth and temple with healing and prolonging life, portrayed here in treasuries have funded statuary one of her many temples, from an early 12th-century manuscript. Tara is the Divine Mother and most conveying Tara’s magnificence beloved savior of the South Asian and Himalayan with gold and silver gilding, Buddhist pantheon. (The Metropolitan Museum of gemstones, turquoise and coral Art/Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2001)

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insets, and lapis lazuli and other precious pigments. Most Asian collections in museums around the world include at least one Tara image of high quality, for such images have been produced in vast number. Another distinction of Tara effigies over the centuries is the miraculous powers of her icons. A statue might ooze liquid with curative properties, dispense gold coins or jewelry, change location, burst apart, consume food offerings, become too heavy to lift, and, most commonly, speak. By the time Indian Buddhism came to a close, in the 12th century, worship of Tara was already thriving in Himalayan Buddhism. Tara attained her zenith of adoration in Tibet. Tibetans claim a special relationship with Tara, exalting her as the divine ancestress of the Tibetan people and the patron Goddess whose compassion shaped the Tibetan nation. The two wives of the first Buddhist king of Tibet, Songtsen Gampo, are recognized as emanations of Tara. Hailing from Nepal and China, the queens were devout Buddhists and imported votive images, texts, and artisans and influenced their husband to promote their faith, thereby altering the course of Tibetan history. Tara is woven into the fabric of Tibetan cultural life. Her icons are present in temples, homes, and roadside chapels and are worn as amulets attached to a sash or belt. Colorful prayer flags spread her blessings on the wind. Masked dramas enact her miraculous interventions. The most popular hymn to Tara is the 21 Praises of Tara and Their Benefits, in which each verse describes a different quality or power. This lengthy prayer is memorized starting in childhood, recited daily in many Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and homes, and figures in communal celebrations marking Buddhist holy days (Beyer 1973, 232, 241). Special concerns of women fall within Tara’s purview. She figures in protective rites for pregnant and postpartum mothers and newborn infants. Tara mantras are chanted over water, butter, and medicinal mixtures and then used to anoint expectant mothers and newborns (Beyer 1973, 234, 289–90). Laypeople sponsor priestly recitations of Tara texts, mantras, or prayers accompanied by votive offerings that last between one night and, in the case of the Hundred Thousand Tara Prayers, three months. Nuns are preferred to monks to perform these services, on the conviction that the Tara rites of female monastics are more effective, with the fortuitous result that Tara rituals may generate significant income for a nunnery (Havnevik 1990, 122–23, 175–76). Tara also garners reverence in the Buddhism of Nepal, or Newar Buddhism, which is practiced by the indigenous Newar population rather than by Nepalis. Tara’s presence is felt throughout the art, architecture, ritual life, and sacred landscape of the country. Her images are ubiquitous, appearing in homes and among the abundant statuary and relief carvings in Newar shrines and temple complexes. Tara is a popular subject, too, for Newar painters and sculptors. Many of the most exquisite representations of Tara in collections around the world are Newar creations, produced for use in Nepal and for Tibetan, Chinese, and Mongolian patrons. In Nepal, Tara is invoked and worshipped for a range of blessings, but her primary role at present is that of healing deity. In cases of serious illnesses or even mild conditions that have not yielded to medical treatment, it is common for the family to enlist priests to perform a Satvavidhana Tara Puja, which features an elaborate



Tara

assemblage of rows of flickering candles and a colorful array of food offerings, jasmine flowers, peacock feathers, greenery, and green vegetables and fruits. An important Newar Buddhist observance is the Tara Vrata. A vrata is a practice in which participants fast, maintain a state of ritual purity, and evoke divine energies into themselves and into the world. Women are the primary participants in vratas devoted to Tara. The women wear green, for they will embody Green Tara and channel her presence and blessings at the culmination of the rite. This reflects the Newar Buddhist belief that women are human representatives of Goddesses, both in ritual and in daily life, sharing their life-giving, healing powers. The Tara Vrata may be held in any temple courtyard, but two favored sites represent local traditions of Tara in Nepal. The Itum Baha temple complex holds the most famous Tara image of Nepal, which marks the spot where Tara appeared in person to dispense Buddhist teachings. Tara Tirtha is a riverbank where Tara has appeared to bless her devotees in dramatic ways. Therefore, Tara Tirtha is held to be an auspicious place to perform the vrata or simply to meditate, pray, and make offerings to the Goddess (Lewis 1989, 119–29). The Buddhist tradition celebrates motherhood in many ways and through a range of female divinities, but in no case is motherhood more complete or exalted than in the case of Tara, the ultimate embodiment of mother love. Her maternal tenderness, bolstered by omniscience and miracle-working powers, has made her the supreme and most beloved savior of the South Asian and Himalayan Buddhist pantheon. The cornerstone of her character is her ability to save her devotees from any peril, whether physical, emotional, or spiritual. This tender and powerful motherhood has enshrined her in the hearts of millions of South Asian and Himalayan Buddhists over the centuries. Tara continues to garner new devotees across the globe, as Tibetans sent into exile by the genocidal Chinese occupation of their country bring their faith to new constituents in the Asian, European, and North and South American countries where they have settled. Miranda Shaw See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Dance of Tara; Female Divinities; Feminine Virtues; Guan Yin; Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Mahayana; Christianity: Mother of God; Hinduism: Durga and Kali; Spirituality: Sex and Gender Further Reading Beyer, Stephan. The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Havnevik, Hanna. Tibetan Buddhist Nuns. Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1990. Lewis, Todd T. “Mahayana Vratas in Newar Buddhism.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 12, no. 1 (1989): 109–38. Rinpoche, Bokar. Tara: The Feminine Divine. English ed. San Francisco: ClearPoint, 1999. Rinpoche, Khenchen Palden Sherab, and Khenpo Tsewang Dongyal Rinpoche. Tara’s Enlightened Activity: An Oral Commentary on the Twenty-one Praises to Tara. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2007. Shaw, Miranda. Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Willson, Martin. In Praise of Tara: Songs to the Saviouress. London: Wisdom, 1986.

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TEA CEREMONY Women became the main practitioners of the Way of Tea (Chadoˉ or Sado) from the beginning of Japan’s modern period, or Meiji period, in 1868. The Way of Tea was considered a way to instill etiquette into young women and promote the betterment of society through Zen art and its aesthetic qualities. In general, the tea ceremony prepared women for a life of marriage and domestic responsibilities. The first women’s preparatory school opened in 1875 and included a course on the Japanese tea ceremony as part of the curriculum. The tea school taught women not only to master the procedures of serving tea but also to appreciate the art of the tea ceremony, including flower arrangement, and to serve with grace, humility, and attentiveness to her guests. The Way of Tea originated during the ninth century when Buddhist monks brought powdered tea making to Japan from their journey to China. Drinking tea helped to heal both the body and mind and helped nuns and monks to stay awake during meditation. The Way of Tea was quickly adopted as a staple practice in Zen Buddhism. Over the course of several centuries, monasteries developed and refined the tea ceremony, incorporating rules and procedures for the service based on Zen philosophy, which birthed an intricate ritual that was more than just the mere consumption of tea. The tea ceremony typically takes place in small, tatami-​ floored buildings (tea house or chashitsu) with an adjoining area where guests clean and prepare themselves for the ceremony (mizuya). The ritual itself starts with the guests washing themselves with water in the mizuya. The hostess will allow the guests to enter the room, and the two will sit in silence as the hostess whisks powdered tea, tea leaves, and hot water over a coal hearth at the center of the room. The tea is served in bowl-like cups and given to the guests. When the guests finish, they will leave the room, and the hostess will clean up. Rituals change according to the time of year and the type of A woman serves tea in a traditional Japanese tea cer- ceremony performed; changes emony. The Way of Tea was developed and refined include the type of tea, cups, in Buddhist monasteries and embodies Zen philosophy with elements of etiquette, aesthetics, and grace. and furniture arrangements used in the tea house. The service (Oluolu3/iStockphoto.com)



Therigatha

provided by the hostess ranges from simple snacks to full-course meals, depending on the type of tea service. The ceremony itself is riddled with Buddhist symbolism due to the several Zen principles evident in the Way of Tea. The first principle of Zen Buddhism in the tea ceremony is the dynamic relationship between master and student. There is an obvious power structure in the ceremony: the hostess instructs and guides the guest through the whole service. The guest has no role in the ceremony besides experiencing what the hostess provides for him or her, reflecting the relationship of the master and student. The hostess serves as a master for the guest, not only teaching the practice but also passing on the tranquility the tea can provide. Another principle of Zen observed in the ceremony is the connection to the harmony of nature. The tea house is outfitted with a chabana, or minimalistic flower arrangement, that typically consists of single, in-season flowers. Its simplicity and natural aesthetic is a means of connecting the participant to the tranquility of nature. Because the arrangement is in a simple pot and free of artificial decor, the blossom stands as an example of nature’s harmony through simplicity. Zen Buddhism stresses a strong belief in one’s return to nature, and these flower arrangements are a means of re-creating the outdoors. Also, ceremonies often take place in vast gardens, especially in the case of picnic-style ceremonies, allowing the participants to interact with their natural surroundings and to return to the peace that only nature can provide. The peacefulness of nature makes it easier for Zen practitioners to enter a meditative state, allowing them to achieve a level of enlightenment through the ceremony. Kenneth Lee See also: Buddhism: Gender Roles; Zen Further Reading Anderson, Jennifer L. “Japanese Tea Ritual: Religion in Practice.” Man 22, no. 3 (1987): 475–98. Mori, Barbara. “The Tea Ceremony: A Transformed Japanese Ritual.” Gender and Society 5, no. 1 (1991): 86–97. Tanaka, Sen’O. The Tea Ceremony. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1973. Varley, H. P., and Isao Kumakura. Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1989.

T H E R I G AT H A Buddhism may perhaps claim to be the only world religion to have in its scriptures a book written exclusively by women. That book is the Therigatha, meaning poems (gatha) by female elders (Theri). In Theravada Buddhism, a woman earns the title “Theri” after several years of life as an ordained nun. There is also a Theragatha that is the collected poems of the male elders. The Therigatha poems, and the poems by nuns in another section of the Pali Canon, are among the oldest known from India and are also some of the oldest poems by women anywhere.

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A gatha is a style in which the poetic nature lies in the rhythm and cadence of the syllables rather than in end rhythms. A gatha is brief, often only two stanzas of 16 syllables each. Though using few words, the poems express the deeply felt spiritual experiences of the nuns. One common theme contrasts the spiritual life as a nun with that of being a housewife. For example, one nun writes about the joy of her newfound freedom from the drudgery of kitchen chores (the freedom from mortar and pestle) as well as the freedom from her bad husband (I.11). Several poems recall the exact moment of the nun’s mystical experience, the moment in which her mind broke through to a state of bliss. For example, one elderly nun’s poem focuses on a morning when she was going through the streets for alms, as both Buddhist monks and nuns historically did each morning. On this particular morning, her old legs failed her, and she fell to the ground. While lying there, her mindfulness of her frail and failing body touched off, in contrast, a deep sense of freedom of her mind. In another poem (II.3), a nun talks about cutting passion and aversion with a chop of a knife, leaving herself in a state of bliss. A nun named Uttama speaks of how troubled she was before, even to the point of running away from home five times, until she became a nun under the instruction of a teaching nun. Having undertaken a prolonged session of meditation, she achieved a breakthrough on the eighth day. While the Theri named Dantika was meditating deep in the woods, she watched an elephant obeying its mahout. Her reflective comparison of the taming of the wild elephant to the taming of her passions sparked her enlightenment. In Buddhism, one understanding of nirvana is the extinguishing of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. In one poem (V.10), the nun first laments about years of struggle without a breakthrough. Then she joyfully relates how at bedtime she slowly puts out her oil lamp by turning down the wick. As the flame slowly fades, she experiences the extinction of her own mental flames. The “nirvana” of the little lamp leads to her own spiritual nirvana experience. As in the much later haiku poems of Japanese Zen, the poems of these early women draw us into their own, deeply felt spiritual transformations. Roy C. Amore See also: Buddhism: Nuns, Theravada; Pajapati; Women in Early Buddhism; Zen Further Reading Hallisey, Charles. Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Murcott, Susan. First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 2006. Murcott, Susan. The First Buddhist Women: Translations and Commentaries on the Therigatha. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 1991.

W O M E N I N E A R LY B U D D H I S M There were two main spiritual traditions in India around 2,500 years ago. One was the Brahmanic Hindu tradition, which centered on sacred sacrificial rituals



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in which priests (brahmins) chanted verses from the Vedas while conducting offerings to the various Gods and Goddesses. Only males from the brahmin caste were qualified to be priests, and only the three upper social castes were allowed to attend the most sacred rituals. In contrast, the other spiritual tradition, known to us as the Disciple (Sravaka) or Ascetic tradition, was open to any social caste and to both male and female disciples. Buddhism arose from this Disciple tradition, and as such its women adherents were able to participate fully in religious practices. Most women in India at the time of the Buddha, around 2,500 years ago, did not have an easy life or equal status. Many were servants, some were slaves or courtesans, and those who lived the “householder” life were expected to serve and obey the males. As the Hindu law book Manu mandates, young women were to obey their fathers, wives were to obey their husbands, and widows were to obey their grown sons. It is unlikely that the gender subordination of women changed dramatically in early Buddhist societies, but there were some significant improvements. One important difference was that Buddhist teachings tried to end the discrimination against the lowest social classes and castes. Buddha, like Jesus later, went against traditional practice when he accepted water from a low-caste woman at a well. He taught that one’s conduct and character, rather than one’s birth status, made one pure or impure. This would have been a liberating teaching for lower-caste persons, whether male or female, but lower-caste women suffered from both gender and caste discrimination. Another improvement for women was that they now, as Buddhists, had the option of departing the householder life and entering the monastic order for females, the bhikkhuni sangha. This provided a refuge for widows, orphan girls, impoverished women, or women in an abusive home. Widows have traditionally been regarded as inauspicious in Hinduism, but by becoming a nun, a Buddhist widow’s status, in sharp contrast, became that of a respected holy person. It also provided a respected institution for women who desired a life devoted full time to spiritual development. Several Buddhist women who entered monastic life were so advanced in their spiritual achievements, and so skilled as poets, that their poems about their enlightenment experiences were included in two sections of the Buddhist canon. One such collection is the Apadana, and the other, more famous collection is a separate book known as the Therigatha, the “Poems of the Theri” (senior female monks). Many laywomen gained great respect for their material contributions to the poor and the sick or to Buddhist monastic life. One such example is Visakha, a wealthy laywoman who gave such things as food for the poor, medicines for the sick, support to medical clinics, and robes for the nuns. Other women, such as Queen Mallika or the nun Dhammadinna engaged the Buddha in religious discourse and were not expected to keep quiet in public as in many traditional societies. The Buddha himself is said to have praised the words of instruction uttered by Dhammadinna, saying that they were consistent with what he would have answered to the questions. Queen Mallika, in keeping with the Buddhist denunciation of animal

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sacrifices, is credited with talking her husband into forgoing the traditional royal duty of sponsoring an impressive ritual of animal sacrifices. Beside the more lofty roles played by outstanding laywomen benefactors and spiritually advanced bhikkhunis, most Buddhist women practiced their Buddhism in more everyday ways, such as offering food to the monks and nuns who made the alms rounds each morning. And, as Buddhism took on more of the trappings of other institutionalized religions, women were quite active in participating in the devotional services (pujas) at stupas, Bodhi trees, and shrines. Along with the males, but perhaps seated or standing separately, they put their palms together in front of themselves, in the anjali position, and bowed before monks, nuns, and the Buddha images as a way of paying respect to the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. In one way, the options open to Buddhist women in the early centuries were better than for many of their modern counterparts, for regrettably the Buddhist order of nuns has died out in many countries. Roy C. Amore See also: Buddhism: Gender Roles; Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Pajapati; Therigatha; Hinduism: Caste; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Bodhi, Bhikkhu, trans. “Bhikkhuni-samyutta—Discourses of the Ancient Nuns.” Alliance for Bhikkhunis, 1997. http://www.bhikkhuni.net/bhikkhuni-samyutta-discourses-of​ -the-ancient-nuns/. Caplow, Zenshi Florence, and Reigetsu Susan Moon, eds. The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women. Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2013. Engelmajer, Pascale. Women in Pali Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Paths in Mutual Dependence. New York: Routledge, 2015. Hecker, Hellmuth. “Buddhist Women at the Time of the Buddha.” Translated by Sister Khema. Alliance for Bhikkhunis, 2010. http://www.bhikkhuni.net/buddhist-women​ -at-the-time-of-the-buddha/. Tisdale, Sallie. Women of the Way: Discovering 2,500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom. New York: Harper One, 2007.

WOMEN’S BUDDHIST NETWORKS Organized networks of women have been integral to the success and spread of Buddhist traditions since the religion’s origins in northern India in the fifth century BCE. Numerous women, including Mahapajapati Gotami, the Buddha’s stepmother, and Yashodhara¯, his former wife, were among the first women in history to join a celibate religious order with similar social standing to their ordained male counterparts. The songs and poems of their enlightenment utterances constitute some of the earliest extant poetry composed by women. Many of the Buddha’s first patrons included respected queens, noblewomen, courtesans, and prostitutes alike. According to early Sri Lankan chronicles, as Buddhism began to spread outside of India in the third century BCE, its earliest missionaries included Sanˇghamitta¯



Women’s Buddhist Networks

(ca. 308–229 BCE), the enlightened nun and daughter of Emperor Asoka. She traveled south to Sri Lanka to ordain Anula, consort of the Lankan prince regent, and her retinue of virtuous noblewomen (Oldenburg 1879). Contemporarily, global women’s Buddhist organizations like the Sakyadhı¯ta¯ (Sanskrit: Daughters of the Buddha) International Association of Buddhist Women formed in 1987 by Asian and Western ordained and lay Buddhist practitioners and scholars, continue to fight for gender equality in Buddhist institutions across various communities and practice traditions. In 433 CE, 11 fully ordained nuns (bhikkhunis) sailed from Sri Lanka to China during the Southern Song dynasty and introduced the dual ordination for Chinese nuns (Heirman 2010), where it soon flourished and spread to Taiwan and South Korea. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, as well as in other Theravadin and Tibetan practice contexts, the full ordination lineage for women either lapsed or was never available in the first place. In many Theravadin countries, some nonordained renunciant roles for women exist, such as the maechii in Thailand and the thilashin in Myanmar. Due to the lack of a viable ordination lineage for women in Theravada traditions, Buddhist women have in recent times come together in organizations that cut across distinctions of nationality and Buddhist practice tradition and work toward reinstating the bhikkhuni (fully ordained nun) lineage and addressing issues of gender inequality and discrimination in Buddhist communities and institutions. Sakyadhı¯ta¯ is an organization that demonstrates the mobilization of Buddhist women and men across national boundaries and practice traditions. It was formed following the first International Conference on Buddhist Women, which convened in Bodhgaya, India, in 1987 (Tsomo 1988). Such organizations integrate key concepts and monastic communities to organize for the resuscitation of a women’s ordination lineage and to raise awareness of gender subordination in Buddhist institutions (Ohlson 2004). In 1996, Sakyadhı¯ta¯ organized the first international ordination for 10 Theravada nuns from Sri Lanka, which was held in Sarnath, India. Ten South Korean Mahayana nuns conferred the ordination, which was then followed by another ordination conferred by Theravada monks (DeSilva 2004). Since then, there have been a number of ordinations for women throughout India, Sri Lanka, Australia, North America, and Southeast Asia. Tyler Lehrer See also: Buddhism: Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Mahayana; Nuns, Theravada; Ordination; Pajapati; Therigatha; Women in Early Buddhism Further Reading De Silva, Ranjani. “Reclaiming the Robe: Reviving the Bhikkhunı¯ Order in Sri Lanka.” In Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements, by Karma ­Lekshe Tsomo, 233–52. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Heirman, Ann. “Fifth Century Chinese Nuns: An Exemplary Case.” Buddhist Studies Review 27, no. 1 (2010): 61–76.

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Mohr, Thea, and Jampa Tsedroen, eds. Dignity and Discipline: Reviving Full Ordination for Buddhist Nuns. Boston: Wisdom, 2010. Ohlson, Caren I. “Resistance without Borders: An Exploration of Buddhist Nuns across Cultures.” In Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements, edited by Karma Lekshe Tsomo, 119–35. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Oldenberg, Hermann, trans. The Dîpavam·sa: An Ancient Buddhist Historical Record. London: Williams and Norgate, 1879. Tsomo, Karma Lekshe, ed. Sakyadhita: Daughters of the Buddha. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1988.

ZEN Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word chan, an abbreviated form of chan’na, which is the Chinese transliteration of the Sanskrit dhyana ­(meditation). The Zen tradition was established on the core teachings of innate wisdom uncovered through meditation as the way of vigilance and self-discovery that helps unearth one’s essential nature: the Buddha-nature. As such, there should not be an essential difference in the spiritual experiences available to human beings, regardless of class, race, and gender. Yet, Japanese Zen Buddhism has historically been a predominantly male tradition whose records refer to patriarchs’ Zen teachings, largely oblivious of the few female Zen masters, the numerous nuns, nunneries, and lay female practitioners and followers that have historically participated, alongside men, in the spread and refinement of this Buddhist school. In Japan there are at present three main Zen lineages: the Rinzai, the Oˉbaku, and the Soˉtoˉ school. From the introduction of Buddhism to Japan in the sixth century throughout the Heian period (794–1185), women belonging to the upper elite played a significant role as Buddhist patrons: female monarchs like Empress Koˉmyoˉ (701–760) and rich laywomen’s donations secured much financial support to nuns in the female monasteries that were included in the state-sponsored temple system. A dominant figure in the history of Japanese Zen is Doˉgen (1200–1253), a Soˉtoˉ Zen master. Doˉgen lived in a time when the spread of Confucian values and ideas of women’s “three obediences” (to father, husband, and son) were gradually combined with the Buddhist notion of “the five obstructions” hindering women’s salvation in Buddhism. As a consequence, hierarchical structures, including religious organizations, became increasingly male dominated. Despite the prevailing culture placing a variety of restrictions to religious spaces and roles on women while barring them from reaching higher levels of spiritual enlightenment, Doˉgen unambiguously articulates in his text Bendoˉwa (1231) that male and female practitioners are equal. In the impassionate chapter “Raihai-tokuzui” (1240) of his work the Shoˉboˉgenzoˉ (written between 1231 and 1253), he supports the spiritual capability of women in that the desire to enter Buddhahood is not limited to men but is also among women, as all sentient beings without exception have Buddha-nature. However, Doˉgen’s eagerness did not solve the contradiction of Japanese Zen women having equal capacity of awakening but limited entry to ordination and access to master roles or higher ranks. A second dominant figure in Japanese Zen is Hakuin Ekaku (1686–1769), an 18th-century Rinzai Zen master. Compared to Doˉgen, Hakuin had no such written



Zen

defense or praise of women, but the community that grew up around him accepted women readily. One of his famous students was Satsujo, a laywoman and great disciple of Hakuin. Several stories or koan used in Rinzai Zen practice tell of this woman, who allegedly sat on the sutras after attaining enlightenment because she understood them as being not special. There are various details of her encounters with her teacher or with other practitioners. In most of these encounters, she excelled in Zen ideas and values. Entering modernity, alongside nuns and lay practitioners, another group of women in Zen Buddhism has made itself known: Zen priests’ wives. The Meiji (1868–1912) government in 1872 issued a law allowing priests (and in 1873 also nuns) to eat meat, get married, and have free choice of tonsure. Prior to the cabinet decree of 1872, however, temple inheritance was an old custom often accepted and legitimated in many Buddhist orders, despite the members professing celibacy and renunciation of secular married life. Zen Buddhism was the most resistant toward this sort of laicization, but the institutionalization of married priesthood empirically legitimated as social facts the inheritance of the profession and the temple. Marriage has since become a norm for most Zen priests, making the jitei fujin (temple wife, also called jizoku, temple family) an integral and indispensable part of temple administration. This, however, has come with struggles and difficulties for women in a rigid patriarchal system: their lives are locked into the traditional virtues of the mother and wife whose primary role is to bear and bring up a boy as a future priest-to-be. The temple wife embodies the complexities of a relationship that is bound by a fictional principle of priestly renunciation and has to adjust to former categorizations of temple women being taboo. While priestly marriage is acknowledged in the outside world, Buddhist orders remain unable to affirm the fact of marriage within themselves. Even today, temple wives are sometimes referred to as obasan (aunt) rather than okusan (wife), emphasizing the institutional rather than the marital status of the wife. Priest’s wives often have to give up their own career to live with their parentsin-law and have to regard their home as the shared property of the local community. This places a lot of pressure on wives, who need to balance between being in a married couple and being representatives of an institutional temple family. Renunciation is still a practice among Zen practitioners, though renouncers are extremely few and mostly women. For a Zen nun to marry and not be tonsured means a return to the secular world and therefore counters the strict idea of renunciation. However, although females may be qualified and interested in taking over a temple, biological and social hierarchical orders implicitly make male priests the only suitable instructors and temple owners. Temple wives are not renouncers, nuns, nor female lay followers. While laywomen have been present and part of actual temple life almost from the beginning as practitioners, donors, and followers, temple wives must stand aside since they cannot take an active role in rituals or preaching, even if they want to. This poses an issue of gender inequality in that it forces male priests’ spouses into an ambiguous position that renders them powerless. Starting with numerous Soˉtoˉ Zen temple wives in the late 1990s, a movement of laywomen, temple wives, academics, nuns, and practitioners has come together

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from all over Japan, transcending distinctions of their various schools and orders. They have been voicing criticism of present-day Zen Buddhism to raise awareness of the problem of gender inequality and seek institutional reform that implies the involvement of women and men who hold themselves apart from gender problems. Paola Cavaliere See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Buddhism in the United States; Gender Roles; Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Mahayana; Ordination; Tea Ceremony; Spirituality: Meditation Further Reading Arai, Paula Kane Robinson. Women Living Zen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Faure, Bernard. The Read Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Kawahashi, Noriko. “Women Challenging the ‘Celibate’ Buddhist Order: Recent Cases of Progress and Regress in the Soˉtoˉ School.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 44, no. 1 (2017): 55–74.

Christianity

INTRODUCTION The 47 articles in this section cover the earliest days of Christianity through the present and follow its spread across the globe. Starting in small and diverse groups known collectively as the Jesus movement, Christianity at its earliest was largely open to, and supported by, women as well as men. Women participated as disciples, apostles, missionaries, martyrs, and material supporters, as we read in “Women in Early Christianity.” Extant yet often fragmented texts from this period relate the narratives and ideas of numerous groups, only a few of which were included in what came to be the canon of the Christian Bible. In contrast to the canonical scriptures, where women are seen on the peripheries, women were central in a number of apocryphal texts, as noted in the entry “Apocrypha.” As Christianity advanced into an increasingly powerful and institutionalized church, women were largely excluded from leadership, yet they continued to engage in pastoral care as deacons and priests’ wives. However, with the rise of unmarried priests in the Middle Ages (celibacy became a requirement of the priesthood in 1139), women’s roles within the hierarchy were further diminished. The Middle Ages saw the further incorporation of folk traditions into Christianity among the common people. This would later impact women, as authorities through the early modern period sought to purify Christianity of magical and nature elements often associated with women, who served their communities as folk healers and midwives. Also increasing in the Middle Ages was the veneration of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, female saints, and Christ with feminine aspects. These features of medieval piety are related in the entries “Mother of God,” “Mary Magdalene,” and “Saints.” The Feminine Divine within esoteric Christian mysticism is discussed in “Sophia,” and “Mystics” discusses female Christian mystics. “Middle Ages” provides an overview of the rise of chastity and mysticism as features of medieval women’s piety and of women’s growing involvement in monasticism as founders, leaders, and nuns. Monastic women, whether dedicated by their families, joining voluntarily, or founding and running monasteries (see “Abbesses”), lacked clerical authority and were often dependent on male clergy for their organization, rules of conduct, and oversight. Despite these limitations, monastic life was seen by some as a welcome alternative to marriage and motherhood in an era when few women worked outside the home. Monastic life also offered some women educational opportunities rarely available elsewhere. The writings of medieval monastic women are important to our understanding of their roles, motivations, and faith practices, as related in “Women Writers of the Middle Ages” and “Education.”

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Further articulating these developments are the articles “Monasticism, Medieval Women” and “Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity” and entries focused on particular medieval women: “Julian of Norwich” and “Hildegard of Bingen.” “Monastic Life” and “Chastity” both describe in some detail the practices of women in monastic communities and women’s ascetic practices within the home. “Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious” and “Roman Catholic Women Religious” provide the same with a focus on the monasticism of women in these traditions. “Monasticism, Contemporary Women” relates changes occurring in the practice of modern women’s monasticism as a result of challenges in the 20th and 21st centuries, including secularization and the church’s response to it. And, “Ministers” discusses changes in various Christian denominations regarding women’s ordination, while “Founders” tells the stories of women, like Ann Lee of the Shakers, who founded new Christian denominations. Women’s faith practices and roles in the churches are also related in region-specific entries, including “Christianity in the United States,” “Christianity in Latin America,” “Christianity in Europe,” and “Christianity in Africa.” Other articles, such as “Mormonism” and “Orthodox Christianity,” discuss women in specific branches. “African American Women” discusses womanist Christianity and the importance of the black churches as community support systems for African American women. For the most part, entries relate how women have chosen to practice their faith, whether inside or outside of the institutional church. However, several entries discuss restrictions on women and rationales used to justify them. “The Fall” relates a story from scripture that has been widely used in Christian societies to justify the subordination of women. Interestingly, this story, recorded in Genesis 2:3, was not the only one circulating in the ancient world that blamed women for death and destruction. Perhaps the most famous rival to the story of the Fall is that of Pandora’s box (ca. 700 BCE), according to which the woman Pandora brings disease, death, and more into the world when she opens a jar (see Hesiod 2009). Other entries, including “Chastity,” “Fundamentalism,” “Clothing,” “Sex and Gender,” “Homosexuality,” “Marriage and Divorce,” “Widowhood,” and “Abortion,” relate specific topics and issues of importance to women in Christian societies. General Bibliography—Christianity Bitel, Lisa, and Felice Lifshitz, eds. Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Bourgeault, Cynthia. The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2010. Brooks, Joanna, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Hannah Wheelwright, eds. Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Clark, Elizabeth A. Women in the Early Church. Wilmington, DE: M. Glazier, 1983. Clark, Elizabeth A., and Herbert Richardson. Women and Religion: The Original Sourcebook of Women in Christian Thought. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. Conn, Marie A. Noble Daughters: Unheralded Women in Western Christianity, 13th to 18th Centuries. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000.



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Coon, Lynda L. Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Craig, Leigh-Ann. Wandering Women and Holy Matrons. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009. Daynes, Kathryn M. More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840–1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Dickens, Andrea Janelle. The Female Mystic: Great Women Thinkers of the Middle Ages. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Eisen, Ute E. Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Evidence. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life. London: Routledge, 1989. Hesiod. Theogony and Works and Days. Translated by M. L. West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Jansen, Katherine Ludwig. The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Jantzen, Grace. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. King, Karen L., ed. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000. Kraemer, Ross Shepard, and Mary Rose D’Angelo, eds. Women and Christian Origins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Margolis, Nadia. An Introduction to Christine de Pizan. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. Martin, Phyllis. Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Matter, Ann. “Discourses of Desire: Sexuality and Christian Women’s Visionary Narratives.” Journal of Homosexuality 18 (1989/1990): 119–31. McNamara, Jo Ann, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Mooney, Catherine, ed. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Oduyoye, Mercy Amba. Beads and Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004. Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve and the Serpent. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Raab, Kelly. When Women Become Priests: The Catholic Women’s Ordination Debate. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Robert, Dana L. Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002. Salinas, Maximiliano. “Christianity, Colonialism and Women in Latin America in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries.” Social Compass 39, no. 4 (1992): 525–42. Sawyer, Deborah F. Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries. London: Routledge, 1996. Solomon, Dorothy Allred. The Sisterhood: Inside the Lives of Mormon Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation. 5th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2011. Torjeson, Karen, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. Ursic, Elizabeth. Women, Ritual, and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. n.p.: Orbis, 2013.

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ABBESSES Abbeys and convents were first established in Europe as places of contemplation and study where nuns and monks could pray for the souls of deceased kinsfolk in purgatory and venerate the Virgin Mary for both her chastity and her maternal love for Christ. During the Early Middle Ages or Dark Ages (ca. 400–1000 CE), European convents were led by the most senior nun, the abbess, or, in smaller nunneries, the prioress. Besides her exceptional religious zeal and decade or more of experience, the abbess frequently had noble blood, which legitimized her right to exert authority over lower-born nuns, like a high-status mother over her daughters and maidservants. Early abbesses included Hilda, a famous poet and the niece of seventh-century Saxon king Edwin, who established Whitby Abbey in 657 CE; Scholastica (480–543), who used her inheritance to establish a convent in Italy and became an expert on early Christian religious texts; and Leoba and Walburga, who assisted the missionary work of Bishop Boniface, their kinsman, in eighth-century Germany (Schmitt and Kolzer 1996). Deeming themselves subjects, not clergy, pre-Reformation abbesses and their dependents usually remained within their abbey once Christianity had established itself. Typical tasks for abbesses during the High Middle Ages (ca. 1000–1300) and late Middle Ages (1300–1500) included delegating routine chores to the servant-nuns from poor backgrounds, managing the convent’s finances, attending daily prayers under a priest’s direction, caring for the sick, writing religious songs or proverbs, and maintaining political neutrality by neither endorsing nor criticizing royal policies that contradicted papal infallibility. Sixteenth-century English abbesses like Catherine Bulkeley (fl. 1535–1539) and Margaret Vernon (d. ca. 1546) generally cooperated with the secular authorities in return for peaceful retirement after Henry VIII’s schism from Rome and 1536–1540 Dissolution of the Monasteries. However, a few older nuns, including Isabel Whitehead of Arthington (d. 1587, while imprisoned at York Castle), stayed in England until Elizabeth’s reign, performing itinerant charitable works, collecting alms, and healing poor women’s spiritual and physical afflictions in the priests’ absence. Many English recusant women (so called for their refusal to accept royal church supremacy) joined existing convents in Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy, or in the case of Benedictine abbess Anne Neville (1605–1689), established their own overseas abbeys as a mirror image of their confiscated ancestral estates. From about 1560 to 1700, these women aided the Counter-Reformation mission to reconvert countries under Protestant control by commemorating martyred priests and perpetuating pre-Reformation saints’ days. In addition, some 17th-century nuns actively involved themselves with missionary and scholarly work, including Mary Ward (1585–1645), who established schools for the poor and founded a secret convent in Yorkshire; Francisca Josefa del Castillo (1671–1742), who gained fame in Colombia for her devotional writings; Mexican scientist and composer Juana Ines de la Cruz (1645–1695), who argued for female education; and Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajel (1568–1614), who was imprisoned in London for leading a community of female converts. During the early 19th century, nuns fleeing the French Revolution, such as abbess Lucy Blyde (1729–1816) and the English Benedictines from Cambrai,



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took advantage of the emerging Catholic emancipation movement to establish new abbeys and convent schools in Britain. Previously, 18th-century English recusants worshipped secretly at home or joined overseas convents, while others, including Carmelite prioress Frances Dickinson, established communities in the United States. Aware that Catholicism’s long-term survival depended on properly educating the younger generation, mid-19th-century abbesses, including British-born nuns trained on the Continent, established schools in England for the children of wealthy Catholics fearful of the European revolutions of 1848 and for newly arrived Irish families fleeing starvation in their homeland. Goals of Victorian and Edwardian nunneries were to provide educational opportunities, a surrogate family unit for the women who joined, and a simple yet spiritually fulfilling lifestyle. However, for some, there were long-standing rumors of repression, corruption, enslavement, and abuse. Like their European counterparts, British, Irish, and American abbesses frequently established hospitals, farms, and laundries to employ and shelter destitute, sick, disabled, impoverished, or elderly people as well as orphans. These charitable services were, variously, intended to ensure the convent’s self-sufficiency, reverse an apparent nationwide moral decline, improve living conditions to maintain support from the poorest members of the Catholic congregation, and promote nuns’ carebased work as a vocation distinct from the priesthood. N. K. Crown See also: Christianity: Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious; Chastity; Christianity in Europe; Education; Hildegard of Bingen; Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Women in the Reformation Further Reading Alcock, John. The Abbaye of the Holy Ghost. London: Wynkyn De Worde, 1497. British Library STC/13609. Lindley, Susan, and Eleanor Stebner. The Westminster Handbook to Women in American Religious History. London: Westminster John Knox, 2008. Neville, Anne. “English Benedictine Nuns in Flanders, 1598–1687.” Catholic Record Society. Vol. 6. Miscellanea V. Edited by Mary Rumsey. London: W. H. Smith, 1909, 1–72. https:// wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/publications-static/pdfs/Annalsof5communitiesJan09.pdf. Partington, Anne. “A Brief Narrative of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray, 1795.” Catholic Record Society, Vol. 13. Misc. VIII: Records of the English Benedictine Nuns at Cambrai 1620–1793. Edited by Cecilia Heywood. London: Catholic Record Society, 1913, 20–73. https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/publications-static/pdfs/CambraiBens.pdf. Schmitt, Miriam, and Linda Kolzer. Medieval Women Monastics. Collegeville, PA: Liturgical Press, 1996.

ABORTION Women have terminated pregnancies by means of abortifacients or other methods throughout recorded history and across cultures and for reasons that include physical considerations, such as the health of the mother, or social considerations, such

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as an unwanted pregnancy or lack of resources. While popular beliefs in several religious denominations are often at odds with abortion, religious and sacred texts generally do not specifically mention the practice. The Bible does not refer to abortion directly but contains passages that may refer to abortion when taken out of context, notably Exodus 20:13, prohibiting murder, and the oft-quoted Deuteronomy 30:19, on choosing life, and Exodus 21:22, which addresses the need for a financial penalty in cases where a woman suffers a miscarriage as a result of a scuffle. At the time of early Christianity, most religions in its region of origin allowed women to have abortions or kill newborns by exposure to the elements. The prevailing Aristotelian view was that a male fetus became animated or endowed with a human soul after 40 days and a female fetus after 90 days, leaving ample room for abortion up to that point, and this view was also held among Christians. It wasn’t until the second century that Christian philosophers began to denounce abortion, starting with Barnabas’s epistle, which condemned both abortion and infanticide, and in the writings of Clement of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Saint Ambrose, Saint John Chrysostom, and others. Beginning in the fifth century with Saint Augustine, and continuing with Saint Thomas Aquinas and others, the earlier Pagan view returned, namely that only abortion of an animated or “ensouled” fetus was murder. The interpretation that abortion in the early stage of pregnancy and under certain conditions is permitted has continued to exist. For example, the Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez (d. early 17th century) stated that he and his contemporary theologians approved of early abortion to save the life of the woman (Macguire 2001, 36). From the 17th century onward, abortion was generally forbidden by the Christian church. Pope Leo XIII issued a decree in 1886 prohibiting all procedures that directly ended the life of a fetus, and this became the dominant view. Pope Francis (b. 1936), however, has softened the approach and has stated that priests can show forgiveness to a woman who has had an abortion. While abortion is generally not permitted in Christian traditions today, for many women, Christian religious doctrine is weighed against secular decision making, and the use of both contraception and abortion is evident in the low birth rates in many Christian nations in Europe and Latin America. Where patriarchal and religious values combine to encourage production of offspring, abortion is prohibited by the church and production of large numbers of children highly valued. This view is most strongly present in the so-called dominion theology, which is part of the radical right-wing fringe of Protestantism in the United States, and has sometimes encouraged acts of violence against abortion providers and women seeking to end pregnancies. Brigitte H. Bechtold See also: Buddhism: Abortion; Christianity: Fundamentalism; Sex and Gender Further Reading Juergensmeyer, Mark. “Christian Violence in America.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558 (1998): 88–100.



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Lindemann, Andreas. “‘Do Not Let a Woman Destroy the Unborn Babe in Her Belly’: Abortion in Ancient Judaism and Christianity.” Studia Theologica 49 (1995): 253–71. Macguire, Daniel C. Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. Schenker, J. G. 2000. “Women’s Reproductive Health: Monotheistic Religious Perspectives.” International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics 70, no. 1 (2000): 77–86. Stephens, Moira, Christopher F. C. Jordens, Ian H. Kerridge, and Rachel A. Ankeny. “Religious Perspectives on Abortion and a Secular Response.” Journal of Religion and Health 49 (2010): 513–35.

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN In recent years, African American Christian women have self-identified as one of the most religious populations in the United States (Pew Research Center 2009). This deep sense of personal spiritual commitment is one with a complex history of enslavement, conversion, transformation, growth, and centuries of perseverance in the face of racial and social subjugation. African American Christianity is, in part, one of many indelible marks of slavery that is still present on the American religious landscape. From the first captivity contact with the West that Africans experienced in the 16th century, missionary efforts were made to convert slaves (who largely adhered to traditional African faith practices or Islam) to Christianity (Diouf 1998). While the motivation for quick, forced conversion was rooted in the fear that captives would unify and rebel in their shared African heritage, Christianity played the unanticipated role of helping to bring together diverse populations of slaves in a common faith tradition. With few firsthand accounts of early slave religion in the United States, scholars can only speculate that the early practices of these communities were syncretistic—melding traditional African faith practices with newly learned Christian rituals, for a decidedly unique Christian practice. When considering the influential roles of women in African spirituality—as mediums, healers, and priestesses in traditions like Yoruba and Vodun—it is possible that women played a more public role in the religious lives of these early communities. Through the century of revivalist religious movements during the First and Second Great Awakenings (1730s–1830s), Christian denominations like the Methodist and Baptist churches gained many African American followers. These movements were especially significant for women, as their race and gender continually placed African American women at the bottom of the social ladder. Religious revival meetings, however, promised (though did not always deliver) egalitarianism, affording women the opportunity to hear religious messages and to have religious experiences, regardless of their race or gender. As African American interpretations of Christianity developed, communities formed in which men took roles as leaders and preachers, and women became responsible for religious instruction of children in the home. While still enslaved, African American women sometimes participated in the religious child-rearing of the white Christian families for whom they worked.

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While these more conventional gendered roles were prevalent, there are notable women who were empowered to preach to fellow believers, despite resistance from their male (and sometimes other female) counterparts. One celebrated example from this period is Jarena Lee (1783–1864), a freeborn member of the African Methodist Episcopal church (AME), whose requests to preach were at first denied by the well-known preacher Richard Allen (1760–1831) (Tucker 2016). Lee was only permitted by Allen to become a circuit (traveling) preacher after exhibiting what were believed to be convincing signs that God had chosen her to be the first female preacher in the tradition. She would go on to travel thousands of miles, delivering her messages in the northern and southern United States and Canada during the racially complicated period before the American Civil War (1861–1865). Lee was not alone in her efforts to prove that “the Savior died for the woman as well as for the man,” with Zilpha Elaw (ca. 1790–ca. 1870), Julia Foote (1823–1900), and Amanda Smith Berry (1837–1915) also finding inspiration to take on more public religious roles in the African American Methodist movement (Chaves 1999, 68). Although questioned and marginalized for their unconventional religious authority, female preachers undoubtedly helped to shape and grow historically black churches (like the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, National Baptist Convention, and later some Holiness and Pentecostal churches) through their charismatic preaching and extensive missionary efforts. By the 19th century, the relationship between slavery and Christianity became more proble­matic, as both slave owners and abolitionists attempted to use Christian scripture and teachings to support their causes (a dissonance that President Abraham Lincoln voiced in his second inaugural address in 1865). African American rights and spirituality were thus very much at stake by the advent of the Civil War, as evidenced in the work of abolitionist Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883) and Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Former slave Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883) became a leader in the abolitionist and first wave feminist Tubman (ca. 1820–1913), who movements in the United States. She was a compelling used their Christian faith as speaker and activist with a message of social justice support for their efforts to end grounded in the Christian gospel. (Library of Congress)



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slavery in the United States. The postwar Great Migration of freed southern blacks into northern cities raised further questions about the relationship between race and Christian practice at that time and the postslavery role of women in black churches. Today’s thriving female African American Christian population is in many ways the legacy of historically black churches that were founded in the antebellum era and gained momentum during the period of Reconstruction following the war. For some Christian denominations, like the AME and AME Zion churches, women gained a public voice as the traditions grew, with eventual female ordination and inclusion as bishops in the 21st century, as in the case of AME bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie (b. 1947), who was ordained in 2000. This path to leadership was laid in the opening decades of this period, with female pastors like Florence Spearing Randolph (1866–1951) defying traditional gendered roles in their church communities. For other denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention, female leadership has been called into question even in recent years. While formal female ordination was introduced in the 1960s in that denomination, religious conservatism spelled an end for the practice in 2000. In the past several decades, African American women have undoubtedly found the strongest foothold in Holiness and Pentecostal movements, which continue to offer them spaces to preach, educate, and act as healers. For some, like former slave Lizzie Robinson (1860–1945), who with her husband, Edward, founded the Church of God in Christ (the largest African American Pentecostal church today), authority came through coleadership as well as more traditional laywoman work in fund-raising, music ministries, communal food preparation, and missions. For others, like Ida B. Robinson (1891–1946), who founded the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, charismatic leadership meant preaching the gospel as independent leaders who supported and propelled women’s religious rights. The civil rights era of the mid-20th century was one that underscored the views of black male preachers like Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) and Howard Thurman (1899–1981). As founders, financial supporters, and sometimes leaders of black churches, however, many women also had prominent voices in church politics and civil rights in the United States. For example, educator Mary McLeod Bethune (1875–1955) used her training from the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to bolster her activism, while Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) used African American spirituals to link her political action with Christian spirituality. The multilayered conditions of slavery, conversion, religious innovation, and gendered norms have created a variety of African American women’s Christian experiences. While their presence in historically black churches is profound, African American women have also played significant parts in Christian denominations beyond the evangelical and mainline in the United States in the past several centuries. As Shakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Episcopalians, and Catholics, African American women have been present in the American Christian experience in many settings beyond historically black churches. With more than 80 percent of African American women claiming that religion is very important

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to them, female presence and perspectives are alive and well, informed by and continuing to shape American Christianity (Pew Research Center 2009). Emily Bailey See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Yoruba Religion; Christianity: Christianity in the United States; Founders of Christian Denominations; Missionaries; Mormonism; Protestant Denominations; Women in the Reformation; Spirituality: Syncretism Further Reading Chaves, Mark. Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Diouf, Sylviana A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Pew Research Center. “A Religious Portrait of African Americans.” Last modified January 30, 2009. http://www.pewforum.org/2009/01/30/a-religious-portrait-of-African Americans/. Raboteau, Albert J. African American Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tucker, Ruth A. Extraordinary Women of Christian History: What We Can Learn from Their Struggles and Triumphs. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2016.

A N G L I C A N / E P I S C O PA L I A N W O M E N R E L I G I O U S In 16th-century England, King Henry VIII’s political and personal situation led to his denying the authority of the pope and creating the Church of England, also known as the Anglican church. Henry VIII also dissolved the monasteries, stripping them of their riches and banning cloistered religious life. Women religious either had to return to secular life or flee to Catholic mainland Europe to create convents abroad. For 300 years, the religious community life in England remained illegal until, under the auspices of the Oxford movement, it was restored as part of the mid-19th-century ecclesiastical revival of the Anglican church. The first Anglican woman to take life vows was Marion Hughes in 1841, and between 1845 and 1960, 90 female communities were established in England; in the United States, a parallel high-church movement in the Episcopal church (the American offspring of the Church of England) also led to 42 female foundations between 1845 and 1974. The early days of the communities were fraught with controversies: they based their restored monastic life on the pre-Reformation (and thus Catholic) model, and their devotional practices included such “heresies” for Anglicans as devotions to the Virgin Mary, meaning they were seen by many to be closet Catholics. Some early communities did indeed secede to Rome, while others remained Anglican but became known as Anglo-Papalists whose aim was reunion with Roman Catholicism; others based their strong sense of Anglican identity on the Book of Common Prayer as their touchstone. This tension between the Anglican communities and their Catholic heritage continues to exert an undeniable pull, and



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in 2012, 11 sisters of the Community of Saint Mary the Virgin (est. 1848, Oxford, England), one of the oldest and most influential of the Anglican communities, were received into full communion in the Catholic church. Anglican communities include enclosed communities, such as the Sisters of the Love of God (est. 1906, Oxford, England), who lead a contemplative life of prayer and rarely leave their convents, but the majority of Anglican and Episcopal orders combine active work with a life of prayer and worship. They have founded schools and hospitals, provided social care in Britain and the Americas, and established missions to the disadvantaged across the world. While religious motive was prominent in the revival, the early Anglican sisterhoods also offered opportunities of service in social and educational work, which were not readily available to women in 19th-century England. Anglican sisters were among those who accompanied Florence Nightingale to the Crimea and whose work was influential in raising both the standards and status of the nursing profession. During the first decades of the 20th century, the communities grew in both numbers and confidence, but despite their role in the worldwide spread of the Anglican Communion, the Anglican religious communities (ARC) are often referred to as “the best-kept secret of the Church of England,” and it was only in 1935 that they gained official recognition. The demographic of Anglican women religious has changed considerably over the 160 years of their existence: the social upheavals of two world wars; the emergence of state-funded training for teachers, nurses, and social workers; and latterly the acceptance of women for ordination as priests have all led to more opportunities for Anglican and Episcopalian women to live a life of service without joining a religious community. There has thus been a corresponding drop in the number of new professions, which is mirrored in the Catholic women’s communities. Even so, there has been a steady flow of novices into the ARC: in 2013, there were at least 1,057 Anglican women religious worldwide (Anglican Religious Communities 2013), and new convents are regularly founded. These are either closely allied to the traditional orders, such as the Benedictines, Augustinians, or Franciscans, or develop a completely autonomous identity. Recent independent communities include the Sisters of Jesus Way (est. 1979, Kirby, England) and the Sisters of the Incarnation (est. 1981, Australia). Amanda Haste See also: Christianity: Monastic Life; Monasticism, Contemporary Women; Roman Catholic Women Religious Further Reading Anglican Religious Communities. Anglican Religious Life 2014–15: A Yearbook of Religious Orders and Communities in the Anglican Communion. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2013. Losada, Isabel. New Habits: Today’s Women Who Choose to Become Nuns. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999. Mumm, Susan. Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Great Britain. London: Leicester University Press, 1999. Stebbing, Nicholas, ed. Anglican Religious Life: A Well-Kept Secret? Dublin: Dominican, 2003.

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A P O C RY P H A The Christian Apocrypha—the noncanonical Christian texts produced from the first century onward—encompasses a broad assortment of documents of diverse genres and from diverse communities and locations in the early Christian context. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that the documents reflect a wide range of attitudes about women and their roles in early Christian communities and femininity more broadly understood. What is most intriguing is the frequency with which these texts interact with female characters, feminine identity, and the issue of femaleness, especially when compared with the canonical Christian texts. One of the most prominent female figures within the documents is Mary of Magdala. In the canonical Christian gospels, Mary Magdalene is an important female figure who is the first to see the risen Jesus and is tasked with the job of informing the other disciples of his resurrection. In the Apocrypha, Mary becomes a more dominant figure. In fact, the only Christian gospel attributed to a woman is attributed to Mary and is known simply as the Gospel of Mary (ca. first or second century CE). In this text, it is revealed that the Savior gave Mary private instruction. The apostle Peter is disturbed by such an assertion and challenges Mary. Levi, however, comes to her defense, thereby affirming Mary’s status in the Christian community and the significance of her teaching for the community. Mary, as the apostle to the apostles, teaches the disciples that the gender/sex differences of the body are meaningless and temporary, as humans and the Divine are essentially genderless (King 2007). In another text, the Dialogue of the Savior (ca. second century and possibly redacted from several earlier works), Mary also takes a prominent role as the “woman who understood everything” (King 2007, 139, 11–13). In this document, she comes to understand the teachings of the Savior through dialogue with him alongside the male disciples. She stands as the male disciples’ equal. In the Gospel of Philip (ca. second to third century, containing a collection of proverbs), Jesus kisses Mary Magdalene, demonstrating his own love for her and her favored status among the disciples. The dialogue that follows insinuates that Jesus loved her more than the disciples because she had seen the light while the disciples remained in darkness. Further, in this text, it is possible that Mary should be understood as part of the salvific plan of reuniting male and female after the separation of the primordial union of Adam and Eve in the garden (McGuire 1999, 275–76). In light of such positive portraits of Mary as one who receives private instruction and teaches the male disciples, it might be surprising to note that there are also some rather difficult sayings related to women and even Mary in particular. One of the most challenging to interpret is the final saying (114) in the Gospel of Thomas (ca. first to second century, a collection of sayings of Jesus, likely taken from oral tradition): “Simon Peter said to them: ‘Mary should leave us, for females are not worthy of the life.’ Jesus said, ‘Look, I am going to guide her to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’” While Jesus does not



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agree with Peter’s assertion that Mary is not worthy of the life, neither does Jesus allow for Mary to enter that life in a state of femaleness. It appears that the author, requiring Mary to be made male to enter the kingdom, somehow links salvation and maleness. Interestingly, however, maleness does not directly correspond to biological maleness, as Mary is made male and yet is accepted in her biological state of femaleness (Stefaniw 2010, 344). Rather, maleness appears to be a set of qualities and behaviors, such as goodness and strength, rather than qualities and behaviors associated with femaleness in the ancient world, such as helplessness, passivity, and emotionality (Stefaniw 2010, 344–45). Certainly, this text is not an endorsement of qualities associated with femaleness in the ancient world, but neither is it an outright rejection of biological femaleness. The difficulty arises when one seeks to determine how texts such as these were read in their ancient contexts. It is difficult to offer overarching views about femaleness across the full corpus of these documents. Elaine Pagels points out the vast array of positive female imagery in the so-called Gnostic documents in the Christian Apocrypha and argues for a correlated positive view of women in the communities using these texts. Other scholars, including Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, have pointed out negative comments concerning femaleness in the corpus and argue that a devaluation of femaleness took place in the communities using the texts as well. More recently, a number of scholars, including Anne McGuire, argue that the texts exhibit more variation on the topic of women and femaleness more broadly, and the resulting social implications are far more varied and contextually conditioned as well. Further complicating matters, there is no way to definitively determine which texts were read together and which texts were excluded by a given community. Scholars, therefore, agree that the views of women propagated by these texts affected the communities in which the texts were used; they disagree, however, on the extent to which scholars can determine from these texts the status and roles of women in early Christianity. Stephanie Peek See also: Christianity: Mary Magdalene; Sex and Gender; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Islam: Hawwa; Judaism: Lilith Further Reading Ehrman, Bart, and Zlatko Pleše. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. King, Karen. “The Gospel of Mary with the Greek Gospel of Mary.” In The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer, 737–47. New York: Harper One, 2007. McGuire, Anne. “Women, Gender, and Gnosis in Gnostic Texts and Traditions.” In Women and Christian Origins, edited by Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo, 257–99. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Meyer, Marvin, ed. The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. New York: Harper One, 2007. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Stefaniw, Blosson. “Becoming Men, Staying Women: Gender Ambivalence in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Contexts.” Feminist Theology 18 (2010): 341–55.

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A R T, M O D E R N A N D C O N T E M P O R A R Y Christian women have contributed to every medium of modern and contemporary art. Some artists create work with explicitly religious themes, while others imbue their creative endeavors with spirituality in less direct ways. Some have created art that is embraced by the church and even used in corporate worship, while other women’s art is rejected by segments of Christendom because of the artist’s gender, theology, artistic projects, or elements of their identities. During the modern era (early 15th century to mid-20th century), women had varying degrees of independence and access to artistic training, and some works by women went unattributed or simply did not receive equal exposure to that of their male counterparts. Factors limiting Christian women’s opportunity to create art for religious contexts included geographic location, class, cultural background, and denomination. The Reformation led to changes affecting women specifically. Due to consistent patronage of art in the use of icons in religious practice, there was a well-established place for the visual arts in Catholic worship, both corporate and private. Conversely, iconoclasm in some Protestant streams has led to some exclusion of the arts in worship. Further, diverse doctrines regarding gender roles have at times discouraged or even prohibited women’s participation in the arts or in certain elements of corporate worship. Even when women were not given a voice within the church, many managed to share their perspectives through the arts. Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) was a devout Puritan woman who immigrated to the United States from England and was the first English-language author to be published in the North American colonies. Anne’s poetry describes her everyday experiences and the challenges she faced, yet every topic is filtered through her understanding of God and what he might be teaching her through these events. She writes about the role of women in her society, and though she generally accepts the Puritanical understanding of gender roles, she still advocates for more appreciation of women’s contributions. In the field of visual arts, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1653), an Italian Roman Catholic Baroque painter and the first woman admitted into Florence’s Accademia di Arte del Disegno, portrayed women’s diverse roles in biblical stories. Her most famous piece is Judith Slaying Holofernes, in which the Jewish heroine violently beheads the Assyrian general. Gentileschi takes a classic biblical scene and then draws from her personal experience of being raped by her artistic mentor, Agostino Tassi, and later bringing him to trial. In the painting, she casts her abuser as Holofernes and herself as Judith, making an ancient story a tool for personal catharsis and artistic expression. The 18th century ushered in changes affecting women’s place in the church and society in general, including the First Great Awakening, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. In addition to their participation in the visual and literary arts, Christian women became more involved in religious music, which eventually led to their greater participation in mainstream music as well. The Shakers are a Christian sect known for their egalitarian principles, among other distinctive beliefs. As early as 1747, women occupied leadership roles in



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the community, composed songs, developed the choreography of their distinctive dances, and coordinated other liturgical arts. Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), the founder of the Shakers, composed many songs herself and set a unique precedent for women’s spiritual leadership and artistic work within charismatic communities. In the 19th century, Christian women also used their artistic abilities outside of religious communities, often using new techniques and participating fully in the mainstream arts world. Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879), a deeply religious British woman, didn’t begin her career in photography until the age of 48; however, Cameron went on to become one of the greatest portraitists of the 19th century. Her techniques were unconventional, and the art community greeted her work with mixed responses. Not all Christian women had access to materials or opportunities, as many art forms were considered endeavors for the upper echelons of society. That did not prevent Christian women from creatively using the arts to express themselves and their faith. Harriet Powers (1837–1910) was an African American slave and accomplished folk artist who specialized in the creation of quilts. One of her most famous quilts is the Bible Quilt in which she combines West African motifs and images of biblical stories. Power’s work reimagines biblical narratives within the context of her experience and culture and offers a glimpse into both her personal life and her understanding of Christianity. In the contemporary era, Christian women from all denominations are active in all mediums of the visual and performing arts both within Christian communities and in the larger secular arts world. Within the Catholic church, much of the art created for the church is in the form of religious iconography often viewed as part of worship. Sister Concordia Scott (1924–2014) was a Benedictine nun and a celebrated sculptor whose work has been included in cathedrals and churches in the United States and across Europe. Her work often exclusively centers on Marian imagery. Within Protestantism, visual art often has a very different form within a church setting. At Bethel, a large charismatic megachurch in Redding, California, Theresa Dedmon leads a group called the Creative Arts Team. During each church service, team members paint spontaneously on stage alongside the worship band in a style known as “prophetic painting.” This art is not necessarily meant for permanent display in the church’s building, but rather its creation is meant to be an act of worship and a tool to hear from God. Contemporary women have also taken part in diverse movements of art outside of the church. While being inspired by their Christian identity, such art is often not categorized as religious artwork, despite the fact that faith and spiritual practice may be integral to the work. Many contemporary Christian women are making music for use inside and outside of the church. Sandra McCracken (b. 1977) is a singer-songwriter who takes the lyrics of old hymns and reimagines them for corporate worship. In addition, she writes and records original folk music. Sara Groves (b. 1972) is a singer-songwriter who explores many themes related to her own spiritual journey and life while also calling direct attention to social justice causes, such as the plight of human-trafficking victims. Many of these artists manage to cross

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CeCe Winans performs during the 34th Annual Dove Awards. Winans is a popular song artist in the gospel genre. (R. Diamond/WireImage/Getty Images)

artistic and denominational boundaries through their work, such as Audrey Assad (b. 1983), a Catholic singer who leads at charismatic gatherings and advocates for refugees. Darlene Zschech (b. 1965) from Hillsong Church, an Evangelical church in Australia, was one of the first Christian worship leaders to lead a worship team that packed out stadiums. Gospel is a musical genre in which many female artists have thrived. Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972) was the first gospel singer to sell a million albums, and her work led to the mainstream popularity of gospel music. Gospel artists continue to create and perform for local churches but have also entered the mainstream market. Singer CeCe Winans (b. 1964) created gospel music as well as mainstream R&B music, and, like her, other female artists began to add the influences of many diverse genres into their gospel music. Some Christian women have been criticized for the topics their work explores or their own personal beliefs or identities. Some Christian musicians, such as Jennifer Knapp (b. 1974) and Vicky Beeching (b. 1979), created music that was originally celebrated by the church, but upon their coming out as queer, these women’s art was rejected entirely by conservative Christianity. Other queer Christian artists, like Julien Baker (b. 1995), an alternative musician, have never focused on creating music specifically for Christian communities, so there was never any organized backlash. In certain Christian communities, an artist will only be categorized as Christian if the work is explicitly religious or the artist’s theology is considered orthodox, while in other communities, no hard line between the sacred and the secular exists, and diverse works can be viewed as relevant to Christian faith. The



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role of the arts in contemporary Christian culture remains highly contested, as does the role of women. Despite this, contemporary Christian women continue to make compelling art and make their voices heard. Hannah Sachs See also: Christianity: African American Women; Christianity in the United States; Founders of Christian Denominations; Mary Magdalene; Mother of God; Protestant Denominations; Sex and Gender; Widowhood Further Reading Anderson, Cameron J., and Sandra Bowden. CIVA XXV: Faith Vision: Twenty-Five Years of Christians in the Visual Arts. Baltimore, MD: Square Halo Books, 2005. Watkins, Jim. “Featured Artist: Sandra Bowden.” Transpositions, October 31, 2011. http:// www.transpositions.co.uk/featured-artist-sandra-bowden/. White, Audrey. “Julien Baker on Being Queer, Southern, Christian, and Proud.” Pitchfork, May 18, 2016. https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1154​-julien​-baker​-on​-being​-queer​-southern​​ -christian​-and-proud/. Wren, Linnea. “Can Religious Faith and Contemporary Art Flourish Together?” ARTS 20 (2009): 33–36.

CHARITY The definition of charity in Christian texts and teachings reaches into the soul of Christian belief and behavior in both the female and male. Charity in English comes from the Latin caritas, which means love—love of God and one’s neighbor, a spiritual love that goes out from oneself to others. From this root meaning developed the idea that love of God and others leads one to bestow charity or to give alms to those who need love or esteem or whose treasure, whether spiritual or material, is sparse. Many religious women have been exemplary models of Christian charity. Scripture supports both connotations in multiple contexts. The 10 Commandments begin with the order to love God and then one’s neighbor. John’s gospel is a love poem: Jesus loved his sheep as a shepherd loves his flock; and he said to his followers: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love” (John 15:9–10). The first letter of Paul to the Corinthians leaves no doubt about the importance of charity: “the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13). In Mark 12:43–44, Jesus praises the poor widow who gave everything she had. The Beatitudes in Matthew 25 enumerate the various ways one is to practice Christian charity. Traditionally, religious women have assumed responsibility for feeding the hungry and caring for the poor, the castaways and orphans, the sick and the elderly. In the Middle Ages, wealthy women like Paula (347–404), a Roman noblewoman, and Fabiola (fl. 395–d. 399) sponsored charitable works. In the early 17th century, Louise de Marillac (1591–1660), wife of a French official, virtually invented a new service system by getting the rich women of the Ladies of Charity to support the work of the  Daughters of Charity, who were usually poor rural women serving the needy; at the same time, Marillac also set up a system of shelters for women in distress.

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Many religious orders of women were founded for charitable reasons of care and concern. Angela Merici (1474–1540) founded the Ursulines, originally a company of young Italian women who lived at home, wore simple clothes, and ministered to young women. Katharine Drexel (1858–1955), a wealthy heiress, founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indian and Colored People in 1891 and built schools throughout the United States for Native Americans and African Americans. In the 19th century, Ladies’ Benevolent Societies were active primarily within Evangelical Protestant churches. The societies provided a way for women not only to engage in charitable activities but also to “make claims on the public sphere” (Varty 2006). In the United States, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), and sisters Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–1879) campaigned against slavery. President Lincoln called Harriet Beecher Stowe the little lady who started the big war because her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a catalyst for the onset of the Civil War. After the war, women were leaders in reestablishing society: Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874) founded the Five Point Mission; Isabella Graham (1742–1814) began the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children; and Elizabeth Seton (1774–1821) founded the American Sisters of Charity in 1808, which led to the first Catholic hospital in the United States. Dorothy Day (1897–1980), with her partner Peter Maurin (1877–1949), began the Catholic Worker movement in 1933. The Catholic Worker was founded “to live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus” and is now a network of 200-plus independent houses that offer hospitality with a free dinner every day and whose workers are activists in causes of pacifism, social equality, cultural inequity, and service. Clara Barton (1821–1912) was an educator who in 1854 opened the nation’s first free public school in New Jersey. She worked as an independent nurse during the Civil War, where she became aware of the scarcity of medical supplies and services for the soldiers. Barton founded and was the first president of the American Red Cross in 1881. These women are among many others who practiced charity, often transgressing the cultural mores of their day to practice charity in its many manifestations. Karen Halvorsen (1988, n.p.) concludes, “Though feminine ministry has historically been defined in terms of service rather than leadership, the statement throughout Christian history that women have made as they have anointed Christ’s mission with gifts can be clearly heard, even in those eras when their voices are silent.” Carole Ganim See also: Christianity: Christianity in the United States; Education; Middle Ages; Missionaries; Monastic Life; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Durkin, Mary-Cabrini. Angela Merici’s Journey of the Heart: The Rule, The Way. Boulder, CO: Woven Word, 2005.



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Halvorsen, Karen. “The Benevolent Tradition: The Charity of Women.” Christian History 19 (July 1, 1988). https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-19/benevolent​ -tradition-charity-of-women.html. Varty, Carmen Nielson. “A Career in Christian Charity.” Women’s History Review 14, no. 2 (2006): 243–64.

CHASTITY The word chastity comes from the Latin castus, meaning pure, and is most often taken to refer to sexual purity. However, chastity is an approach to life, promoted by Christianity as well as by other major religions, that extends beyond sexual purity to include purity of thought under the premise that thinking lustful thoughts is tantamount to the act of fornication or adultery (as Christ says in Matthew 5:28). Chastity can include, but is not restricted to, celibacy (abstaining from all sexual activity). It can also refer to a commitment not to engage in sexual activity outside marriage, so that chastity encompasses fidelity within marriage. A woman’s purity has traditionally been of prime importance in terms of securing a good marriage (and thus her future) and ensuring the respect of others; while in practical terms this no longer applies to much of 21st-century Western society, it is still crucial in many cultures and particularly among Muslim families where there is a strict code of honor. In Western Christendom, many techniques have been employed in an effort to save women both from the lustful attention of others and from their own desires. The most notorious invention is the chastity belt, a lockable contraption that prevents access to a woman’s genitals; evidence suggests that these were used from the 15th century onward. The commonly held myth of 12th-century English crusaders leaving their wives locked into a chastity belt for years while they were away fighting the Crusades is unlikely to be true, as there is no real evidence for chastity belts before the Renaissance; in any case, the belts would have had to be removed regularly to ensure the woman’s sanitary health and hygiene. In most cases, chastity has been an individual choice made by the woman herself, and the late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen an increase in the use of purity rings, especially in the United States; they are worn on the ring finger, to be replaced by a wedding ring. These rings are often offered to daughters at puberty and signify that the wearer has made a promise to remain chaste until her wedding night.  There are, however, women who choose to forego all sexual relations to devote themselves to a life of service to God. In the Catholic church, virgins can consecrate themselves to a life of perpetual virginity, and widows can also decide to live in perpetual chastity. A similar undertaking of the single consecrated life also exists for women in the Anglican church. Consecrated virgins live in the world rather than in a convent and work in various professions: notable Catholic examples include the eminent art historian “Sister Wendy” Beckett (b. 1930) and university professor and biblical scholar Joan Frances Gormley (1937–2007). Women joining a religious order—that is, nuns or sisters—also make a lifelong vow of chastity, taking the role of “bride of Christ,” a husband whom they will only

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meet in the next world: in this instance, chastity does indeed mean celibacy, though not necessarily virginity as previous sexual experience is not always a bar to a religious vocation. Although not always an easy vow to keep, women religious say that the effects of chastity are positive, and they often find they can achieve a greater focus on other activities, sexual and procreative energy becoming transformed into creative energy. Amanda Haste See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Marriage and Divorce; Mary Magdalene; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Contemporary Women; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Saints; Sex and Gender; Widowhood; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Women in the Reformation Further Reading Eden, Dawn. The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2006. Sue, Amma. “A Fresh Expression of Religious Life in the Anglican Church.” Single Consecrated Life, 2014. http://www.singleconsecratedlife-anglican.org.uk. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Forms of Consecrated Life.” 2016. http:// www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/vocations/consecrated-life/forms-of-consecrated​ -life.cfm. Winner, Lauren. “Sex in the Body of Christ: Chastity Is a Spiritual Discipline for the Whole Church.” Christianity Today, May 13, 2005. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005​ /may/34.28.html.

CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA Christianity has a long history in Africa. From the religion’s beginning, many African women have been heavily involved in Christianity, but their history has not always been recorded. In Ethiopia, historical records of Christian communities predate King Ezana, who declared Christianity to be the state religion in 330 CE. For example, the Book of Acts 8:26–38 records the conversion of the Ethiopian Court. Further north in Egypt, the city of Alexandria was home to the Patriarchate of Alexandria, founded in 43 CE by Mark the Evangelist. Although Christianity took an early hold in Africa, political schisms, the emergence of Islam, and divisions about Christian doctrine produced isolations and intersections among African Christian communities. These changes have affected the ways that women participate in their churches. One of the earliest changes was the division of the Coptic church from the Eastern Orthodox church and the Roman Catholic Church that occurred at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE. At this time, nuns were forbidden from marrying, and the minimum age for a nun to become a deaconess was set at 40 years old. Changes affecting women have continued to occur in the Coptic church, Eastern Orthodox church, and Roman Catholic Church, as well as the varied Protestant denominations that began working in Africa alongside colonial projects. During the colonial period, which began in the 1400s, the arrival and establishment of



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missionaries, evangelists, and religious schools both opened new spaces for women to participate in the church and caused a clash between European and African traditions regarding gender segregation and education. The Ethiopian Orthodox church is among the oldest in Africa and has maintained a continuous religious tradition while adapting to changing gender norms. Many Ethiopian Orthodox churches are segregated by gender, with different entrances and worship spaces for men and women. While women did not traditionally hold positions of power in Ethiopian Orthodox churches, today, some women’s rights organizations, such as UN Women, are partnering with the church to address development issues in Ethiopia. In Francophone African nations, such as Mali, Niger, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Roman Catholic Church has a strong foothold. Large congregations were established during the French colonial period. At this time, many girls were educated in church schools and admitted into the clergy as nuns. European nuns often moved to join Francophone African convents and work in religious schools. While many of these nuns encouraged exchanges between European and African nuns, prejudices in European churches prevented the establishment of an equilateral exchange. As recently as 1949, African nuns were denied places in European convents. However, African nuns are now welcomed into European convents. Interfaith women’s organizations, such as the Consecrated Women of East and Central Africa, have facilitated educational programs and exchanges for clergywomen from different religious groups throughout the region. These groups seek to bring together women from multiple Christian traditions, as well as Muslim women and members of indigenous religions, to address community problems and support development issues, such as family planning and education. In South Africa, Protestant traditions were brought by a diversity of churches and evangelists. In some of these churches, women were often prohibited from holding positions of power. In other churches, such as the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, a women’s movement called Manyano organized prayer meetings and community fund-raisers to support widows and orphans. In other denominations, such as the Anglican High church, single European women were encouraged to move to South Africa to work in schools for both European and African children, to work in hospitals, and to do housekeeping work for church offices. Today, in post-Apartheid South Africa, many private schools continue to be connected to religious institutions, but they now encourage girls to explore their community traditions and the different ways that women can hold power in the community and church. South Africa is home to a diversity of Christian denominations that offer various levels of participation for women as both clergy and lay members. Many African nations are home to multiple Christian denominations. In some countries, women from different denominations are coming together to forge national religious communities as well as serving as missionaries to other nations and representatives for international religious organizations. In some African countries, it is taboo for women to enter the church. And in some nations, women are blending Christian and indigenous traditions. The ways that African women

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participate in their churches will continue to change as girls and women have opportunities to interact with one another in face-to-face and online forums. Allison Hahn See also: African Religions: Rastafari; Christianity: Christianity in Europe; Missionaries; Orthodox Christianity; Polygamy; Protestant Denominations; Roman Catholic Women Religious Further Reading Elphick, Richard, and Rodney Davenport. Christianity in Southern Africa: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of Christianity in Africa: From Antiquity to the Present. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. Oden, Thomas. How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2010. Sunkler, Bengt, and Christopher Steed. A History of the Church in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

CHRISTIANITY IN EUROPE The role of women in European Christianity differs widely in western and eastern Europe and also depends on whether adherents belong to the Catholic (universal doctrine) or Protestant churches. The former comprises the Latin and Greek traditions in addition to some Eastern denominations. The Roman Catholic Church includes 23 rites that recognize the authority of the Holy See. The Protestant denominations include the Lutheran, Calvinist, Baptist, and other, less influential confessions that have gathered followers since the Catholic monk Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door of Wittenberg in 1517. The duties and tasks that befall women as members of their families and religious communities has changed drastically in the past centuries, and the most notable shift occurred after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). The role of women in all denominations typically models those of female characters depicted in the Bible (mostly the New Testament). The most venerated figure among all is the Virgin Mary, the Blessed Mother of Jesus, who represents grace, strength, and purity that serve as the backbone of the Christian feminine ideal. Further distinctions besides the East-West, Catholic-Protestant divide can be drawn alongside the lay-consecrated line. The distinct role of women as comforting and nurturing caregivers that serve the family has its roots in the Bible story about Martha, who attended to the needs of Jesus while he was visiting the household. Mary, her sister, on the other hand, sat at Christ’s feet and listened intently to what he was saying (Jesus also broke with contemporary practices of teaching only men: he regarded women and children as just as important). When Martha complained, Jesus stated that Mary chose the better part, but both roles were valuable to the same extent. These differences are also visible in how contemplative and active monastic orders organize their lives. The former focus more on silent prayer and spiritual sacrifices while the latter serve via teaching, healing, or in more active and



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visible ways in the world. Yet, the church recognizes the equal value of both paths, as there cannot be active service without a solid spiritual backbone. The teachings of the Catholic rite also equate women and men as ontologically equal but with different roles. Thus, it is considered just as sinful for a man to be unfaithful to his wife as vice versa (though social practices still tend to have double standards), and divorce, incest, and polygamy—along with infanticide (including abortion)—are on the illicit list. While the Catholic church recognizes lay celibates, most laywomen are expected to fulfil four roles: having children, being caregivers, serving in church communities, and becoming good wives to their husbands. Consecrated women differ in that they do not give physical birth to their offspring, though some orders count spiritual motherhood through prayer. Nuns list Jesus Christ as their spouse. Within church communities, women are not permitted to perform certain tasks that men can readily undertake and perform. Yet again, these activities have gone through changes since Vatican Two. For instance, girls were banned from serving at the altar before 1965, the idea being that altar boys would receive their priestly vocation while fulfilling their duties. Since women are not permitted to become priests in the Catholic tradition, their altar service was not seen as viable. After the liberalization of the practice, however, girls have typically outnumbered boys around the altar in many countries as they tend to be more steadfast in their undertakings (some eastern European parishes still do not look favorably on girls serving during mass). The East-West divide is also palpable when the role of eucharistic ministers is discussed. While women may not become deacons by law, in western Europe, with special permissions from the diocese’s bishop, they can still assist the residing priest by handing out communion. At the same time, in more conservative eastern Europe, this would be untenable (although nuns might occasionally serve in this capacity). While the duties available to women might be lesser in number, when it comes to merit, the total of female saints and blessed women makes up for the imbalance. Many of history’s abbesses, thinkers, and mystics have been elevated to sainthood, and spiritual greatness was also recognized in laywomen: ordinary mothers who have stood out with their everyday simplicity, religious devotion, or fervor. The Reformation itself, ideally, allowed women to acquire more influential roles in society through learning. Luther and Calvin agreed that mothers could only raise children in a responsible manner if they themselves were educated and well-read. Future wives and mothers in the early Protestant tradition were thus more accomplished than their Catholic counterparts. Typical classes included reading, writing, and arithmetic, and in the immediate aftermath following the Reformation, women were encouraged to hold prayer meetings and preach. However, these initiatives were soon eradicated, and women were assigned to the sole role of spouses and mothers. As choosing a religious vocation was not available to Protestant women, their only option besides matrimony was spinsterhood, which was not looked upon favorably until the beginning of the 20th century. The Counter-Reformation (from 1545) and religious persecution (on and off between the 16th and 19th centuries) periods were much harsher on women than

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on men because it often came down to the mothers to pass down their faith to their children in secret. Exceptional females as role models abound in the Protestant traditions, and their numbers have swelled even more since the 19th century, which saw many of them contribute to social work through volunteering and philanthropy. In recent decades, most Protestant churches—but not all—have not had quibbles about the ordination of women as pastors, priests, or bishops, for that matter. To mention only a few, the German and Swiss Baptist churches ordain women, but the Southern Baptist Convention does not. Most of the Mennonites ordain women, and so do the Reformed churches of France and Hungary, but the Netherlands is an exception. As for the Lutheran denominations, Germany has several female bishops, while Latvia reversed its previous stance and stopped ordaining women pastors. Along the same line, some Anglican churches have allowed females to become bishops, while others do not follow in these footsteps. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Christianity: Mary Magdalene; Ministers; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Mystics; Orthodox Christianity; Protestant Denominations; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Saints; Sex and Gender; Widowhood; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Women in the Reformation Further Reading Bokenkotter, Thomas. A Concise History of the Catholic Church. New York: Image Books, 2005. Hause, Steven C. Western Civilization: A History of European Society. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2005.

C H R I S T I A N I T Y I N L AT I N A M E R I C A Christianity in Latin America has played a role of both oppression and emancipation for women in their everyday lived experiences. Christianity first arrived in continental Latin America in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, with the European conquest and the conquistadores who brought Christianity to the indigenous civilizations that had flourished throughout what we know today as Mexico, Central America, and South America. This imposition of a muscular, European, Christian, and patriarchal social order has contributed significantly to Latin American religious history. Equally important are the forms and methods by which women—Spanish, Portuguese, Indigenous, and Afro-descendent—figured into the story of Christian conquest, religious hybridization, and struggles for independence and resistance in the Americas. Colonial Christianity

In the lives of Latin American women, Christianity has always been a fluid, hybrid, and cross-fertilized tradition, influenced by indigenous spirituality as well as the forces of politics and economics. Before the arrival of the Europeans, robust and diverse indigenous civilizations thrived throughout the continent. Millions of people populated the continent upon Christopher Columbus’s arrival, and hundreds



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of different indigenous communities lived throughout the Americas. While the Spanish and Portuguese brought their religion of Roman Catholic Christianity, the indigenous nations they encountered already held religious traditions that had survived, in some cases, for millennia. This is perhaps nowhere better exhibited than through the many apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is a predominant figure in Latin American Christianity, yet she was initially introduced by the conquistadores as a strategy for the domestication of women. The European conquistadores used religion and force to control the indigenous populations, and women were no exception. The original manifestations of the Virgin Mary were the representations of noble Spanish women and connected primarily to the Spanish ruling class. She was also white. Mary represented the embodiment of a racialized hierarchy and a distant and detached expression of God. During the colonial era, the imposition of a colonial political and social order rendered women as impure objects, inherently flawed, and second class. They were the essentialized Other, meant to be seen and not heard or felt. Women were expected to be submissive to their fathers, brothers, husbands, and priests. Indigenous, Afro-descendent, and mixed-race women were doubly othered, or oppressed, as they were categorized by their race into lower social castes than white, European women. Black, indigenous, and mixed-race women were prohibited from participating in religious ceremonies and from being nuns or leaders in the church and were subject to sexual violence from not only Spanish conquistadores but also priests themselves on some occasions. The influence of the images of the white Virgin Mary worked to give symbolic weight to these new social orders. For the first few centuries of colonial rule in the Americas, to be a woman of God, or to be a worthy woman, meant to be white and Europeanized. Otherwise, women were slotted into secondary, tertiary, or lower social rungs in the hierarchy of power that was put into place by an imperial Christianity. However, just as Christianity was essential for the colonizing process and the “invention” of Latin America (the continents were named after the arrival of the Europeans), Christianity in its different forms also played a central part in processes of decolonization, independence, and equality. And women were important figures in the emergence of these new manifestations of a hybridized Christian expression. It was an indigenous woman who encountered La Virgen de Chinquinquirá in Colombia (1586), a mixed-race woman who spoke to Our Lady of the Bark in Venezuela (1702), and an indigenous woman who saw Our Lady of the Angels in Costa Rica (1635). These apparitions resignified the feminine and the role of women in the church. Throughout the Americas, new expressions that mixed together Euro-Mediterranean folk traditions with pre-Columbian and African divinities arose in efforts to resist imperial Christianity. For example, a subversive image of Mary began to emerge in the later 16th century and onward that challenged the social and racial orders being imposed by the Europeans. La Virgen de Guadalupe appeared to an indigenous farmer in 1531. She was warm, mothering, involved, and indigenized. This apparition, who has become the patron saint of the Americas, had dark skin, rose from the earth, existed outside the boundaries

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of the church walls, and exemplified a Mary that had been liberated from colonial versions of a purified, whitened, and European Christianity. Pluralization and Contemporary Latin America

In almost all Latin American countries, and almost all Christian denominations, women make up the majority of affiliates (Pew Research Center 2014). In part, this is due to the fact that Christianity in Latin America today has developed into a highly diverse and complex religious tradition with practices and rites that differ from region to region and country to country. Within the Christian tradition, there are varying denominational branches that include Roman Catholicism, Charismatic Catholicism, liberation theologies, Pentecostalism, Charismatic Christianity, Evangelical Christianity, historical Protestant Christianity, Seventh-Day Adventists, and more. While in 1960, 90 percent of Latin America claimed to be Catholic, today the numbers are down to 69 percent, and a diverse plethora of different denominations are growing throughout the region. Women have influenced Catholic traditions by claiming elements of liberation theology through a Latin American feminist lens. Liberation theology is a Catholicbased theology that interprets scripture from Marxist analyses of the lived socioeconomic realities and concrete historical contexts of colonialism that emerged in the 1970s. For the feminist theological movement that began to evolve in the 1970s, liberation theology fell short. Using the principles of liberation theology, however,

Women in Honduras pray to Our Lady of Suyapa, a local version of the Virgin Mary. Celebration of this patron saint of Honduras blends local tradition with Catholicism, a European import. (Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images)



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Catholic feminist theologians developed their own voices and agendas, challenging the patriarchal structures that have historically oppressed women. Today, feminist liberation theologians continue to develop interpretations of church practice in society and forms of emancipation for women in the Catholic tradition. Pentecostal and Protestant Christianity

Women have also become increasingly influential in the growing spheres of Pentecostal and Protestant Christianity. These traditions began to arrive in Latin America in the early 19th century (some, like the Methodists, even earlier) and have grown most significantly since the middle of the 20th century. Historical Protestant traditions, including Lutherans, Mennonites, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, among others, have been present in Latin America for over a century yet remain small in number. In these churches, equality of gender is generally accepted, and women can be pastors or priests and even bishops, as is the case with the Methodist church. Pentecostal Christianity, on the other hand, is not only the fastest-growing Christian movement in the region but potentially also the most influential for women. Within this broad gamut of religious expression, denominations include the Assemblies of God, the Foursquare church, the United Pentecostal church, the Baptist church, the InterAmerican church, and so on. In these denominations, women have found different forms of leadership. Although many churches still maintain traditional gender inequality in terms of leadership, churches are increasingly led by couples, and women have become more visible in leadership roles. Since many Pentecostal churches emphasize small-group meetings, home gatherings, and more democratized forms of biblical interpretation, women have found that they are assigned new roles. As the main authority in the home, women became new authorities in their small groups. They found certain emancipation in bringing the church out of the temple and into their kitchens, living rooms, and patios. Here, the women are the leaders. Pentecostal churches are primarily filled by women, and most of them have converted from Catholicism to Pentecostal Christianity. Scholars of women and gender in Latin America have noted that Pentecostal Religion “provides positive social and economic benefits for many poor women in Latin America and . . . involves them in large communities of women” (Hallum 2003, 171). One of the unique characteristics of Pentecostalism is also a factor of hybridization with indigenous spirituality; emphasis on health and healing, miracle work, the presence and even possession of the Holy Spirit, and negotiating with God are ideas shared with popular Catholicism and indigenous traditions. Importantly for women, however, strict adherence to spiritual rules, such as sobriety, fidelity, and prohibition of gambling, tend to improve their domestic economies and personal lives as less money is spent on such endeavors, and domestic economies become more stable. Conclusion

The relationship between Christianity and women in Latin America has been a fraught and complicated endeavor over the last 500 years. Women have been overlooked in many historical narratives of the church, while the influence of a

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patriarchal social and political order remains indebted to the regimes established by the church of the conquistadores. However, women in Latin America, as always, have reinterpreted, reimagined, and reclaimed spaces and places in the making of the contemporary church, both Catholic and Protestant. They have forced open dialogues to consider feminist readings of the Bible, the role of women in leadership, and the very colonial inheritance that they are responding to. Rebecca C. Bartel See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Christianity: Christianity in Europe; Christianity in the United States; Founders of Christian Denominations; Fundamentalism; Mother of God; Protestant Denominations; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Sex and Gender; Spirituality: Syncretism Further Reading Brusco, Elizabeth. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Cassanova, Carlos C. “The Influence of Christianity on the Spanish Conquest of America and the Organization of the Spanish-American Empire.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 15, no. 4 (2012): 125–44. Hallum, Anne Motley. “Taking Stock and Building Bridges: Feminism, Women’s Movements, and Pentecostalism in Latin America.” Latin American Research Review 38, no. 1 (2003): 169–86. Pew Research Center. “Religion in Latin America: Widespread Change in a Historically Catholic Region.” November 13, 2014. Rosado-Nunes, Maria José. “Religious Authority and Women’s Religious Experience.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 19, no. 2 (2003): 85–92. Salinas, Maximiliano. “Christianity, Colonialism and Women in Latin America in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries.” Social Compass 39, no. 4 (1992): 525–42. Truitt, Jonathan. “Courting Catholicism: Nahua Women and the Catholic Church in Colonial Mexico City.” Ethnohistory 57, no. 3 (2010): 415–44.

C H R I S T I A N I T Y I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S From 17th-century Roman Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), the first Native American Algonquin-Mohawk woman to be canonized, to 21st-century Bible teacher, speaker, author, and blogger Priscilla Shirer (b. 1974), American Christian women have shared a lived experience in response to the monotheist belief that the resurrected Jewish Jesus is a unique incarnation of God in human history, as the second “person” of the Trinity: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. The main communities situated under the wider Christian umbrella in the United States include Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, and Nondenominational Protestant churches. Though doctrinal divergences exist among these traditions, the core of Christian life follows what Jesus claimed to be the two greatest commandments of Jewish law: love God with your entire heart, and love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37–40; Mark 12:30–33; Luke 10:27). American Christian women translate these commandments by serving both the body of Christ (the Christian community) and others by praying, prioritizing



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family, serving the poor and oppressed, joining religious orders, constructing theology, promoting social justice, speaking against patriarchal structures, leading congregations as ordained leaders, and establishing evangelistic global ministries. Seventeenth- and 18th-century American Christian women lived the faith in varied ways. While the majority of women dedicated themselves to Bible study, prayer, and serving in the home, others, such as Anne Marbury Hutchinson (1591–1643) and Mary Dyer (1611–1660), challenged male-dominated religious ideals: Hutchinson, banished from Massachusetts, served as one of the first voices to contest Christian legalism during the Antinomian controversy (1636–1638); Dyer was hanged in Boston Common for practicing her Quaker faith. Later colonial Protestant women served as itinerant preachers, speaking to their audiences about social issues, the evils of slavery, and the plights of the poor and prostitutes (Bizzell and Herzberg 2001). Quakers such as Jane Fenn Hoskens/Hoskins (1694–1764), Sophia Hume (1702–1774), and Elizabeth Ashbridge (1713–1755) preached openly on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit as spiritual truth. Ursuline Catholic nuns arrived in New Orleans in 1727, operating the local hospital and establishing a school for Native American, African American, and European American girls. As educational opportunities increased with time, more women would write and speak about their Christian experiences, notably Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), the first African American woman to publish a volume of poetry. Nineteenth- and early 20th-century upheaval and transition saw Christian women playing important roles igniting and sustaining many movements. The Second Great Awakening, temperance, abolitionism, suffrage, civil war, and reconstruction, Jim Crow through civil rights, and two world wars all would be woven into the fabric of the United States’ first wave of feminism (1830s–1900s), including the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first American women’s rights convention. Jarena Lee (1783–1864) and Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874)—part of the greater Holiness movement—advocated for women’s rights to preach; Lee was the first woman authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopalian church, walking thousands of miles to spread God’s word. Women’s messages demanding authority to profess the gospel from the pulpit also included an array of civil rights issues. Most notable in this arena were Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879), Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), Prudence Crandall (1803–1890), Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), sisters Sarah Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Grimké Weld (1805–1879), and Laura Haviland (1808–1898), who in 1837 founded the Raisin Institute—one of the first schools to admit both African American and European American students. Frances Willard (1839–1898), president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, led one of the most visible and successful campaigns of the century, fighting against the deleterious effects of alcohol abuse (domestic violence against women and children), and for women’s property rights, ordination, and suffrage. Twentieth-century Christian women participated in the civil rights movement, the Azusa Street Revival (1906–1915), and the second wave of feminism (1960s–1980s). African American woman Neely Terry’s introduction of William Seymour to her Holiness pastor Julia Hutchins would lead to the Azusa Street

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Revival, a multicultural, continuous revival where African Americans, European Americans, and Latino/a Americans experienced glossolalia (praying/speaking in tongues), singing, shouting, and miraculous signs and wonders. Later, in 1967, Patti Gallagher Mansfield (b. 1946) would be part of the Duquesne University student group that sparked the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. In 1933, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) commenced the Catholic Worker movement with her penny newspaper, The Catholic Worker; her group opened “a number of hospices or ‘houses of hospitality’ for the poor and unemployed and established a farm commune . . . [they] walked picket lines, opened soup kitchens, studied and prayed,” living simple lives rooted in social justice (McGonigle and Quigley 1996, 194). Ella Baker (1903–1986) helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In carrying out the Christian mission, women have served as foundresses of schools and hospitals. Saint Katharine Drexel (1858–1955), foundress of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, opened boarding schools for Native Americans and African Americans. Saint Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton (1774–1821) established the Sisters of Charity, devoted to serving poor children; Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School (now Saint Joseph College) was the first American parochial school for girls, inaugurating American Catholic education. The Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first African American religious order, founded (1829) by Elizabeth Lange (1794–1882), Maria Balas (d. 1845), Rosine Boegue (ca. 1790–1871), and Almaide Duchemin (1810–1892), opened an academy for girls in its Baltimore, Maryland, convent—Saint Frances Academy is the oldest American Catholic academy still serving African American children. Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) taught women household management, health care, and teaching. And, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (born Maria Francesca Cabrini, 1850–1917) established 67 hospitals, schools, and orphanages throughout the United States. Scriptural interpretation of biblical women has both limited and liberated the American Christian woman’s experience, preventing and permitting hierarchical decision making and ordination. Views of Eve as either a/the cause of the fall of humanity and original sin or as a helpmate and equal with Adam, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and many others have contributed to a wide spectrum of perceptions on women’s participation in the church. While some traditions prohibit women from serving in church hierarchy, others promote a more egalitarian world view, fully ordaining women. Orthodox and Catholic churches prohibit female ordination, but women in some other traditions have enjoyed organizational, hierarchical equality for centuries: Ann Lee (1736–1784) founded the American Shaking Quakers, and Barbara Heck (1734–1804) is credited with launching the first American Methodist group. Later foundresses include Seventh-day Adventist foundress Ellen Gould Harmon White (1827–1915) and Church of Christ, Scientist foundress Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910). Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944) founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. In 1863, Olympia Brown (1835–1926) was the first ordained woman in the Universalist church. The 20th century brought full ordination rights for women in Presbyterian and United Methodist churches (1956), the Lutheran church in the United



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States (1970), and the Episcopal church just four years later (a rogue act ordaining the Philadelphia 11 and then officially in 1976). The year 2012 witnessed the ordination of Christine Lee (b. 1972), the first female Episcopal Korean American priest, and 2016 brought the election of Rev. Karen Oliveto (b. 1958), the first lesbian bishop of the United Methodist church. Many 20th- and 21st-century feminist and womanist theologians have emerged, writing about the female Christian experience. Prominent voices include Anne Carr (1934–2008), Rosemary Radford Ruether (b. 1936), Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (b. 1938), Jacquelyn Grant (b. 1948), and Katie Geneva Cannon (b. 1949). The Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus (1973), now known as Christian Feminism Today, promotes Christian feminist education and equality within the church. Catherine Clark Kroeger (1925–2011) served as the first president of Christians for Biblical Equality in 1988; the Priscilla Papers is the international organization’s peer-reviewed journal. Two main attributes that Christian women exemplify mirror the faith’s objectives: love God and love your neighbor. Loving your neighbor implies acting in a self-sacrificing way that benefits others; these benefits/values include sharing Jesus, meeting people’s basic needs (clothing, sustenance, shelter), and treating others like family. An early example of these attributes in action was the 1858 Ladies Christian Association—later known as the Young Women’s Christian Association—now a staple for women’s empowerment and civil rights in the United States. Saint Pauli Murray (1910–1985), the first female African American Episcopal priest, along with Roman Catholic sisters Joel Read (1925–2017) and Austin Doherty (1927–2015), helped to start the National Organization for Women, the United States’ largest feminist organization to date. In 2003, Dr. Khouriya Maggie Hock (b. 1953) cofounded, and now serves as the North American director of, the Antiochian Department of Marriage and Parish Family Ministries of the Antiochian Christian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America; she works with global partners to provide clerical training support and seminars about mental health issues and marriage and family counseling. The advent of the information age has allowed Christian women from the Silent Generation to Generation Z to serve their neighbors, employing global platforms such as television, the Internet, and social media. Television network foundresses include Eternal Word Television Network foundress Mother Angelica (1923–2016); Trinity Broadcasting Network cofoundress with husband Paul, Janice Crouch (1939–2016); and Daystar Television Network cofoundress with husband Marcus, Joni Lamb (b. 1960). Prominent evangelists using these avenues include Marilyn Hickey (b. 1931), Joyce Meyer (b. 1943), Anne Graham Lotz (b. 1948), Beth Moore (b. 1957), and Johnnette Benkovic (b. 1950). Women using media include social justice activists like Rev. Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil (b. 1955) and Rev. Jo Anne Llyon (b. 1940); celebrity advocates for education and children such as Rev. Bernice King (b. 1963), Roma Downey (b. 1960), and Jordin Sparks (b. 1989); and authors and bloggers such as Elyse Fitzpatrick (b. 1950) and Priscilla Shirer (b. 1974). Websites, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have helped female-led ministries make a national and international impact in outreach areas such as prison

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ministry, medical mission, children’s rights, world hunger, water relief, disaster relief, and human trafficking. Nicol Nixon Augusté See also: Christianity: African American Women; “The Fall”; Founders of Christian Denominations; Mary Magdalene; Mother of God; Orthodox Christianity; Protestant Denominations; Saints; Spirituality: Syncretism Further Reading Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: Bedford’s/St. Martin, 2001. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Penguin, 2011. McGonigle, Thomas, and James Quigley. A History of the Christian Tradition: From the Reformation to the Present. New York: Paulist, 1996.

CHRISTINE DE PIZAN (CA. 1364–CA. 1430) Christine de Pizan was a prominent writer and thinker whose works continue to engage scholarly translation and analysis and to inform literary, historical, political, and feminist studies. Born in Venice, de Pizan spent most of her life in France, where she was educated primarily by her father and participated actively in court society. Her writings, influenced by classical and contemporary rhetorical styles and by a range of thinkers, including Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, and Petrarch, garnered such attention that, after being widowed, she was able to support her family with her writing. Her work affected public intellectual debate during an intense period of civil discord and ecclesiastical disorder. Consistently championing the underrepresented female voice, de Pizan was a prolific writer capable of effectively employing a breadth of genres. Select works include The Vision of Christine (1405), The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), and The Treasure of the City of Ladies (1406), which address the role of women understood inclusively, attending to individual and collective contributions that benefit all humanity and attesting to ways of reading constructively within and against normative operating assumptions of classical and religious traditions. In The Book of the City of Ladies, for example, de Pizan relies on the insights of Lady Reason and astute exegetical strategies to disrupt conventional readings and interpretations of biblical texts and to dismantle arguments for social hierarchy based on the order of creation contained in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. It deploys an equality of soul that is ungendered and designed by the Creator to reflect the Divine image. Later, in the same work, with the assistance of Lady Justice, de Pizan exalts the Virgin Mary and the members of her court, virtuous Christian women including martyrs, mothers, and monastics who embrace and embody the cultivation of the virtues. The Virgin Mary also features prominently in several prayers, attesting to de Pizan’s personal Catholic piety and contributing to constructions of Marian devotion. Drawing on themes of virtue and righteousness, courage and



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conviction, de Pizan weaves together religion, nationhood, and female heroism in her final poem, The Song of Joan of Arc (1429). As a laywoman, de Pizan’s work promoted theological, ethical, and spiritual developments within the Roman Catholic world view of her day. Reframing tradition and appealing to the validity and authority of female experience— broadly construed to encompass women in all walks of life—de Pizan engaged and challenged societal and ideological boundaries. Bernadette McNary-Zak See also: Christianity: Education; “The Fall”; Mother of God; Widowhood; Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity Further Reading Altmann, Barbara K., and Deborah L. McGrady, eds. Christine de Pizan: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2003. Brown-Grant, Rosalind. Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defense of Woman: Reading beyond Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Margolis, Nadia. An Introduction to Christine de Pizan. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. Willard, Charity Cannon, ed. The Writings of Christine de Pizan. New York: Persea Books, 1994.

CLOTHING In the Old Testament account, sin entered the world when Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit. The story simultaneously integrated sin, shame, and clothing when they “sewed fig leaves together,” and God subsequently fashioned sturdier garments from “skins” (Genesis 3:7, 21 NSRV). The Hebrew verb in the passage, ta-fa˘r (to sew), implies that knowledge of sewing and garment construction are instinctive and have existed since the beginning of human life. The tale posits a connection between sin and attire that through the ensuing centuries subjected clothing to external moral policing applied to both sexes in attempts to protect domestic manufacturing and to control boundaries of social class, gender distinctions, and perceived excesses of fashion. Throughout fashion history, men and women have fought these boundaries through class and gender slippage; a significant number of female ascetics, for example, dressed and even lived as men during the early formative centuries of Christianity. The Bible provided numerous specific injunctions that had lasting effects in terms of dress control for women and determined the themes subsequently repeated and emphasized through the ensuing centuries. Deuteronomy 22:5 expressly forbade women from wearing men’s clothing. However, elements of male attire represented a higher status relative to that of women throughout Christian history; the adoption of men’s fashion is a nonverbal representation of the assumption of male privileges and constitutes a declaration of equality at best or emasculation of men at worst, when seen from the masculine perspective. In The Anatomie

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of Abuses (1595), for example, Philip Stubbes described women’s fashions of the late 16th century, consisting of tightly buttoned doublets and jerkins that resembled “[men’s] apparel . . . in all respectes” and that were suitable for men only. He expressed shock that the ladies were not ashamed to wear mannish styles and suggested that they would change their sex: “I thinke they would as verily become men indeed” (Stubbes 1595 and 2002, 118). He further labeled such women as “Hermaphroditi, that is Monsters of both kindes, halfe women, half men.” Three centuries later, Sarah Josepha Hale (1868, 44) insisted, “Are not those nations most morally refined in civilization and Christianity where the costume of men and women differs most essentially?” When Hale wrote, the layers of women’s clothing had not changed much over the centuries: a chemise or shift formed the initial layer, followed by a corset, under-petticoats, and petticoats. Different types and shapes of bustles, hoops, and cage crinolines extended and reshaped hemlines during the different decades. Men, in contrast, had been wearing recognizable versions of the three-piece suit since the mid-1660s. The heart of the issue resided in the fear that women genuinely want to “change their sex” and assume male prerogatives through manly dress. In terms of fashion history, Deuteronomy consequently locked women into long skirts until World War  I (1914– 1918), during which time hemlines began to rise for all, not just for women laboring in factories. It was not until the mid-1920s that the flapper’s skirt barely covered her knees. The masculine clothing debate ultimately crystallized over the question of women wearing trousers, a dangerously suggestive garment due to its bifurcated leg construction. The (in)famous “bloomer” costume of 1851–1852 exposed latent fears about women in pants. The costume, consisting of full trousers gathered at the ankle and a knee-length dress that allowed freedom of movement, Young lady poses in “gymnastics” clothing and dumb- was not new to women’s wardrobes bells, ca. 1868. The outfit was considered appropriate at the time. The combination, usufemale attire for gender-segregated physical fitness exercise. (Carte de Visite photograph from the studio ally of wool, had long been the approved standard for sea bathing of Reed & Co., Sacramento, California)



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and for the new exercise fad of women’s “gymnastics.” Women on the frontier and in the gold fields of California had found it essential as they pursued physically demanding labor. However, swimming and gymnastics were gender-segregated pursuits in the 19th century; the frontier represented a drastically reduced social circle and hospitality obligations. The bloomer costume transitioned trousers out of specialized activities for women into daily, public, and mixed company, which is one reason why it failed to enter mainstream fashion. Similar debates and fears about women in trousers reappeared during the bicycling craze of the 1880s, and particularly in the 1890s, when full, knee-length bloomers reemerged as suitable sporting attire that appeared in mixed company. Issues surrounding the appropriateness of trousers for women continued throughout the 20th century. When they did appear as part of sports and leisure fashions in the 1930s, trousers for women fastened on one or both sides; a zipper or fly at the center front caused anxiety as it drew inappropriate attention to female sexual organs. It was only in the 1970s that hospitals and professional office spaces grudgingly allowed women to wear tailored pantsuits instead of dresses. The apostle Paul issued injunctions that also ruled women’s church life in the centuries that followed when he asked, “Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled?” and advised that “a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” (1 Corinthians 11:13, 10 NSRV). Although the nature of the head covering naturally changed with time, women could not attend church services with their heads uncovered. The fad for “whimsies” in the 1950s, which were tiny circles of decorated net fastened to the head, caused great consternation in the Catholic church in particular because there was simply insufficient material to qualify them as genuine hats or head coverings. The oversized bouffant hairstyles of the 1960s were a severe blow to the hat industry as it was difficult to design hats that looked good with teased hair and would actually remain on the wearer’s head. Massive cultural changes in the 1970s that continued to reject the traditional status quo finally put an end to the hat requirement in church, illustrating how centuries-old edicts could erode in a relatively short time when the right elements suddenly combined. Other fashions came under attack in the name of religion. Throughout the Middle Ages, any attempt to alter God’s creations through cosmetics, dyes, piercings, or body-shaping garments such as corsets or false padding represented an affront to God: if “God created humankind in his image” (Genesis 1:27 NSRV), any alteration of that creation implied unacceptable criticism of God’s very image. Thus Cyprian, bishop of Carthage as of 249 CE, wrote, “All females alike should be admonished, that the work of God and his fashioning and formation ought in no manner to be adulterated, either with the application of yellow color, or with black dust or rouge, or with any kind of medicament which can corrupt the native lineaments.” He further equates hair dyes with seduction, and warns “when those things which belong to God are corrupted and violated, you are engaged in a worse adultery” (Cyprian 1868, 344–45). An Elizabethan sermon claims that a woman who uses beauty products “doth work reproofe to her Maker, who made her[.] As though she could make her selfe more comely then God hath appoynted the

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measure of her beauty” (Sermons 1635, 106). This interpretation survived through the centuries, and some denominations continue to forbid the use of cosmetics and beauty products. However, a fundamental shift occurred in the early modern era: corsets, for example, became necessary as disciplined correctives to a weak, infantile body dangerously inclined to crookedness. In a convoluted argument, corsets, worn by both boys and girls until the boys transitioned to trousers, were a moral necessity and even a sign of superiority: “Are the mothers of men who rule the world found among the loose-robed women, or among the women who dress in closer-fitting apparel?” (Hale 1868, 44, italics in original). Christianity also limited women’s dress through a denial of fashion as sinful on multiple levels. Good Christian women eschewed the latest styles: “Women should dress modestly and decently in suitable clothing, not with their hair braided, or with gold, pearls, or expensive clothes, but with good works, as is proper for women who profess reverence for God” (1 Timothy 2:9–10 NSRV). The theme of the refusal of fine clothing and fashion repeats in 1 Peter and further adds, “Rather let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in God’s sight” (3:4 NSRV). Instead, women should prefer “the sober, yet transparent veil of a more comely mind” (Young Lady’s Book 1836, 259). Furthermore, rich dress implied insufficient charitable succor to the poor and needy: Cyprian noted, “Let the poor feel that you are wealthy; let the needy feel you are rich,” a view echoed by many other writers. Fine clothing also implies another grave sin: “Certainely, such as delight in gorgious apparell, are commonly puffed up with pride, and filled with divers vanities” (Sermons 1635, 104). Instead, a woman’s jewel is her husband and his virtues (Sermons 1635, 106), and she should not dress with a mind to please him, any other man, or society at large. However, the force of the “fickle goddess of fashion” is such that women, esteemed the weaker vessel, were always deemed particularly susceptible to its lures, and thus they consistently represented a potentially dangerous lack of financial self-control that could ruin their family’s fortunes. The injunctions above attempted to determine how a Christian woman should dress; further core contradictions, difficult to reconcile, still remained. In times when washing both the body and the clothes represented an extremely heavy burden, women nonetheless received instructions to be extremely neat and always perfectly attired. The unkempt “Christian lady, by making herself a slattern, brings reproach upon the cause of Christ, instead of glorifying God” While an investment in one’s personal appearance is considered necessary for religion’s sake, women must reconcile that with the injunction that “your time is the Lord’s. You have no right to waste it in useless attention to dress” (Newcomb 1851, 176–77, italics in original). In modern times, some denominations, such as the Amish, continue to set themselves apart with fossilized dress and headgear. The dresses and aprons currently associated with Amish women, and those of closely related sects, represent a popular and mainstream style of around 1910. Their bonnets visually distinguish married and unmarried women and perpetuate earlier head-covering requirements. In an invisible form of dress control, the temple garments worn as underwear by



Education

active members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), commonly nicknamed the Mormons, define acceptable parameters of modesty. The garments must remain invisible; hence hemlines cannot rise above the knee, and sleeveless and low-necked garments are also not permitted. The garments of LDS women today represent an updated form of the earlier ankle-length versions originally worn in the 19th century. Fundamentalist polygamous Mormon wives, not recognized by the LDS church, typically wear sweatpants under their dresses—trousers are forbidden to them—to conceal the ankle-length garments that they continue to wear. Such practices represent an exception, and ultimately, few regulations regarding the dress of Christian women exist in contemporary religion. Karin J. Bohleke See also: Christianity: Chastity; “The Fall”; Marriage and Divorce; Mormonism; Orthodox Christianity; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History; Sex and Gender; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Garber, Majorie. “Dress Codes, or the Theatricality of Difference.” In Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, edited by Marjorie Garber, 21–40. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hale, Mrs. [Sarah Josepha]. Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round. Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1868. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Newcomb, Harvey. Practical Directory for Young Christian Females; Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister. 5th ed. Boston: Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, 1851. Saint Cyprian. “On the Dress of Virgins.” In The Writings of Cyprian Bishop of Carthage. Translated by Robert Ernest Wallis, 1:333–350. Ante-Nicene Christian Library 8. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1868. “Sermons or Homilies Appoynted to Be Read in Churches.” In The Time of the late Queene Elizabeth of Famous Memory. London: Printed by Iohn Norton, for Ioyce Norton, and Richard Whitaker, 1635. Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomie of Abuses. 1595 ed. Edited by Margaret Jane Kidnie. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Conjunction with Renaissance English Text Society, 2002. The Young Lady’s Own Book: A Manual of Intellectual Improvement and Moral Deportment. By the Author of the Young Man’s Own Book. Philadelphia: Desilver, Thomas & Co., 1836.

DIVORCE See Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood E D U C AT I O N Historically, the pre-Reformation Roman Catholic Church was patriarchal in structure; priests traditionally instructed the laity through use of daily, regulated

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prayers and rituals, and women were deemed childlike, irrational, lustful, and in need of guidance from a male figure. Priests distrusted female preaching due to their belief that only learned men could understand the Bible as well as the association of outspokenness in the secular sphere with disorder and sexual immorality. Although convents provided opportunities for wealthy women to learn literacy and numeracy—either in preparation for running her future husband’s household or for a life of prayer and contemplation in the cloisters—a nun’s educational opportunities were limited by her social class. Sisters from high-status backgrounds were often chosen for privileged positions as choristers, teachers, financial administrators, illustrators, scribes, and advisers to the abbess, while poor nuns normally worked as servants. Despite the church’s male-dominated hierarchy, many Renaissance-era clergymen supported female education in the belief that high-status women had the capacity to learn from the priests and in turn instruct their own children in basic Christian morality. The schoolmaster Richard Hyrde praised Sir Thomas More’s daughter Margaret for translating Erasmus’s Latin texts into English and proclaimed female education beneficial to the soul because it enabled women to reflect on morality rather than seek idle pleasures (Erasmus and Roper 1526). However, few 16th-century European women attended university because in Catholic and Protestant societies alike, these institutions were intended to train clergymen, lawyers, physicians, and other traditionally male professions. During the Reformation, educated women played an important role in the early Protestant movement; Anne Boleyn was credited for convincing Henry VIII to reform the post-1533 Church of England on more Protestant lines, and English gentlewoman Anne Askew was praised by John Bale for her writing of prayers, poems, and ballads to instruct female readers (Bale 1547, 58). As Protestant countries stabilized during the 1600s, female education generally focused on basic literacy and godly behavior rather than intellectual development and was primarily intended to counter internal religious schism, immorality, and disorder in society and instill discipline and self-control among the lower orders. During the late 17th century, however, a few female Protestants began to question the restrictions on female education, including Dutch artist Anna van Schurman, one of the few women to attend university at this time. Quaker women like Anne Docwra deemed familiarity with scripture vital not only for broadening one’s mind or defending the sect from allegations of heresy but also for averting the damnation of oneself and one’s kinsfolk due to reports of corruption, sexual misconduct, ignorance, and incompetence among established Protestant ministers (Docwra 2004, 164). Women’s educational roles evolved in the 18th century with the Great Awakening. Although not officially ordained as ministers, Methodist women were encouraged to participate in public prayers and organize meetings. During a second religious revival in the early 1800s, some women became unofficial missionary preachers in their own right, including self-taught black American Methodists like Jacinta Lee and Julia Foote, who learned to read with a copy of the Bible. These abolitionist women established schools for black children before the Civil War, traveled the country preaching against slavery, and distributed books, newspapers,



Education

and pamphlets to their congregations through their belief that both religious zeal and universal literacy were vital for confirming the black community’s humanity, autonomy, and worthiness to demand freedom (Bale 1547). Many white Methodist women crusaded against drunkenness in the United States and the industrial cities of Victorian Britain. Trained in the use of speeches, newspaper articles, printed pamphlets, poems, songs, protest marches, and mass meetings to promote their message among lower-status women, these temperance activists used both emotional persuasions and diplomatic but logic-based arguments derived from their own rigorous study of the Bible to convince men to renounce alcohol for their families’ well-being (Mattingly 1998). The Regency and Victorian eras represented a time of increased tolerance toward nonconforming Protestant sects and the Roman Catholic Church, with convent schools returning to England from continental Europe for the first time since the Dissolution of the Monasteries; universities throughout Europe and the United States opened to female students at this time. Some 19th-century academics criticized the hastily introduced courses intended exclusively for female university students due to the poor quality of teaching and lack of intellectual challenges. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Jefferson and Calvinist arguments that all souls of the chosen elect were equal before God, the antislavery activist Horace Mann argued that the state had a duty to provide outstanding education for all and to create an inclusive, diverse, rational, and politically aware American Christian identity (Anthony and Benson 2011). Driven by missionary zeal and the desire to improve everyday living conditions, Protestant philanthropists like the Irishman Thomas Barnardo opened institutions to instruct working-class orphaned girls in a combination of Christian morality and practical, vocational education with the intention of transforming them into useful and productive domestic servants. In the African and Asian colonies, British, Danish, and Swiss evangelical missionaries established schools for young indigenous girls and argued that a Christian education not only instilled a sense of obedience toward the Victorian colonial authorities but also benefited the natives due to their exposure to civilizing and modernizing influences (Sill 2010). Both at home and abroad, the schoolmistress was an important figure for instructing, encouraging, inspiring, and disciplining these girls; assisting the resident clergyman with his administrative work; planning lessons; and (particularly in African countries with high mortality rates) independently reading scripture to the class on the basis that every educated white colonist was duty-bound to spread Christianity. In the United States, Britain, and Ireland, nuns played an equally important role in the spread of universal public education from the 1840s to the 1960s by founding and teaching at schools for Catholic girls from poor backgrounds. In 1884, the bishops ruled that every parish in the United States was to have its own school, to be funded with tithes and charitable donations. Although remembered as austere and sometimes authoritarian institutions, these schools provided educational opportunities for Irish, Italian, Polish, and Mexican immigrant girls; offered pastoral care and support for those without families; and assisted with assimilation by teaching the children in English and identifying

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values common to both the Catholic congregation and the host country (Smarick and Robson 2015). The ordination of women, now widely accepted by many universities specializing in the training of Christian ministers (including UC Berkeley, Brigham Young in Utah, and Westcott House in Cambridge), can be credited to early British and American protofeminist organizations that took a revisionist approach to the traditional interpretation of Christianity as a bolster to patriarchy and a means to uphold long-standing norms of female domesticity and submission. Christian feminism originated within 19th-century female evangelical societies, especially the temperance movement, whose leaders Frances Willard, Mary Livermore, and Annie Wittenmyer believed that granting the vote to well-educated women would safeguard the perpetuation of the Sabbath, prevent a repeat of the godlessness that preceded ancient Israel’s collapse, and eventually herald legal prohibition of alcohol. Following the suffragettes’ success in winning the vote after World War I, a debate emerged within the Church of England on the question of female ordination, which was opposed by conservative bishops but supported by many laypeople. By the 1950s, some Presbyterian and Reformed Protestant churches in the United States had begun accepting women into universities for training and ordination into the ministry. Many American schools of divinity, where university students could study religion in preparation for the ministry, began to admit women during the late 1950s and early 1960s (including Emily Gage, the first female divinity student to graduate from Harvard in 1957), and by the 1970s, several colleges had established interdisciplinary courses for the study of gender in relation to religion—most notably Harvard’s Women’s Studies in Religion program, which was so successful that by the 1980s, female divinity students outnumbered the men. Yale had admitted a limited number of female divinity students from the 1930s onward, including Bernice Buehler and the children’s author Terry Allen, but the male-dominated status quo was not challenged until the 1970s, when feminist students questioned traditional concepts of a male patriarchal God and formed organizations inspired by the civil rights movement to protest against poor living conditions and institutionalized discrimination (Christ and Plaskow 2016). However, female admission was not without controversy; prior attempts to enroll women at Harvard in the 1890s had been opposed by conservatives who believed that priority should be given to male students, especially from poor or immigrant backgrounds, and feared that many women attended university with the sole aim of finding a husband (Braude 2006). N. K. Crown See also: Christianity: Abbesses; African American Women; Christianity in the United States; Christine de Pizan; Julian of Norwich; Ministers; Pilgrimage; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Sex and Gender; Women in the Reformation Further Reading Anthony, Michael, and Warren Benson. Exploring the History and Philosophy of Christian Education. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011.



“The Fall”

Bale, John. The First Examination of Anne Askew. London: Nicholas Hill, 1547. Christ Church, University of Oxford STC/851. Braude, Ann. “A Shift in the Created Order: 50 Years of Women and Transformation at the Harvard Divinity School.” As cited in Harvard Magazine, Harvard University, May/June 2006. http://harvardmagazine.com/2006/05/a-shift-in-the-created-o.html. Christ, Carol, and Judith Plaskow. Goddess and God in the World. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016. Docwra, Anne. “An Apostate Conscience Exposed, 1699.” In Autobiographical Writings of Early Quaker Women, edited by David Booy, 161–67. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Erasmus, Desiderius, and Margaret Roper. A Devout Treatise on the Paternoster. Edited by Richard Hyrde. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1526. British Library STC/10477. Mattingly, Carol. Well Tempered Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Sill, Ulrike. Encounters in Quest of Christian Womanhood. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Smarick, Andrew, and Kelly Robson. Catholic School Renaissance. Washington, DC: Philanthropy Roundtable, 2015.

EVE See Lilith (in Judaism section) “ T H E FA L L ” When we consider “the fall,” a religious moment that establishes the spiritual trajectory of humanity’s redemption and the truth of original sin within Christian theology, a more common signifier would be “the fall of man [humankind]” signaling the ways in which sex and gender concerns have been written into the history of Christian religiosity. Theologically, the fall introduces evil and sinfulness to manifest the possibility of experiencing God’s grace through the redemption made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. At the same time, however, as the archetypal woman and man of Western culture, the story of Eve and Adam’s fall from the Garden of Eden has emerged as apparent proof of women’s inherent inferiority to men, and that supposedly led to and justifies the universal subordination of women. While never specifically named within the Bible, interpretations of the fall develop from Christian exegesis of Genesis 1–3, which describes the transition of humankind from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of sinful disobedience and free will. According to Genesis, the formation of heaven and earth culminates on day six when God breathed life into the “first man,” Adam. After settling Adam in the Garden of Eden, God then creates Eve from Adam’s rib to be his companion, restricting both only in his command not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Tempted by a serpent, Eve and Adam disobey God’s command, committing the first sin by eating from the tree, and subsequently bring divine judgment on both nature and humankind. Adam and Eve’s innocent existence was over; the fall introduced moral evil into the world, helping to establish the doctrines of original sin and salvation while also engendering heteronormativity and a hierarchy of sexualized identities within the Christian world view. According to early church theologians, as the antihero of the fall narrative, Eve’s decision to transgress the will of God leaves a stain on all women and thus

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sanctifies sexual and gender difference, including Eve’s (and hence women’s) secondary role in the conjugal state (see 1 Corinthians 11:9). According to his context and interpretation, Paul stresses that man retains authority over woman exactly because, from the perspective of creation, Adam came first and because Eve, not Adam, was deceived by the serpent and transgressed God (see 1 Timothy 2:12–14 and 2 Corinthians 11:3). Saint Augustine’s notion of original sin draws inspiration from the belief that Eve’s conduct destroyed the image of God, causing all humanity to become a massa damnata (condemned mass). As this narrative goes, the depravity of humanity begins with the transgression of Eve, resulting in the story of the fall serving for centuries as the divine source for patriarchic laws that—often violently—curtail the rights and status of women. It is important to note, however, that such a narrative relies on the assumption that (1) a distinct sexual and gender hierarchy existed within the Garden of Eden before the fall and (2) that Eve’s conduct reifies this hierarchy by revealing her role as a sexual temptress and the cause of the fall. Strictly patriarchic interpretations of Eve, Adam, and the fall rely more on the nature and aim of interpretation than on the vitality of the text itself. Meaning, while Genesis absolutely includes patriarchal tendencies, to read the text itself as patriarchic ignores the roles and voices of women within biblical narratives, the interpretative conduct (and misogyny) of theologians and scholars alike, and the fact that gender is a social construct and thus a matter of power. As Bible scholar Phyllis Trible argues, rather than a hierarchy at the time of creation, Adam and Eve were equals—any inequality between them, and thus between the sexes generally, was not originally part of God’s plan but emerges as a direct consequence of the fall and their disobedience, which resulted in the gained knowledge of, and shame connected with, their bodies (Genesis 3:16) (Trible 1973, 39–42). Moreover, as Mieke Bal (1985) develops, through Eve’s decision, humanity gains not only its independence through free will but also the capacity to enter into a genuine relationship with the Divine. In other words, to demonize women vis-à-vis Eve ignores the meanings found within the Book of Genesis, the historical and linguistic contexts that developed patriarchic thinking, and, as Danna Fewell (1999, 271) develops following Bal, the true implications of the fall, which, rather than fallen, presents Eve as “a character of great power” because her “choice marks the emergence of human character.” Morgan Shipley See also: Christianity: Christianity in the United States; Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity; Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Mary Magdalene; Mother of God; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History; Sex and Gender; Islam: Hawwa; Judaism: Hebrew Bible; Lilith; Sex and Gender Further Reading Bal, Mieke. “Sexuality, Sin and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character (A Reading of Genesis 1–3).” Poetics Today 6, no. 5 (1985): 21–42.



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Fewell, Danna Nolan. “Reading the Bible Ideologically: Feminist Criticism.” In To Each Its Own Meaning: An Introduction to Biblical Criticisms and Their Application, edited by Steven L. McKenzie and Stephen R. Haynes, 268–282. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1999. Trible, Phyllis. “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 12 (1973): 30-48. Trible, Phyllis. “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread.” In Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, 74–83. New York: HarperOne, 1992.

F O U N D E R S O F C H R I S T I A N D E N O M I N AT I O N S Although women have been influential in every variety of Christianity, only a handful of women have founded a significant new denomination. Ann Lee founded the first Shaker community in 1776. Ellen Gould Harmon White cofounded the Seventh-Day Adventist church in 1863. Mary Baker Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879. Aimee Semple McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, opening Angelus Temple in 1923. In very different, often unorthodox ways, each founder described her work as witnessing to Jesus’s ministry and the appearance of the Christian millennium. Ann Lee (1736–1784), an English textile worker, joined the Wardley Society or “Shaking Quakers.” Renouncing Quaker (Society of Friends) theology, they worshiped with ecstatic dancing and shaking, considering this an effect of God’s presence. None of Lee’s four children survived, and she embraced the values of celibacy, communal property, and the feminine and masculine nature of God. Lee and others were jailed and beaten for street preaching and interfering with state church services. Lee emigrated to New York with a Wardley remnant and refashioned the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, or the Believers. Others called them Shakers. Renouncing a fleshly life of private possessions and private relationships, Shakers believe that the visions and revelations of “Mother Ann” explain Bible truth. Lee met opposition for her pacifism, radical theology, and social practices. Yet converts and orphans swelled the ranks to 26 villages of about 6,000 believers by 1850. They opposed slavery and welcomed women’s leadership. Lee’s motto “hands to work, hearts to God” elevated physical labor to a form of spiritual meditation and worship. Shaker furniture and other handmade goods remain popular for their beauty and simplicity. Inventive as well as industrious, Shakers created the flat broom, circular saw, spring clothespin, washing machine, and more. Shakers became the most successful communitarian religious movement in the United States. Converts gradually declined after the Civil War. One Shaker village remains in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Ellen H. White (1827–1915) was raised a “Shouting Methodist” in Maine. A classmate threw a rock at Ellen when she was just nine years old, hitting and disfiguring her face and rendering her unconscious for three weeks and too ill to attend school. Her religious interests grew during her convalescence, and she was baptized at the age of 12.

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White’s family soon left Methodism for Millerite meetings. William Miller predicted that the end of the world and the Christian millennium would come on October 22, 1844. This nonevent became known as the Great Disappointment. In December 1844, White reported a vision that Miller’s prophecy had been misunderstood. She galvanized a new movement that anticipated the (undated) second coming of Christ and celebrated this in worship on the seventh day of the week (Saturday on chosen cultural calendars). White and her husband, James Springer White, cofounded the Seventh-Day Adventist church in 1863. A prolific writer, White claimed about 2,000 visions throughout her life and produced 26 books based on her visions. Her 1892 Steps to Christ saw roughly 100 million copies published in 165 languages. Plagiarism charges dogged her, which historians have since begun to carefully dissect. Widowed in 1881, she took 24 train trips to California from the Midwest, spent almost two years in Europe, and lived eight years in Australia, all to spread the global reach of her church. An abolitionist, health reformer, and educator, she promoted vegetarianism and established several schools and hospitals. White’s religiosity paralleled many 19th-century intellectual currents as it yielded early radicalism to institutionalization and a more maternal idea of the Divine. Today, Seventh-Day Adventists number about 20 million globally and operate many hospitals and schools. Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) was raised in New Hampshire by Congregational parents. She read the Bible daily and joined the church in 1838. Her education was acceptable for a girl of her time, though it was interrupted by illness. Widowed young and pregnant, she sought to rebuild her family with an unfortunate second marriage ending in her husband’s desertion. She experimented with various medical treatments for chronic illness, but none proved lasting. In midlife, Eddy experienced a severe accident but quickly recovered, attributing this to an insight into God’s love for creation found in a gospel account of Jesus’s healing. Although at first she struggled to explain this experience, she soon came to feel she had received a new discovery or revelation meant to restore biblical healing to modern Christianity. She gradually separated from curative approaches she once considered impelled by Christ, notably the work of Phineas P. Quimby, which she later deemed sincere but based on human willpower. She married Asa Gilbert Eddy, her supporter until his death in the 1880s. In 1875, Eddy published Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, her Bible interpretation and statement of Christian Science. In her view, God’s mothering and fathering love rests on God’s own fixed, provable laws, making Christianity a compassionate science. Eddy first hoped the established churches would accept her teachings but later founded her own, obtaining charters for both her church and a teaching college. In 1898, she founded the Christian Science Publishing Society. Concerned about global social issues and balanced media reporting, at age 87 she founded the Christian Science Monitor, a respected international daily news source. In 2017, the mother church of Christian Science added members from 33 countries, many of them African. Christian Scientists have seen their popularity ebb and flow but have never published membership statistics.



Fundamentalism

Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), a Canadian, had a Methodist father and Salvation Army mother. She married Pentecostal minister Robert Semple. Like Mary Baker Eddy, she was a young widow and expectant mother who sought stability in a second marriage that failed. Traversing the United States with her children, she preached her signature “four-square gospel”: Jesus the Only Savior, the Great Physician, the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, and the Coming Bridegroom. “Sister Aimee” settled in Los Angeles, building the massive Angelus Temple. She preached a forgiving God who was against evolution and for prohibition, nationalism, faith healing, feeding the needy, women’s equality in churches, and (unevenly but eventually) racial inclusivity. McPherson was the first to blend revivalism with mass media: radio broadcasting, advertising, movies, and glamorous public appearances. Her sermons included musical bands and elaborate costumes rivalling those of Hollywood. In 1926, McPherson mysteriously disappeared. After a thronged memorial service, she reappeared and claimed to have been kidnapped. Prosecutors could not establish contrary evidence, though rumors swirled of a (voluntary) romantic tryst. Some Foursquare churches seceded, and family relationships frayed in disputes over the authenticity of her story. An impulsive third marriage ended in bitter divorce. McPherson redeemed herself by returning to her Pentecostal roots in 1936. She died of an apparently accidental drug overdose in 1944. Mocked by some as a sexual vixen manipulating her followers with false eyelashes and false doctrine, revered by others for her warm and successful ministry, she influenced the course of modern Christian conservatism. The Foursquare church today includes 68,000 churches in 136 countries. Its ministries still focus on aid to the needy. Amy B. Voorhees See also: Christianity: Christianity in the United States; Education; Protestant Denominations Further Reading Aamodt, Terrie Dopp, Gary Land, and Ronald Numbers, eds. Ellen Harmon White: American Prophet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Gottschalk, Stephen. Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006. Stein, Steven. The Shaker Experience in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Sutton, Matthew. Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

F U N D A M E N TA L I S M In the early 20th century, a fundamentalist movement swept American Christianity, particularly in Protestant churches. This movement was characterized by a defense of the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith, including biblical inerrancy (the notion that the word of God was completely infallible), the virgin birth of Jesus, the reality of miracles, and belief in the literal resurrection and physical second coming of

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Jesus Christ. The historian George Marsden (2006, 4) defines fundamentalism as “militantly anti-modernist Protestant evangelicalism,” and this definition suggests a certain role for women in the fundamentalist movement. Extremely conservative, fundamentalism reserved (and continues to reserve) a place for women that emphasized their traditional biblical roles as wife, mother, and caretaker. However, there were a few exceptions to this, most notably in the person of Aimee Semple McPherson, a fundamentalist Pentecostal preacher in the 1920s and 1930s. Fundamentalists have historically propagated either a complementarian or biblical patriarchal view of women. Complementarianism suggests that women and men are both equally valued but that they have different roles as mandated in scripture. Biblical patriarchy views the father as head of the household and therefore responsible for the behavior of his wife and children. Both views of women emphasize a theological position known as “biblical womanhood,” which argues that a woman’s virtue is chiefly contained in her being a good wife and mother. Central to these arguments is the fundamentalist conviction that the “fundamentals”—and, by extension, those who believed in them—were under attack by some sort of modernist project. Ergo, when it came to cultural activities, fundamentalists were vehemently opposed to anything that might possibly harm the home (which was, of course, the domain of women). In the movement’s earliest years, some fundamentalists opposed women’s suffrage. They also strongly opposed the teaching of evolution in public schools, believing it would harm children. Perhaps their most successful cause was Prohibition, which many fundamentalists supported in an attempt to keep the home space secure. After 1925, fundamentalism beat a hasty retreat into itself, only to resurge strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. If anything, the fundamentalism of those decades placed more of an emphasis on issues of women and their role. The political fundamentalism of the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition was shaped in large part by their opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in the United States. The fight to limit abortion became central to these new fundamentalists, who saw nothing wrong with policing women’s bodies to maintain their political and religious positions. This period also saw the formation of fundamentalist groups dedicated to maintaining traditional views of the home and family, such as the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. These organizations advanced the fundamentalist position that marriage ought to be “traditional” (between one man and one woman, with the man as head of the household) and that any other variation of the family is dangerous to society. Through their political activities, fundamentalists have positioned themselves against many of the things that both feminist and LGBTQ activists consider important gains. Somewhat ironically, even though fundamentalism reserves a traditional role for women, women have frequently been the public face of the movement. Sometimes they have challenged the fundamentalist assertion that women should not be leaders in churches or in faith formation. The best example of this is Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), who began her very public preaching career by itinerating in tent revivals and churches throughout the country, driving from place to place in a car with the phrase “Jesus Is Coming Soon—Get Ready” on the side (King



Fundamentalism

2013). She eventually settled in Los Angeles, where her preaching drew crowds of thousands, and she was able to raise enough money to build a permanent home for her ministry, the Angelus Temple. Her ministry became known as the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (or the Foursquare church), a Pentecostal denomination that emphasizes faith healing, speaking in tongues, and living a “spirit-filled” life (Foursquare Church n.d.). McPherson’s life and career were an anomaly in the world of early 20th-century fundamentalism, where most prominent evangelists were men. McPherson drew larger crowds than even Billy Sunday (1862–1935), the bombastic revival preacher who personified masculine Christianity. In a movement where women most frequently served in the background, Aimee Semple McPherson stood out. More recently, fundamentalists have used popular culture in an attempt to reinforce their traditional views of women. One of the most visible examples of this has been the Duggar family, whose television show 19 Kids and Counting ran on the TLC cable network from 2008 to 2015 (when it was canceled due to allegations that the eldest Duggar child, Josh, molested several young girls while in his early teens). The Duggars adhere to the Quiverfull movement, a branch of fundamentalism that prohibits the use of birth control and advocates having large families. These families frequently adhere to biblical patriarchy, and the Duggars have used their public forum to advocate for what they consider to be traditional values: supervised courtship, modesty in dress, and an emphasis on women’s role

Genesis—Two Stories of Creation The book of Genesis includes two versions of creation. The first, told in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 (see excerpt below), tells how the first woman was created alongside the first man; both were made from the same substance, at the same time, and in the same manner, with no indication of inequality between them. The second version, told in Genesis 2:4 to 2:24, is different. Here, the man—Adam—is created first, and the woman is created afterward from Adam’s rib. Following the second version, Genesis 3:1 to 3:24 tells the story of “the fall,” in which Eve picks the fruit that was forbidden, eats it, and offers some to Adam, which he also eats. As a consequence, both are expelled from the Garden of Eden, but Adam is punished with toil, while Eve is punished with pain and male domination. The second creation story and the story of the fall have had widespread influence in Western culture, and are familiar stories. But the first creation, included here, is less well known: Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Source: Genesis 1:26–27, Bible NKJV.

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as wives and mothers. This popular-culture mainstreaming of fundamentalist views on women reinforces the limited roles that they are able to play within the fundamentalist movement itself. Mary Ruth Sanders See also: Christianity: Christianity in the United States; Founders of Christian Denominations; Ministers; Protestant Denominations; Sex and Gender Further Reading Epstein, Daniel Mark. Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. Foursquare Church. “Declaration of Faith.” 2016. http://foursquare-org.s3.amazonaws. com/assets/Declaration_of_Faith.pdf. Hankins, Barry. Jesus and Gin: Evangelicalism, the Roaring Twenties, and Today’s Culture Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. King, Gilbert. “The Incredible Disappearing Evangelist.” Smithsonian Magazine, June 17, 2013. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the​-incredible​-disappearing​-evangelist​ -572829/?no-ist. Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN (1098–1179) Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of the convent of Rupertsberg on the banks of the River Rhine in Germany, was one of the outstanding women of medieval Europe. In recent decades, she has become famous for her repertoire of mystically inspired music. In Hildegard’s own era, she was more famous for her mystical visions. These were dictated to a scribe and illustrated with beautiful mandala-style images by her nuns. Hildegard was born in Bermersheim, near Mainz, into a minor noble family. As was common in such families, Hildegard’s future was decided by her parents at an early age. At the age of eight, she was sent to the Disibodenberg Benedictine monastery to study with Jutta, daughter of the Count of Sponheim. Here, Hildegard learned theology, literature, music, medicine, and other skills. Around 1113, she took her vows as a nun. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was elected the leader of the growing women’s community. In 1141, Hildegard felt that she received a command from God to make her visions and her interpretations of them more widely available. She began a book she called Scivias, (Know the Ways [of God]) (1141–1151). Around 1147–1148, during the Synod of Trier, Hildegard’s writings were brought to the attention of Pope Eugenius III (1088–1153), who gave papal approval to the text. Hildegard’s fame spread, and she was widely credited with the gift of prophecy. She corresponded with hundreds of people who sought her advice, guidance, and prayers, including popes, secular rulers such as the German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (1123–1190), important religious figures such as Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), and many laity.



Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

The beautiful paintings of Hildegard’s visions were artistically innovative and contained much feminine imagery. For Hildegard and her nuns, the lives of the Virgin Mary and other saintly virgins were important role models. Another important concept in her writing is that of viriditas, a Latin-based word she used to express what for her were the essential qualities of the Divine—vitality, fecundity, lushness, verdure, and growth. During her first decade as women’s leader at Disibodenberg, Hildegard began a concerted campaign to set up a women’s community independent of the male monastery. In 1150, she succeeded and established a new convent at nearby Rupertsberg. This was followed in 1165 by a Illumination shows Hildegard of Bingen receiving a second community at Eibingen, vision, from her book Liber Scivias (Know the Ways), on the opposite bank of the ca. 1151. The book describes 26 of her visions. (PriRhine. Hildegard commuted vate Collection/Bridgeman Images) twice weekly across the river between the two convents for the rest of her life. In an era when few women wrote, Scivias was only one of Hildegard’s extensive writings. Other books included Physica (1151–1158) on plants and their medicinal properties; Causa et curae (1151–1158) on medicine; Symphonia harmoniae celestium revalationum (Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revolution; ca. 1158), which included songs and a rare early oratorio for women; and a major theological work, Liber divinorum operum (Book of Divine Works; 1163–1174). Her spiritual advice was so valued that, highly unusually for a woman, she was invited to preach in public. In her sixties and early seventies, Hildegard undertook four preaching tours of Germany. Although revered as a saint for centuries, Hildegard was not formally canonized until May 1, 2012. On October 7, 2012, in recognition of her work as a theologian, Pope Benedict XVI proclaimed Hildegard a Doctor of the Church. There is a shrine to Saint Hildegard at the Eibingen parish church, where her body is now buried. Vivianne Crowley

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See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Christianity in Europe; Middle Ages; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mystics; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archeology, and History; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity Further Reading Anon. “Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess.” In The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture, Vol. 2, edited by Colum P. Hourihane, 331–32. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Burnett, Charles, and Peter Dronke, eds. Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of Her Thought and Art. Warburg Institute Colloquia 4. London: Warburg Institute, 1998. Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life. London: Routledge, 1989. Newman, Barbara, ed. Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

H O M O S E X U A L I T Y I N E A R LY T O E A R LY MODERN CHRISTIANITY Until the 19th century, the identity of “gay” or “lesbian” did not exist. Women before the 19th century would not have identified themselves as gay or lesbian, and few writings by women about same-sex desire survive. Concern with male samesex desire and sexual activity found far greater expression in the works of Christian authors from the Benedictine Rule to canon law. Scholars have identified textual evidence indicating a self-conscious subculture among monks and other clergy who—despite official church censure of same-sex activity or “sodomy”—celebrated and perhaps engaged in homoerotic sex. John Boswell (1981), for example, argues that what might be termed a “gay” subculture found wide toleration in the central and High Middle Ages but experienced severe and targeted repression by the 13th century CE. Christian writers’ direct discussion of female homosexual desire and sexual activity is more limited but suggests concern about erotic and romantic relationships. Throughout premodernity, Christianity served both as a vehicle for persecuting female homosexuality and as a way for women to express their desire for other women. In some cases, female homosexuality was also thought to be related to other forms of social and religious deviance, such as heresy and witchcraft. The New Testament was heavily influenced by Greco-Roman culture, which generally condemned female homosexual relationships. Many Greek writers of the first century condemned female homosexuality, which was thought to act against nature because it entailed women engaging in male roles and usurping male privilege. First- and second-century writers, such as Seneca, Martial, and Soranos, wrote of the dangers of women becoming like men. In Paul’s (ca. 5–ca. 67 CE) letters to the Corinthians and Romans, the author condemns all homosexual relationships, which threaten the social order by not conforming to sexual expectations. In Romans 1:26–27, the only passage in which he explicitly mentions female homosexuality, he writes of women who “exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones.” In 1 Corinthians 11:3–7, he orders that women alone must cover their heads in



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churches because while man “is the image and reflection of God; . . . woman is the reflection of man.” Thus, Paul’s condemnation against homosexuality reflected Greco-Roman concerns for the rigidity of gender and sexual roles. Like Paul, the influential North African bishop and theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) argued that the ideal Christian life was one of sexual abstinence. However, since the Bible also called on believers to “be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28), Augustine suggested that sexual activity is justified for the purpose of procreation. In a letter to a community of nuns dated 423, he explicitly condemned homosexual activity among those women: “The things which shameless women do even to other women in low jokes and games are to be avoided” (Augustine 1956, 50). About a century later, church authorities began writing and copying penitentials (lengthy lists of sins with their corresponding penances) first in the British Isles and later in continental Europe. These lists often included sexual sins, as was the case with the Penitential of Theodore, which calls for a woman who “practices vice with a woman” to do penance for three years. Similarly, a woman who masturbates is to do penance for the same amount of time, underscoring the fear that men could be excluded from sexual activity. In the 11th and 12th centuries, church reformers repeated the penances listed in the older penitentials. The writings of Paul and Augustine were read widely by these theologians and were used in support of condemnations of female homosexuality. These theologians focused primarily on male homosexuality, but a few sources also demonstrate theological revulsion to female homosexuality. In his Commentary on Saint Paul, for example, the French theologian Peter Abelard (1079–1142) argues that sexual relations between women is against nature because women’s genitalia was created to be used by men and not by other women. The pattern of primary attention to male homosexuality is reflected in secular law codes, but the French Li livres de justice et de plet (ca. 1260) refers to women convicted of sodomy, stipulating that they shall be mutilated after the first and second offenses and burnt to death after the third. In both secular and canon law, sexual activity between women could be called “sodomy,” but because it did not include penile-vaginal penetration or the emission of semen, it was typically not punished as harshly as male homosexuality. But from the mid-13th century on, female homosexuality was punished just as harshly as the male equivalent in many legal scenarios. Sodomy (any kind of “unnatural” and nonprocreative sex) was commonly associated with heresy or witchcraft in the medieval and early modern eras; both were seen to threaten natural order. One famous example is Benedetta Carlini, an early 17th-century Italian nun. Living during the Catholic Reformation, her mystical visions threatened the spiritual authority of the male clergy. She was tried by a church tribunal and sentenced to life in prison. Her trial transcripts suggest that she engaged in sexual activity with another nun, yet Benedetta did not recall doing this. While it is possible that Benedetta engaged in sexual activity with another woman, historian Ann Matter (1989/1990) has argued that her primary erotic desires were directed toward Jesus, an attitude that highlights the blurred lines between female sexuality and spirituality.

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As Europeans colonized the New World, they carried many of their attitudes regarding homosexuality with them. In colonial Mexico, the office of the Mexican Inquisition was charged with rooting out heresy, but the intersections of sexuality and religion meant that it also acted against suspicions of female homosexuality. In 1621, for example, the office took interest in the 20-year-old mestiza (woman of mixed Spanish and Native American heritage) Augustina Ruiz, who was accused of confessing to her priest that she had both fantasized about and copulated with Jesus and the Virgin Mary. This case reveals that religious beliefs were sometimes eroticized by religious men and women who believed themselves to be good Christians, even while church authorities deemed these thoughts to be deviant. Charles Carroll See also: Ancient Religions: Homosexuality; Christianity: Christianity in Africa; Christianity in Europe; Christianity in Latin America; Christianity in the United States; Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Middle Ages; Sex and Gender; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Augustine. Letter 211. Translated by Sr. Wilfrid Parsons. In Fathers of the Church. Vol. 32: 50. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1956. Bennett, Judith. “‘Lesbian-Like’ and the Social History of Lesbianisms.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 1/2 (January/April 2000): 1–24. Boswell, John. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Brooten, Bernadette. Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Matter, Ann. “Discourses of Desire: Sexuality and Christian Women’s Visionary Narratives.” Journal of Homosexuality 18 (1989/1990): 119–31. Murray, Jacqueline. “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages.” In Handbook for Medieval Sexuality, edited by Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage, 191–222. New York: Garland, 1996.

I N T E R FA I T H D I A L O G U E P O S T 9 / 1 1 , CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM WOMEN For many Christian and Muslim women of faith, participating in the distinct activity identified as interfaith dialogue is an important way of living out their spirituality. While there are many ways to speak of interfaith activities or encounters, the word dialogue is preferred because it emphasizes intentional conversation, interchange, and discussion and suggests that at the heart of every interfaith encounter or activity is a core value placed on effective communications beyond the boundary of religious difference. One of the primary functions of interfaith dialogue is to counter fears, stereotypes, prejudices, and hatred by promoting respect for religious diversity, religious persons, and their sustaining faith systems and institutions. Interfaith dialogue works to create a safe interpersonal space “to define yourself and to learn the self-definitions of others” (InterfaithDialogueAssociation n.d.)



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for the common public good. Because of the violent tragedy of 9/11, wherein 2,977 women, men, and children were killed and thousands of others injured in the name of religion by Islamic terrorists, U.S. citizenry experienced a shock in world view. As a national civic crisis arose centered on how to regard Muslims and Islam, the activity of interfaith dialogue emerged from the shadows, and its role and function within society has become more transparent and valued. Post-9/11 interfaith dialogue partners, whether Muslim or Christian, tend to be women who (1) have had prior positive interfaith encounters, (2) are curious seekers who want to understand Islam or Christianity better, or (3) are participants as the result of an interfaith marriage. Muslim women (Sunni, Shi‘a, and followers of Warith D. Muhammad) who were once hidden from public and religious discourse began to emerge as first respondents after 9/11. As speakers, presenters, and educators, they were sent from Islamic centers, organizations, and mosques to help respond to the numerous inquiries and invitations from social groups (civic and religious, youth and adult) who sought to make sense of the tragedy, and they promoted Islam as a religion of peace. Christian women (U.S. born and immigrants) interfaith partners were most often from mainline Protestant denominations, and some were Catholics. Some denominations, like the Presbyterian church (United States), took a more active role in advocating for interfaith dialogue by adopting the report “Toward an Understanding of Christian-Muslim Relations” and in 2010 commending it to the entire church, including its educational institutions, for study, guidance, and action. While relatively new to the U.S. context, Christian and Muslim dialogues are found worldwide, with one of the oldest being the Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa founded in 1959 to foster relations between Christian and Muslim women and to encourage them to communicate effectively on issues that concern them and their environment. At least three key factors that challenge the participation of women in creating and sustaining interfaith dialogues have been identified: (1) fear of conversion, (2) the unwillingness to recognize the intimate and complex relationships that exist between religions and culture (think Islam, Muslim, and Arabic; think the United States, Christian, and Western) and how they affect religious gender identity in the United States, and (3) the need to understand the encounters of geographically diverse immigrating Muslims and Christians and their need to negotiate religious traditions and assumptions with indigenous and historical U.S. Muslims and Christian communities in the face of the growing global interfaith movement. There are five distinct types of interfaith dialogues practiced by Muslim and Christian women. These and their various forms, approaches, and activities are not static but are often fluid and interrelated. 1. The dialogue of life (practical): The dialogue of life, or living dialogue, is concerned with attitudes and behaviors of respect and dignity shown toward other religious women encountered as one goes about daily life. As the United States is a religiously open society, how one treats her neighbor should be governed by the ultimate divine authority in her life—for the Christian, this is Jesus, and for the Muslim, this is the Qur’an.

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2. The dialogue of religious experience (experiential): Dialogue subjects are religious women who are rooted in their own religions traditions and are willing to use their voices to share their faith experiences and spiritual understandings. Both formal and informal in structure, women’s presentations may reflect on common religious themes, such as compassion, suffering, marriage, and spiritually, and often make use of the arts, storytelling, songs, and dramas as their narratives are shared. 3. The dialogue of engagement (practical): Actively engaging in work together to address issues of social justice and human needs, especially among the most vulnerable members of society (such as refurbishing a shelter for abused women) is one of the most preferred types of interfaith activism. Women find it personally and communally satisfying to organize a joint Christian and Muslim Girl Scouts’ event or plan interfaith projects for youth. 4. The dialogue of relationship (relational): Unlike other types of dialogue, the goal of this dialogue is clearly directed toward building friendships and meaningful relationships. A local community-based example is the Common Ground, an informal group of women who attend the mosque and church in the Plymouth, Michigan, community and decided to develop a relationship following the murder of three Muslim youth. A transcultural example is the consultations of the African and African Diasporan Women in Religion and Theology. The dialogue of relationship recognizes that each woman is her own phenomenon as members of the group share of themselves, talking about their families, beliefs, and passions as well as the sorrows and joys they face. Because relationships are both the subject and object of such dialogues, careful attention must be given to matters such as networks and connections, relational and shared models of leadership, inclusion and care strategies, and attending to contextual power dynamics necessary to develop and sustain meaningful dialogues. 5. The dialogue of theological exchange (confessional): The purpose of this dialogue is to allow religious official leaders, professional specialists, and scholars to share publicly understandings of their core religious heritages and to appreciate one another’s religious and spiritual values. Because Christian women do serve as religious pastors, priests, and scholars, but there are no recognized female imams, some interfaith committees and associations do encourage the participation of religious Muslim women as scholars, commentators, and leading civic leaders.

Given the tenor of the times, the major emphasis on relations between Christian and Muslim women indicate that they contribute to positive and constructive interfaith dialogues in a myriad of forms and structures. As interfaith partners, it is important that they continue to take a closer look at events emerging from within the specific contexts where they live, work, and worship to discover new opportunities for deepening dialogues. Consider briefly three illustrations from the contemporary U.S. context. The first case relates to an event in which a young political science professor posted a personal message on Facebook on December 10, 2015, writing, “I believe Muslims and Christians worship the same God,” and as a result was suspended from Wheaton College, where she taught. The same young woman was also photographed wearing a hijab “in solidarity with Muslim women.” The latter act has initiated a dynamic dialogue on the Internet among Muslim women with opposing views on the issue as to whether it is appropriate and desirable for non-Muslims to wear the hijab or whether this act helps radical Muslim clerics. This unexpected and unplanned interfaith dialogue involving social media will surely have significant



Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416)

implications for gender-based interfaith dialogue in the future. The second case points to a 2016 Pew Research Center report entitled “A Religious Gender Gap for Christians, but Not for Muslims,” which may prove interesting as a current resource to promote interfaith understanding and conversations. The third and final case is focused on the development of the first all-women mosque in the United States housed at an interfaith center in Los Angeles, California, and its implications for interfaith dialogue. An age-old Chinese practice of Islamic female prayer leaders, female imams, and all-women mosques that dates back to 16th-century China appears to be gaining interest in the West. Imam Sherin Khankan set up the first women-led mosque in northern Europe, and the first all-female mosque in the United States, the Women’s Mosque of America, was established in 2015 in Los Angeles by M. Hasna Maznavi, who became interested in Islam and women’s role in Islam after 9/11. Since 9/11, it has become apparent why interfaith dialogue is crucial. Muslim and Christian women in interfaith dialogue are making important contributions toward producing good and thoughtful citizens. Marsha Snulligan Haney See also: Christianity: African American Women; Christianity in the United States; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History; Islam: Islam in the United States; Peacemaking Further Reading Allen, Kathleen E. “Women’s Value Orientation.” In Encyclopedia of Leadership, edited by George Goethals, Georgia J. Sorenson, and James MacGregor Burns, 1688–92. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. Interfaith Dialogue Association. 2018. www.interfaithassociation.org. Reticker, Gini, and Abigail E. Disney, dirs. Pray the Devil Back to Hell. New York: Fork Films 2008. DVD. Ross, Rosetta, and Rose Mary Amenga-Etego. Unraveling and Reweaving Sacred Canon in Africana Womanhood. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Smith, Jane I., ed. “Christian-Muslim Dialogue in North America.” The Muslim World 94, no. 3. Blackwell, Hartford Seminary, July 2004.

JULIAN OF NORWICH (CA. 1342–CA. 1416) In medieval England, one woman rose above the gender limitations of her time to become a Christian theological and spiritual authority. She was the first woman to write any book in English. Her works, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, recount her vision, in which Christ came to her and showed her a pathway to salvation. She lived in Norwich, England, a wealthy port city. The name by which she is remembered is not her birth name. Rather, on becoming a Christian anchoress, she took on the name of her church; hence, Julian from Saint Julian’s in Norwich. An anchoress was a woman who devoted her life to personal, spiritual reflection in a church or monastery, largely removed from society. In youth, she recounted in her first book, she prayed to God for three things: to see Christ’s crucifixion, to experience extreme pain to the verge of death to

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understand Christ’s sufferings, and to receive the three “wounds” of contrition, compassion, and the desire to seek God’s will. Her first vision occurred on May 8, 1373, while she was on the verge of death. The vision revealed God’s love for humanity through offering Christ on the cross. The two major themes presented in her visions’ explanations are love and that all Christians have the opportunity for this love. Her spiritual vision marked her as a mystic who emphasized a personal connection with Christ through inner visions, prayers, and feelings rather than the solely outward rituals of the medieval church. She first recorded the vision in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman soon after the original experience, although the exact date of writing is unknown. In this first version, she provides a general account of what she witnessed: Christ’s suffering on the cross followed by a message of love. In the vision, Christ’s human form died for our human sin, leading her to develop a distinction between body and soul: although all of humankind is sinful, sin is connected to the body and not the spiritual soul. Christ, in his death, relieved the burden of this bodily sin so that our spiritual soul may be saved. She also included several self-degrading phrases, highlighting that she saw such visions despite being an uneducated female. This is reflective of her historical context, in which it was rare for a woman to write and assert religious views. She belittles her gender to downplay her role in the vision and highlight that it was God’s will that she receive the vision and spread it to others. About 20 years after the initial vision, Julian released a revision of A Vision (ca. mid-1380s). A Revelation of Love (ca. 1410) was much longer and, although it provided details of the original vision, it was more focused on providing a theological understanding of the vision and how the vision could provide spiritual guidance for all Christians. She also revealed that she had experienced two additional visions in 1388 and 1393 in which God helped guide her understanding and provide a clear theological interpretation. Thus, A Revelation served as a guidebook for seeking Christ through inner spiritual reflection and prayer, greatly connected with the Christian mystic movement. She provided steps through which a person could focus on his or her soul and separate from bodily sin. She also wrote this guidebook for all people, just as God’s love was for all, rather than restricting her religious teachings to the educated monastics or priests, as other medievalists did. Thus, her writings promoted hope for an entire population. Numerous wills in which she received donations to help fund her remaining an anchoress emphasized her credibility and expertise as a spiritual leader. Many of the wills were from Norwich’s leading clergy, nobles, and merchants, including the Earl of Warwick’s daughter Isabel Ufford. Her most famous follower, and one of only a few we know by name, was Margery Kempe, another English Christian mystic, who wrote of seeking out Julian to better understand Kempe’s own religious visions. The few manuscripts of Julian’s works were copied and retained in Norwich, London, and Paris, also highlighting their importance among medieval religious communities. Amanda Wrenn Allen



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See also: Christianity: Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mystics; Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity Further Reading Dinshaw, Carolyn, and David Wallace, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Jantzen, Grace. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. Jenkins, Jacqueline, and Nicholas Watson, eds. The Writings of Julian of Norwich. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004.

MARRIAGE, DIVORCE, AND WIDOWHOOD In Old Testament times, marriage was overwhelmingly the norm, in keeping with the creation narrative in the first two chapters of Genesis. In the New Testament, the picture differs in that Jesus (as well as John the Baptist, Paul, and Timothy) was unmarried, and Jesus taught that there would be no marriage in the hereafter but that all would be as “angels in heaven,” the only marriage being that of Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom, to his bride, the church. Nevertheless, Jesus referred to earthly marriage, notably in Matthew 10:1–12, citing Genesis in only considering marriage between a man and a woman—“God made them male and female” (Matthew 10:6)—and also defining marriage as an equal contract based on mutual love and respect (Ephesians 5:31–31). These tenets are reflected in the Catholic marriage vows, later codified in the Book of Common Prayer (1552), the text on which the marriage service in most Protestant denominations is based. The premise is that marriage involves a woman entering into a union with a man (“Do you take this man . . .”), that it will be exclusive (“forsaking all others”), and that it is irrevocable (“till death us do part”). The beauty of the marriage vows, in which the woman promises “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health . . . till death us do part,” have since become an integral part of the social fabric. They are closely mirrored in Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Baptist services in which the duality of these phrases is still evident in their more colloquial language (e.g., “in good times and bad . . . in sorrow and joy”). However, the unilateral promise made only by the woman “to love, honor, and obey” her husband is no longer universally accepted. While many conservative Protestant women promise to “obey” or “submit,” reflecting the patriarchal standpoint of fundamentalist Christianity, more liberal-minded women often choose to omit “obey,” a popular alternative being “to love, honor, and cherish.” A woman is now generally free to choose her husband and to marry for love, although women have historically been subjected to arranged marriages as a valuable means of creating alliances between families. The age at which a woman can marry has varied across Europe and the U.S. states, but in the 21st century, the marriageable age is between 16 and 18 years, with parental consent being required for a woman under the age of majority. Women have been considered marriageable

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from as early as 12 years old, this being an age when girls reach puberty; however, in most of western Europe, such young marriages were rare. When conducted by a licensed minister of religion, such a marriage is recognized as legally valid in countries such as the United States and England, although in others (e.g., France) the separation of church and state means that the religious ceremony has no legal status, and the woman must also take part in a civil ceremony. Marriage is seen as the point at which a woman is ready to engage in sexual relations and to build a family life. While some cultures have required proof that a bride is a virgin, traditionally by physically checking that the hymen is intact or by “proof of blood”—the vaginal bleeding that results from the tearing of the hymen during the consummation of marriage—this is no longer applicable in mainstream society. The exclusivity of the marriage contract means it is implicitly monogamous. Although some sects have interpreted the Bible to allow polygamous marriages, this is confined to patriarchal sects (e.g., the Mormons); while in such cases men are granted the right to have several wives (polygyny), women are never allowed to have several husbands (polyandry) but rather are expected to be faithful and obedient. There have been periods such as the early Middle Ages when wealthy men kept multiple partners in addition to the wife allowed under canon law, but this has never been condoned by the church. Polygamy is rare in western Europe, but in places where it is still culturally acceptable some churches allow it, even though this practice disbars them from the World Council of Churches. While same-sex marriages have gained legal status in several countries, the churches still struggle with the concept: the Catholic church does not recognize same-sex marriages at all, and because of objections by the Church of England and Wales to the British legislation, in which they explicitly stated that they did not wish to conduct same-sex marriages, it is accepted that a church (as opposed to civil) same-sex wedding would be illegal (Church of England 2014). Protestant denominations such as Lutherans are also becoming more tolerant, although this is less often the case with evangelical churches, particularly in the United States and Africa. Jesus did not refer specifically to homosexuality, and his message of love has been widely interpreted to mean that he would have been loving and accepting of LGBTQ people. However, Paul did condemn homosexuality as sinful (e.g., Romans 1:26–27) in accordance with Mosaic law (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13), and the hardline evangelical view is that, as all scripture is the word of God, homosexual marriage is abhorrent in the sight of God. If a woman’s marriage breaks down, her right to end that marriage depends on her denomination. Both the Catholic church and many Protestant denominations refer back to Jesus’s teaching, especially his statement that a man or woman who divorces and then remarries is committing adultery (Mark 10:11–12); in other words, marriage is a divine, not a human, convention. However, in Matthew’s account, Jesus does cite certain grounds for divorce, such as a wife’s immorality or indecency. Although under Jewish law the initiative in divorce was always with the husband, Jesus taught that either partner could divorce the other (Mark 10:12), recognizing that the gentiles to whom he was speaking lived by a Roman code in which women could also divorce their husbands.



Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood

A Catholic woman’s only recourse is to have her marriage annulled, meaning that the marriage is null and void; the only grounds for an annulment are that the marriage was illegally contracted (because one of the partners was not free or eligible to marry) or that it had never been consummated. Although an annulment means that the woman has in effect never been married, which would imply that her children from the marriage would be illegitimate, Canon 1137 of the Code of Canon Law affirms their legitimacy. The Anglican church also teaches that marriage is for life but recognizes that some marriages fail. Remarriage following divorce is always allowed if the former spouse has died, although remarrying divorcées in church if their ex-spouses are living has been an extremely contentious issue. In 2001, proposals to permit divorcées to remarry in church were rejected by a third of dioceses, but many clergy were already ignoring the official line; in July 2002, the General Synod overwhelmingly passed the motion to allow divorcées to marry in church, although the decision still rests with the minister. Among nonconformists, the Methodist church has a similarly pragmatic liberal approach, possibly because most Methodist marriages involve at least one divorced partner (around 70 percent according to a 2001 survey); likewise, the Baptist church has no centralized policy regarding divorce, and the decision to remarry a couple lies with the minister. Some feel that it is inappropriate and will not perform the ceremony while others will. Attitudes to widowhood have changed considerably over the years in regard to the appropriate length and manner of their period of mourning. In the 19th century, mourning was highly formalized and was distinguished by three periods: one full year of heavy or deep mourning (only black clothing, no colored jewels), six months of half mourning (black clothing with white touches, or white with black touches), and another six months of light or second mourning (clothing largely a mix of black and white with muted colors, such as grey or mauve), making a total of two years. However, if a young widow met someone she considered a suitable suitor after the first year, she was not required to remain in mourning. While modern widows are not bound by any such social customs, it is generally considered that the grief process lasts for around two years, so the Victorian time scale is logical. There are no restrictions on a widow remarrying, although doing so in considerably less than two years could be seen as showing “indecent haste.” Historically, marriage has often meant that a woman’s property has come under the control of her husband, and she has forfeited her legal rights to conduct business or sign contracts. The resulting dependence on her husband meant that widowhood could leave her destitute and vulnerable; Jesus taught that honoring a mother includes giving her monetary assistance in old age (Mark 7:10–13), and he condemned those who take advantage of widows. Paul also recognized this duty of care but stipulated that the responsibility of the church should be limited to the care of believing widows and that they should also be at least 60 years of age, have had only one husband, and have a well-founded reputation for having lived a good life (1 Timothy 5:5–10). Despite the assumption that widowhood means penury and loneliness, it can also be a liberating period, especially if it involves the restitution of legal rights. In Christianity, widowhood does not necessarily lead to a loss

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of social status and, with her childbearing and rearing duties behind her, a woman may adopt a new role in which she may have greater freedom to pursue new goals, using her experience and wisdom for the greater good. Amanda Haste See also: Christianity: Chastity; Christianity in Europe; Christianity in the United States; “The Fall”; Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity; Middle Ages; Mormonism; Mystics; Polygamy; Protestant Denominations; Sex and Gender; Widowhood; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Women in the Reformation Islam: Marriage and Divorce; Judaism: Marriage and Divorce Further Reading Church of England. “House of Bishops Pastoral Guidance on Same Sex Marriage.” February 15, 2014, 3. https://www.churchofengland.org/sites/default/files/2017-11/House%20 of%20Bishops%20Pastoral%20Guidance%20on%20Same%20Sex%20Marriage.pdf Ortiz, Andres. “Divorce, Annulments, and Remarriage.” About Catholics. 2016. http:// www.aboutcatholics.com/beliefs/divorce-annulments-and-remarriage/.

M A RY M A G D A L E N E ( C A . F I R S T C E N T U RY C E ) Mary Magdalene is one of the most significant female figures in Christianity, second only to the Virgin Mary and perhaps to Eve. Important for her role in the nascent Christian faith, Magdalene was a close companion to Jesus in the first century CE and a woman of exemplary faith, love, and devotion to him before and after his death. She is both a historical woman and a legendary persona whose popularity soared during the Middle Ages. Recently discovered ancient documents and new scholarship add to our knowledge of Magdalene, and show her to be a key figure in the founding of Christianity, an apostle to Christ, and the subject of controversy and gender politics during her lifetime and throughout the two millennia since. New Testament gospels depict Magdalene as a disciple of Jesus, a witness to his crucifixion and burial, and the first to see the resurrected Christ. She is called the Apostle to the Apostles because, according to canonical scriptures, the risen Christ told her to announce his resurrection and tell the others to go out and proclaim the good news. In the Eastern churches, Magdalene is named Disciple of Christ, Apostle to the Apostles, Equal to the Apostles, and “Myrrhbearer” in recognition of her role in anointing Christ after his death—a role that she prepared for but did not perform since he rose from the dead. In Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and some Protestant traditions, Magdalene is a saint. Her relics are considered sacred; thousands of monasteries, hospitals, and churches have been named after her; and the places associated with her life and legends are popular sites of pilgrimage. It is unknown what became of Magdalene after Christ’s death. Some sources claim she went to Ephesus, where she lived out her days in the company of other Christians, but legends about her have been told across the centuries. The Golden Legend, an influential collection of saints’ lives compiled by Jacobus de Voragine (ca. 1260), reports that Magdalene escaped from Palestine with other disciples, landed in Marseilles (current-day France), and continued her role as herald of the



Mary Magdalene (ca. first century CE)

resurrection, preaching and converting the inhabitants. She then retired to some remote caves near Sainte Baume (now an important pilgrimage site), where she lived the last 30 years of her life as a hermit, surviving on divine nourishment. Upon her death, she was raised up into the heavens by angels. Currently, in the West, there is renewed interest in Mary Magdalene and a drive to unearth and revive knowledge of her as a woman of historical importance as well as a significant spiritual teacher. Recently discovered gospels from the same period as the earliest canonical gospels identify Magdalene as the most beloved of Jesus and one of, if not the most, advanced disciples who understood and embodied his message (Bourgeault 2010). There is even some evidence that she—and not Peter, whom some original sources show as her rival—was the intended successor to head the incipient religion after Jesus’s death (Bourgeault 2010; Schaberg and Johnson-DeBauvre 2006). Magdalene in Popular Imagination

While the story of Magdalene as a companion of Jesus is historically true, another long-held belief about her within Western Christianity is false—the story that she was a penitent whore who followed Jesus and wept at his feet for forgiveness. The persona of Magdalene the penitent whore, and the history of errors and mysteries surrounding her life and death, have long captivated artists and storytellers and have led to the production of uncounted works of art, stories and legends, and references in fiction and morality plays. She has been the subject of works by famous artists, including for example, Georges de La Tour (The Penitent Magdalene, ca. 1625–1650; Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, ca. 1640), Alexander Andreyevich Ivanov (The Appearance of Christ to Mary Magdalene, ca. 1834–1836), Gregor Erhart (Saint Mary Magdalene, nude sculpture, 1502–1503), Frederick Sandys (Mary Magdalene, 1858–1860), and Carlo Dolci (Mary Magdalene, ca. 1660–1670), all of which depict her alone or with Jesus in the persona of a penitent. Depictions range from modest to completely nude, the latter highlighting the sexual nature of her supposed sins. One recent work of fiction, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), became a best seller and was made into a popular film (2006), catapulting Magdalene and the mysteries surrounding her into the secular public consciousness. In the Middle Ages, popular sermons by traveling lay preachers, and works of art containing messages for the illiterate, led to immense popular devotion to Magdalene, who became the patron saint of hospitals, mendicants, gardens, and those wanting to have children. Popular sermons drew on legend to portray Magdalene as an example of hope for all sinners. In The Making of Magdalen (2000), Katherine L. Jansen brings to light sources of the period that, while largely fabrications, fed the immense popularity of Saint Magdalene and supported a popular, noninstitutional Christian piety. Popular medieval sermons elaborated on the story of Magdalene as a former prostitute, describing her as an impure and promiscuous woman on the margins of society, whose great faith enabled her conversion to a life of chastity, repentance, and expiation. Hagiographers provided back stories, with Magdalene as a woman of wealth, freedom, and beauty, all of which contributed to her downfall. Sermons

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Early Christian fresco of a woman preaching (as indicated by her outstretched arms and priestly vestments) to an audience, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, ca. third–fifth century CE. Many medieval Christians believed that Mary Magdalene had become a preacher after Christ’s death, helping to convert the inhabitants of Marseilles. (Araldo de Luca/Corbis via Getty Images)

drew on these to explain how lust and promiscuity resulted from her circumstances. Her wealth led to idleness, her freedom led to seduction, her beauty led to vanity, and all these combined to result in a life of prostitution. Other stories, based on the legend of Magdalene the preacher in Marseille, showed Magdalene as Christ’s apostle after his death, preaching to men and women with great knowledge and charisma (which the medieval church claimed was only by special privilege, as women could not normally preach). In other imagery, she is the mendicant living in a cave for so long that her clothes have disintegrated, leaving her covered only by long flowing hair, an image at once both innocent and seductive (Jansen 2000). Other legends draw on a mix-up between several Marys in the New Testament gospels to portray Magdalene as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and also as Mary, the woman in Matthew 26, who anointed Christ’s feet and wiped away her tears with her hair. Sermons identifying Magdalene with the contemplative or monastic life were based on Jesus’s response to Martha in Luke 10:42, that her sister Mary, who sat attentive at his feet, had chosen the best part. This Magdalene is portrayed in medieval paintings dispensing charity alongside Martha and Lazarus. In other imagery, Magdalene is portrayed as the new Eve making up for the sins of the first woman (Eve the mother of all humanity), a reconstituted virgin identified with fertility, nurture, and the abundant fruits of the garden of paradise (Jansen 2000).



Mary Magdalene (ca. first century CE)

The Magdalene of History

New scholarship shows the portrayal of Magdalene the reformed prostitute, which has persisted for nearly 2,000 years, to be a fabrication (Bourgeault 2010; LeLoup 2002; Schaberg and Johnson-DeBauvre 2006). Feminist theologians and church historians have worked to document this case of mistaken identity. New evidence proving that “Magdalene the prostitute” is a historical error doesn’t change, for believers, the importance of Magdalene as a true example of faith, hope, and love. For the faithful, Magdalene the repentant prostitute has had, and continues to have, great appeal. It promises God’s grace for all who repent, no matter how terrible the mistake or how lowly the person’s social status. Her faith and devotion to Jesus; her having been often in his presence and at his crucifixion, death, and resurrection; and the fact that Jesus loved her make Magdalene an important and spiritually worthy woman for Christians, beyond the question of whether or not she was the penitent of mistaken history. However, the new evidence does change the ways in which Mary Magdalene, the person, exemplifies the faith, and in important ways, it changes the story of Christianity as a whole. The confusion of Magdalene with the repentant sinner in the New Testament is seen by some as part of a smear campaign and an example of the intentional and widespread suppression of important women throughout history. The undermining of Magdalene’s character started early. In The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (ca. 100–150 CE), several male disciples ask her to convey teachings she received from Jesus and then refuse at first to believe her, saying, “Why should we believe a woman?” This and other documents show there was some disapproval of Magdalene by male disciples because of her sex. Despite this, Magdalene remains a central figure in The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and other apocryphal (outside the canon) gospel stories, an apostle with a deep and transformative understanding of Christ’s message. Between the third and fifth centuries, the church fathers further undermined Magdalene’s character and suppressed her importance in their writings, often citing her gender. Also, as the New Testament books were chosen for inclusion in what would become scripture, works that gave much greater importance to Mary Magdalene were excluded. These include the (recently rediscovered) Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Gospel of Thomas, and Gospel of Philip. Another source, Pistis Sophia, is based on a lost work, Sayings of Mary. As the organized church was formed, a hierarchy was created with Peter and his successors as head of the priesthood, and women were excluded from positions of authority. Eventually, it became hard to imagine that women might have been apostles, and the language of scripture in translations reflected this attitude. In 591, Pope Gregory affirmed an error confusing Mary Magdalene with another woman named Mary in the synoptic gospels, one who was said to have been a sinner (which readers have identified as meaning a prostitute), thus making the story of Magdalene the reformed prostitute official. This Catholic doctrine was not repealed until 1969. For some, the history of Magdalene as a woman whose reputation was smeared and her true importance suppressed for 2,000 years exemplifies the androcentric

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and sometimes misogynist suppression of feminine wisdom and power which has long enabled men to dominate power and authority in the church. Some feel this as a tragic loss (Bourgeault 2010) not only for feminists but for all men and women, due to a lack of feminine wisdom in the churches and a loss over the centuries of the equality that Jesus himself sought to create. This sense of loss drives a push for accurate representations of Magdalene and more widespread recognition of her importance to the founding and spiritual message of the Christian faith. For others, the popularity of Magdalene the sinner turned saint, the popular female preacher, the hermit whose ascension to heaven makes possible her ability to intercede on behalf of those who pray to her, raises women in the popular imagination and compensates for the loss of historical truth. And, many remain steadfast in their belief that Magdalene was the penitent who anointed Jesus in the New Testament, continuing to uphold this persona as an example of lust turned to chastity through faith and as an exemplar of the grace available to all penitents. The fact that the office of the pope is the same office that both made the error part of its “infallible” doctrine—and recanted and corrected it—has little sway with those whose doctrines, prayers, literature, liturgies, and art reflect the Magdalene of a mistaken history. Meanwhile, the work to set the record straight continues, and already several scholars have published English translations of the newly recovered gospels and have written extensively on their meaning and the significance of this other face of Magdalene for Christianity (see Bourgeault 2010; LeLoup 2002; King 2003). The recovered sources describe a woman whose understanding of Christ’s message was equal to or greater than that of the other disciples. Rather than focus on sin and redemption, Magdalene’s emphasis is on self-transformation through love and how Christ’s love can be found within. Susan de-Gaia See also: Christianity: Apocrypha; Middle Ages; Pilgrimage; Protestant Denominations; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archeology, and History; Saints; Sex and Gender; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Islam: Hawwa; Judaism: Lilith; Spirituality: Pilgrimage, Goddess Further Reading Bourgeault, Cynthia. The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2010. Jansen, Katherine Ludwig. The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. King, Karen L. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle. Farmington, MN: Polebridge, 2003. LeLoup, Jean-Yves. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2002. Schaberg, Jane, and Melanie Johnson-DeBauvre. Mary Magdalene Understood. New York: Continuum, 2006. Voragine, Jacob. Legenda Aurea Sanctorum. London: William Caxton, 1483. Cambridge STC/24873.



Middle Ages

MIDDLE AGES Religion was an integral part of daily life in the European Middle Ages, and as the dominant religion, Christianity exercised enormous influence over women’s lives. The church limited and regulated women’s authority and behavior but also provided opportunities for women to gain education, status, and authority. Religious institutions and traditions in certain cases offered women autonomy, such as convents that were founded or run with relative independence from male oversight. In the later Middle Ages, devotional practices and societies for laywomen provided outlets for women’s piety and conferred respect and status on women who embraced them. New Testament accounts include women among Jesus of Nazareth’s devoted disciples, particularly Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, and Mary Magdalene, who became important devotional examples for women in the Middle Ages. The apostle Paul bequeathed a mixed legacy to medieval religious authorities; he advised the early churches that Christian women were to be silent, subordinate, and celibate, but he also befriended many women through his missionary travels and encouraged their active role in building and maintaining the new religion. This complicated pattern of admiration for women’s spirituality while simultaneously attempting to control it informed the writing of the great architects of Christian theology, such as Jerome and Augustine, and remained an important model for clerical supervision of women throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval Christian theology assigned a paramount importance to physical virginity—although marriage was a legitimate path for Christians, the higher Christian virtue was perpetual virginity, or, as a second-best alternative, chastity within marriage or after one was widowed. Virginity was considered a desirable and ennobling state for both men and women, but theologians such as Jerome emphasized female virginity as an antidote to what they saw as women’s inherently sinful nature. Thus, Christian authors reviled female weakness but heaped praise on women who elected perpetual virginity to escape this weakness, which conferred considerable status on nuns and other women who chose to live in perpetual chastity. Communities of consecrated virgins (nuns) became important administrative and educational centers throughout post-Roman Europe. Nunneries, like male monasteries, were initially governed by informal rules and customs, but by the mid-sixth century many had adopted more formal documents that outlined the liturgical and practical details that organized communal life. Several rules for women’s monastic houses were in use in the fourth and fifth centuries, but the major text that both men’s and women’s institutions adopted in the Middle Ages was the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia (480–543). The Benedictine Rule described a community led by an abbot (or in the case of women’s houses, an abbess) that engaged in a constant round of prayer, work, and sleep. The Rule included instructions for monastic tasks, such as study, teaching, chores, and finances. The Rule required strict enclosure and stability of abode, meaning that the monk or nun’s life was intended to be a permanent, lifelong vocation dedicated to constant prayer for his or her own salvation and for that of others, particularly the patrons who donated funds to the monastery or convent. While some families forced their sons and daughters into monastic life without their consent (and, likewise, sometimes withdrew them without consent or treated

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the monastery as an extension of their dynastic domain), there is evidence that many girls and women chose to enter nunneries and that the convent offered educational and administrative opportunities to women who accepted this way of life. Nuns taught, wrote, copied and illuminated manuscripts, and conducted the musical and liturgical rituals of the convent. Some nunneries became powerful institutions in their own right through their networks of political and personal patronage; some communities established double monasteries with separate houses for men and women, with the administrative authority for the entire community residing with the abbess. Independent communities such as Gandersheim, which had been founded by relatives of the Roman emperor and was traditionally ruled by the women of the family, enjoyed privileges such as its own law court, army, and coinage, all under the supervision of the abbess. Gandersheim was home to the 10th-century playwright and poet Hrotsvit, who authored Latin plays, verse legends and hagiographies, and histories. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), who is one of the Middle Ages’ most famous examples of a medieval woman leader, visionary, and writer, guided her convent as abbess and wrote extensive works of theology, music, liturgical drama, natural history, and medicine. Benedictine monasticism dominated the religious landscape of the early and central Middle Ages, but a number of factors led to other religious vocations for women in the High and late Middle Ages. A series of institutional church reforms  and movements in popular spirituality led to the creation of other monastic orders, such as the Cistercians, Franciscans, and Dominicans, which offered new directions and choices in monastic life. The period 1100–1300 also witnessed innovations in religious vocations that provided opportunities for women outside the cloister yet closely tied to spiritual communities. The High Middle Ages witnessed a rise in these diverse spiritual practices: anchoresses (recluses who established an enclosed dwelling near parish churches), beguines (who lived in informal communities, often not as permanently consecrated members), and vowesses (who professed a vow of permanent chastity while still living in the world) emulated monastic ideals while allowing women to remain engaged in worldly affairs. These more flexible and dynamic forms of piety were well suited to the increasingly urban culture and economy of the High and late Middle Ages and also reflected the Roman church’s successful cultivation of an ethos of penitence and personal devotion in medieval people’s everyday lives. This rich spiritual environment for women also witnessed an increase in the number of women recognized as saints between 1100 and 1400. While the earliest Christian female saints were drawn from the Bible and from tales of the early Christian martyrs, and female saints in the early Middle Ages tended most often to be nuns and abbesses; by the 13th century, women from different classes and vocations were more often recognized as saints even as the process for official sanctity, canonization, became more strictly regulated. Even for women who never entered monastic life or engaged in an intense religious vocation such as anchoress, vowess, or prospective saint, religion was still an omnipresent force in daily life. Women were responsible for the religious education of their children and the pious reputation of their homes. Medieval sources reveal that



Ministers

rural and urban women were active in parish life, patronized religious institutions through money and other gifts, and venerated saints of particular personal and local importance. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary and particular women saints (such as Mary’s widowed mother, Anna, and Margaret of Antioch, the patron saint of women in childbirth) were important examples and objects of devotion in medieval women’s lives, as their prayer books, wills, and visits to pilgrimage churches and shrines make clear. Patrick Geary (2006, 76–77) notes that “within the Western tradition, one woman retains her place at the beginning and the end” of the Middle Ages through her exceptional example as the mother of the “sacred family.” Throughout the Middle Ages, women experienced a complex and ambiguous relationship with the church’s male clerical authorities: the same men who preached a theology of female spiritual inferiority also praised women for their piety, valued their example to other laypeople, and benefitted greatly from women’s patronage and material support (a key activity for women in the parish, for example, was the maintenance of the altar and the upkeep of the church’s interior). The institutional church both oppressed and empowered women; it elevated them as saints as well as decried them as spiritually weaker than men and even claimed that their feminine bodies and nature rendered them more susceptible than men to demonic influence. As Sandy Bardsley (2007, 27) has argued, women’s participation in medieval religion was characterized by “the interplay between broader patriarchal forces that limited women’s status . . . and the role of individuals who were able to overcome or circumvent that status.” Medieval Christianity admitted women as the spiritual equals of men yet persistently subordinated them to male authority, a dynamic that shaped women’s experiences in both sacred and secular spheres of life. Katherine Clark Walter See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Christianity in Europe; Mary Magdalene; Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Mystics; Saints; Sex and Gender; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Spirituality: Sex and Gender Further Reading Bardsley, Sandy. Women’s Roles in the Middle Ages. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007. Bitel, Lisa, and Felice Lifshitz, eds. Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Geary, Patrick. Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. Weinstein, Donald, and Rudolf M. Bell. Saints and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

MINISTERS The status of women ministers differs significantly depending on religious denomination. Women’s ordination (the process by which someone is granted authority

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and allowed to perform certain religious rituals) is a contested issue among many Christian groups in particular, as ordination has traditionally been limited to men. In Christianity, the definition of ordination is understood specifically as a process through which someone is commissioned to pastoral work. This has historically led to a narrower definition of who can and cannot be ordained, although this differs from denomination to denomination. However, women’s ordination has increased significantly as women have pushed for more equal treatment in the church hierarchy, particularly in Protestant churches. The number of women being ordained grew significantly in the 20th century as women challenged traditional norms of church leadership. In the Baptist tradition, the autonomy of local churches has led to diverse views on women’s ordination. Some Baptist churches ordain women as ministers and deacons while others ordain women as deacons only, and others do not ordain women at all. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest organization of Baptist churches in the United States, prohibits women’s ordination entirely, arguing that scripture forbids women in either pastoral ministry or in other ministries that require ordination (for example, in the role of deacon). Conversely, women are ordained both as ministers and deacons in the American Baptist Churches USA and the Alliance of Baptists. Women are ordained in many Presbyterian and Reformed churches. The earliest was Louisa Woosley (1862–1952), the author of Shall Women Preach, who was ordained by Cumberland Presbyterian Church in 1889. The Presbyterian church (United States) began ordaining women as elders in 1930 and as ministers in 1956. Other Presbyterian denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church in America, do not ordain women, arguing for the scriptural imperative that men are to be ordained. Women are frequently ordained in Protestant churches that operate on a bishopric structure. In addition, women have recently begun to serve in prominent leadership positions in those denominations. In 2006, the Most Rev. Dr. Katharine Jefferts Schori (b. 1954) became the first woman elected to the position of presiding bishop of the Episcopal church, overseeing the church’s 2.1 million members worldwide. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America elected its first female presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton (b. 1955), in 2013. Other Protestant denominations also address the issue of women’s ministry in different ways. For example, women have been able to speak and teach in the Quaker setting since its inception in the 1600s; however, other Anabaptist traditions, most notably conservative Mennonite groups, do not allow women’s ordination. Women are frequently ordained in Pentecostal churches, following the example of one of their earliest founding mothers, Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles, California. In Roman Catholicism, the ordination of women to the priesthood is prohibited by canon law and reinforced by papal declaration, such as Pope Saint John Paul II’s apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis (1994). Dissenting Catholic groups do agitate for women’s ordination; recently, Pope Francis agreed to allow the church to study the idea of ordaining women to the diaconate (although not the priesthood).



Missionaries

Women can join monastic orders, but they are prohibited from doing the pastoral work associated with the priesthood, such as administering the sacraments. Mary Ruth Sanders See also: Christianity: Christianity in the United States; Education; Founders of Christian Denominations; Protestant Denominations Further Reading Chaves, Mark. “The Symbolic Significance of Women’s Ordination.” Journal of Religion 77 (January 1997): 87–114. Jewett, Paul K. The Ordination of Women: An Essay on the Office of Christian Ministry. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s, 1981. Raab, Kelly. When Women Become Priests: The Catholic Women’s Ordination Debate. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Saint Pope John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, May 22, 1994. https://w2.vatican.va​/conten​t​ /john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii​_apl​_19940522_ordinatio​ -sacerdotalis​.html. Schmidt, Frederick. A Still Small Voice: Women, Ordination, and the Church. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996.

MISSIONARIES Efforts to spread Christianity through missionaries was highly successful; the rapid spread of converts started from the Roman Empire (ca. 380 CE) and spread through Asia and Europe (600 CE) and has culminated in Christianity being the world’s largest religion. While women have played a part in proselytizing from the start, the literature on their work is sparse. From 1800 CE on, women have been counted as two-thirds of the missionary workforce. Christian denominations have had individual women and groups at home and abroad spreading the word, often in conjunction with providing education, medical, or social services. While there is debate over the issue of altruism versus imperialism, as one analyzes the efforts of these women, the impact on their converts could be considered dialectical: cross-cultural exchanges moved some women to fight for the rights of the groups they were attempting to convert while simultaneously obtaining new rights for themselves or, negatively, dealing with the effect that comes with being colonizers. There were and continue to be gendered notions about what manner of work women in these missions could do and which work was valued. However, determined individuals shifted boundaries out of administrative expediency and theological engagement. Women were active in the apostolic age as followers of Jesus and his disciples to leaders of house churches within the Roman Empire. They acted as spiritual directors, accepted by the Christian community. There are some accounts of martyrs who died due to spreading the word, such as Catherine of Alexandria (fourth century). Records of women missionaries from this era to about the 19th century are difficult to recover. From the mid to late 19th century, varying by mission group, the numbers of European women both donating to and going to the Pacific, Africa, and Asia

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jumped, tied to the entry of middle-class women into philanthropy and similar professions. The increase in number was due to single women adding their numbers to the ranks whereas, previously, female missionaries were married women who accompanied their husbands, or occasionally widows. While men were tasked with particular assignments, married women would care for the family, aid their husband’s work, or help with the local church. Accounts of single women abroad were not broadly publicized by the boards of missionary groups because it wasn’t considered to be proper behavior for women to venture out without male supervision or assistance. These women were typically assigned to instructor positions under the guise that it would provide them the most protection. Frustrated by not being tapped to their full potential, women soon turned to creating their own organizations, such as the Woman’s Union Missionary Society of America (1860). A nondenominational group, within their first 10 years they sent out single women to do evangelistic work in Burma, India, China, Syria, Greece, and Japan. Seeing the effectiveness of these groups, Christian denominations soon subsumed these women’s organizations within their general church boards. While at first there were a few women who held administrative positions on missionary boards, by the 1960s, these spots were steadily replaced by men. The Methodist church was an exception, continuing a dedicated women’s division in foreign missions. The steady whittling away of women’s influence and funds due to the Great Depression (1929–1941) resulted in the loss of capable women in the Presbyterian church in the Pacific Northwest. In India, men’s new authority in the newly independent Indian church affected both Indian women and the disempowered female American missionaries. In addition to carrying out missionary duties, both Catholic and Baptist women had to contend with male church leaders who would challenge their authority. Missionary work, while part of the colonizing mind-set, was considered feminine and conceptualized as the morality of the empire. Like women’s work within missions, the task was undervalued yet played an important role in the framework of business and government interests in these regions and as such was met with distrust. Still, within the colonial period, a key connection in successful conversion was made between missionary women and native women. For example, within the first half of the 20th century, on the southeastern coast of India, Telugu women were influenced by Protestant missionaries to reconceptualize their idea of home and work. In the 1920s in China, key women such as Grace Winona Woods (1871–?) and Ruth Paxson (1889–1949) led the success of revivalist churches by conveying their conservative message, as leaders outside of the male-dominated established mission structures. By the middle of the 20th century, the phenomenal growth of Christianity in the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) was due in no small part to the active participation of Christian women functioning as missionaries, both within the boundaries of their own churches and beyond. These Christian missionary women were key in involving Christian indigenous women to function as missionaries. In the modern postcolonial world, the imperialist tone of outsiders coming to convert others and impose their own traditions has caused discord and, in some



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cases, death. Women missionaries still continue their work, however. There are few operating womencentric missionary groups, as the trend for women was either to operate under existing Christian denomination missionary groups that had subsumed women’s groups or to work for dedicated secular women’s organizations. One prevailing women’s missionary group is The Grail, founded by Dutch priest Jacques van Ginneken (1877–1945) in Holland in 1921. Described as “a society of unmarried Roman Catholic lay-women . . . at the disposal of the church to help with the spreading of the Kingdom of God over the whole world” (Kalven 1999, 29), The Grail started in Germany in 1932 and has spread to 24 countries, including the United States, Uganda, and Portugal. The goal was to permeate Christian values rather than a structured orthodoxy, and thus the laywomen named Women of Nazareth lived out in the world rather than in a convent, with no special vows or customs. The Grail still operates today as an ecumenical group working with the civil society in the countries they operate in. The Woman’s Missionary Union has promoted the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest denominational missionary force in the late 20th century, with 1 million members. It continues to send both women and men abroad to spread the Christian cause. Maria Gabryszewska See also: Christianity: African American Women; Charity; Christianity in Africa; Christianity in the United States; Education; Pilgrimage; Protestant Denominations; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Beaver, Pierce R. “Pioneer Single Women Missionaries.” Missionary Research Library 4, no. 12 (1953): 1–7. http://www.internationalbulletin.org/issues/1953-00/1953-12-001​ -beaver.pdf. Bowers, Joyce M. “Roles of Married Women Missionaries: A Case Study.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 8, no. 1 (1984): 4–7. Huber, Mary Taylor, and Nancy Lutkehaus. Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Kalven, Janet. Women Breaking Boundaries: A Grail Journey, 1940–1995. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Robert, Dana L. Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002.

MONASTIC LIFE Women monastics within Christianity are women who have devoted their lives to God and who live an ascetic life away from the world, wearing plain clothes, eating simply, and praying and meditating several times a day. While there are many variations on this theme, there are also several common factors that define the monastic life, including the taking of lifelong vows, the adoption of a community rule, and the observance of a prescribed cycle of ritual devotions. Monastic life has, until very recently, been unfailingly based on the medieval model: even in the mid-20th century, a woman entering a monastery would

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experience a life almost identical to that of a medieval nun. Women monastics may be called nuns or sisters, terms that used to be very distinct: while both took monastic vows, nun denoted a woman living a contemplative, cloistered life of prayer, whereas a sister had an active vocation of prayer combined with service to the needy. In the Catholic tradition, nuns were answerable directly to Rome and had a higher status than sisters, who were only answerable to their community and bishop. However, all these distinctions have largely become obsolete, and monastics are now called by the term religious, as in a religious. An individual religious may live as a hermit or anchoress (the eremitic life), devoting her life “to the praise of God and salvation of the world through a stricter separation from the world, the silence of solitude and assiduous prayer and penance” (Canon 603 in Roman Catholic Canon Law), or they may live in community (the cenobitic life), which also demands great personal discipline. A woman enters a monastic community as a postulant, becoming a novice when she receives the habit. If accepted by the community, she will then go on to make a first (“simple”) profession, in which she makes vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience (or, in the Benedictine tradition, obedience, conversion of life, and stability). The vow of poverty means living simply, satisfying needs rather than wants so as not to be distracted from God, to whom she pledges herself in spousal love (chastity). The vow of obedience (from the Latin ob, meaning “to” or “intentionally,” and audiens, meaning “listening”) means she strives to listen and respond to God’s will. A few years after first profession, she may make her “full profession,” vowing to live the religious life with integrity and fidelity to the community’s “rule.” The rule is the written text governing the ways in which a community tries to live. It is not simply a set of regulations but encompasses the community’s values, principles, and spirituality. The rule is important in maintaining a code of behavior and sense of identity in the microcosm of a monastery by regulating the rhythm of worship, prayer, work, and rest; setting out the respective authority and accountability of the sisters; and delineating the community bounds and processes of initiation. Communities established within traditional orders (e.g., Benedictine, Augustinian, Dominican, Franciscan, or Carmelite) follow the rule of their order, while other communities write their own. The daily life of a religious is centered on the daily cycle of short services or “hours” known as the Divine Office or Daily Office and also referred to as the opus Dei (work of God). The form of these monastic “hours” developed and became standardized from the third century onward, until by the ninth century they consisted of eight daily offices: lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and compline, and the night office, sometimes referred to as vigils. They include prayers, readings, hymns, and the recitation of psalms and canticles from scripture, some of which remain constant while others change in accordance with the church year and feasts and saints’ days. The degree to which the Daily Office is observed varies according to the community’s charism, or theology. Contemplative communities, whose entire lives are devoted to prayer, may use anything up to the full eightfold Office as well as



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Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652) At one time, girls considered unmarriageable might be sent to live in a convent. This happened to Arcangela Tarabotti of Venice when she was 11 years old; she was considered unmarriageable due to a physical deformity. At the age of 16, she took vows, promising to live in poverty, chastity, obedience, and seclusion for the rest of her life. But life in the convent was hard, and Tarabotti wanted people to understand, so she wrote about it. In her works, Tarabotti described convents as horrible places where society dumped unmarriageable girls. This practice, she argued, contributed to the subjugation of women, which she called a grave sin against the will of God. Instead, she argued, women should be given an education, through which they could be free and equal members of society. Tarabotti also took on sexism in the Bible. Eve was not to blame for the fall, she claimed; instead, Adam was a coward who refused to take responsibility, excusing his actions by accusing Eve. Tarabotti’s writings include Convent Life as Inferno, Paternal Tyranny (condemned by the church in 1660), and Innocence Betrayed (published in 1990, 348 years after her death). Source: Panizza, Letizia. “Arcangela Tarabotti.” World Religions: Belief, Culture, and Controversy (database), edited by David Tipton, Joseph Laycock, Dale McGowan, and J. Gordon Melton. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017.

celebrating Mass (Eucharist) daily so long as a priest (who may be an ordained sister in Anglican communities) is present. For active communities, who may have a busy schedule of teaching, nursing, or other commitments, this may be reduced to a threefold Office, fitted into the day where possible and justified by the maxim that all work is prayer; alternatively, other sisters say the Office on behalf of the working sister. Women’s monastic orders are constantly evolving, and communities now recognize the value of allowing the individual to blossom, albeit within the limits of community life. Women religious have always been in the vanguard of social justice and have carved out professional careers not only as teachers, nurses, and social workers but also as university professors, psychologists, artists, and musicians. Many communities have spent years rendering their Daily Office and liturgy into gender-neutral inclusive language, removing patriarchal terminology (e.g., king, prince, father, son) and militaristic language (e.g., warrior, victor) and affirming their status as human beings on an equal footing with their male peers. Amanda Haste See also: Christianity: Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious; Monasticism, Contemporary Women; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Roman Catholic Women Religious

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Further Reading Morgan, Sue, and Jacquelin deVries, eds. Women, Gender and Religious Culture in Britain, 1800–1940. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2010. O’Murchu, Diarmuid. Consecrated Religious Life: The Changing Paradigms. Manila, Philippines: Claretian, 2006. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The Vowed Life.” 2016. http://www.usccb​ .org/beliefs-and-teachings/vocations/discerning-women/the-vowed-life.cfm.

M O N A S T I C I S M , C O N T E M P O R A RY W O M E N Monasticism began when those leading a solitary life of prayer and devotion began coming together to pray. Over the centuries, these communities of religious codified their daily lives with vows and rules of conduct, and by the Middle Ages, the structure of monastic life had become a complex edifice, centered on a communal Daily Office and liturgy most often sung to plainchant; this is the medieval model on which, until very recently, virtually all communities have been based. However, the rapid social changes of the 20th century, compounded by the radical sea change in modern monasticism following the Second Vatican Council, or “Vatican II” (1962–1965), has led to women religious in all denominations redefining their concept of monastic life and latterly to the emergence of communities built on entirely new models. The “new monasticism” is inspired by historic patterns of religious life but reframed for the contemporary world (see Cray, Mobsby, and Kennedy 2010), producing new communities that focus on the key components of monastic life: prayer, community, and mission. Some have been more successful than others, and it seems that the essential elements for success include a clear idea of their theology and mission—what they believe and how they contribute to the world—and also the establishment of a set of conditions by which they will abide. Many choose to distil this into a Rule of Life, as in the medieval model, which generally stipulates communal meals and regular communal worship. Successful communities also require members to take vows: these may be temporary and renewable or a lifelong commitment, but several sociological studies have concluded that vows in any form are an important means of providing clear boundaries and enhancing the sense of belonging. A sense of continuity with traditional religious life is prized among new communities, although externals such as plainchant and Gregorian tones, often seen as anachronistic, may be set aside in favor of homegrown music, and if they wear distinctive dress it is unlikely to be a traditional habit. A good example of this mixture of old and new is the Community of Our Lady of Walsingham (est. 2004, England), who describe themselves as “Carmelite-rooted” and have retained the traditional vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity. The sisters live a communal life but keep rules to a minimum so as not to infringe the rights of the individual and have designed their own modern habit of long, light denim dress with white-trimmed scapula and hood; the authority structure is also inverted, with founder Sister Camilla known not as Mother Superior but as the community



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servant. The morning timetable includes communal gathering for “adoration, the divine office, silent prayer, Mass and the rosary” but there is “chill out” time every evening and one day off every week “when the sisters may leave their habits in the wardrobe and visit friends or family [or] whatever they choose” (Combe 2007, 14). Women religious have always proved themselves highly adaptable, and these fresh expressions of monasticism would seem to ensure a promising future for women’s religious life. Amanda Haste See also: Christianity: Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious; Chastity; Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Roman Catholic Women Religious Further Reading Combe, Victoria. “Of a Quite Different Order.” Tablet, April 28, 2007, 14–15. Cray, Graham, Ian Mobsby, and Aaron Kennedy, eds. Ancient Faith, Future Mission: New Monasticism as Fresh Expressions of Church. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2010. Mobsby, Ian, and Mark Berry. A New Monastic Handbook: From Vision to Practice. Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2014.

M O N A S T I C I S M , M E D I E VA L W O M E N Medieval women’s monasticism is typically divided into three eras: early Christianity (500–1000), early Middle Ages (1000–1250), and late Middle Ages (1250–1500). The period from 1500 to 1950 may be seen as an extension of the late Middle Ages, as religious life remained essentially the same until the mid-20th century. Monastic life valued seclusion from the world (to devote oneself exclusively to God), asceticism, prayer, vows, a rule to establish an ordered life, and service of others; a nun was said to live in a “state of perfection.” Women’s monasticism began as a counterpart to the men’s monastic movement of the fourth century CE. Some women fled the Roman persecutions of the third century and lived as hermits in the Middle East, but other than that, few women became eremites or hermits as men did. By the fifth century, women’s cenobitic (communal) monasteries were formed and patterned after the men’s. In the early Christian period, monastic women often lived in double monasteries (a convent attached or close to the men’s monastery) with a powerful and wealthy woman from a noble family as the abbess of both. Saint Jerome (347–420) founded the monastery of Saint Paula in Bethlehem; Augustine of Hippo (354–430) set out directions for women religious that were subsequently modified into the Rule of Saint Augustine and became the code of behavior and custom for many religious communities. The wealthy women were usually educated, knew Latin, were able to chant the Divine Office, and were called choir sisters; the poorer and less educated performed the more menial labor and were called lay sisters. Some monasteries were cloistered and saw contemplative prayer and devotion to God as their calling. Others were semicloistered and went out to the world to found hospitals, schools, and orphanages and to perform various social services. The monasteries

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were of “vital significance for the mental and moral growth of Western Europe” (Eckenstein 1963, vii). Saint Benedict of Nursia’s sister Scholastica (ca. 480–543) founded the first female Benedictine community in the early sixth century, following the Rule of Saint Benedict, the first clearly defined Christian articulation of a regimented religious life. By the ninth century, a network of organized communities of women who consecrated their lives to praying and serving others existed. Nuns wore religious habits, professed vows, lived in monastic houses, and served at the will of the local bishop. The patriarchal structure of the church reflected the larger culture at that time; thus, women could not be clergy and had no official power or status in the hierarchical church. Founders and abbesses were leaders of their communities, but only ordained clergy had the power to elect popes and serve as officials of the church. Nuns were technically laity yet enjoyed some privilege as women dedicated to God, even at times being called “brides of Christ.” In the 9th and 10th centuries, monastic life declined because of Viking invasions, abuse of the system, and internal conflicts, but reform began in the 11th century. The early Middle Ages (1000–1250), especially the 12th century, are known as the golden age of monasticism. A renaissance in monastic life occurred as the church became more powerful and modeled its institutional structure on the monarchical and class structure of European nations. The period experienced an expansion of individual charisms (distinctive characteristics and missions) in religious life. The Second Order of Franciscans, or the Poor Clares, who were devoted to the care of the poor, was founded in 1212 by Saint Clare (1194–1253). Hroswitha (935–ca. 1002), a German poet and dramatist, was renowned for her artistic genius. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) is the iconic figure of the nun as abbess, poet, scholar, mystic, consultant to popes, exorcist, healer, musician, and holy woman. Herrad of Hohenberg (1150–1195) was the first woman to compile an encyclopedia: Garden of Delights was a history of the world as she knew it with accompanying miniatures, calligraphy, and text. The late Middle Ages (1250–1500) was a period of growth and development of individual female monasteries, with well-known communities such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Daughters of Charity, the Ursulines, the Sisters of Mercy, the Sisters of Notre Dame, the Sisters of Saint Joseph, and others being founded in the 14th and 15th centuries. Miriam Schmitt and Linda Kulzer (1996, viii) say that in this era “monasticism took on a literary, prophetic, and mystical emphasis.” Some communities remained cloistered and devoted to prayer, while others followed the basic monastic regimen but adapted their lives to take on the female ministries of teaching and caring for the sick and the needy on a broader scale. The proliferation of religious communities signified their importance in the European church and culture of the medieval period. The 16th-century Reformation, along with the dissolution of monasteries in England in the 1530s under King Henry VIII, signaled a dramatic shift in circumstances but not in effectiveness and importance. The fundamental practices and procedures of community life were established during the medieval to Renaissance period by such communities as the Benedictines, Franciscans, and Dominicans and changed little between 1212 and 1954.



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However, dramatic adaptations and changes in religious life that began in the 1950s continue to develop. Carole Ganim See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious; Chastity; Christianity in Europe; Mary Magdalene; Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Contemporary Women; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Eckenstein, Lina. Women under Monasticism. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963. Schmitt, Miriam, and Linda Kulzer, eds. Medieval Women Monastics: Wisdom’s Wellsprings. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996.

MORMONISM Although Mormonism, the religious tradition founded by Joseph Smith (1805–1844), is frequently identified with the patriarchal subordination of women and the strict maintenance of gender roles, a closer look reveals a more complex picture. The concept of a Divine Feminine, the so-called Mother in Heaven, is actually more prominent in Mormonism than in mainstream Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Although the Mother in Heaven is not explicitly referred to in the Mormon interpretation of the Bible, or in the Book of Mormon, the religion’s other sacred text, she dates from its early history. The idea of a Mother in Heaven fits the materialism of Mormon theology, which emphasizes the analogy between the human creation of children, requiring both sexes, and the divine creation of spirits. Although the origins of the doctrine of the Heavenly Mother are unclear, its leading proponent in early Mormonism was Eliza R. Snow (1804–1877), a poet and successive plural wife of both the early Mormon leaders, Smith and Brigham Young. The Heavenly Mother in subsequent Mormon history has been linked with the church’s alleged progressiveness on women’s rights, or with the function of women to bear and nurture babies, or with the nobility of “feminine” traits. Mormon feminists have seized on her as an inspiration. The church, however, discourages worship of the Heavenly Mother and emphasizes that her subordination to the Heavenly Father is a model for women on earth. The Relief Society and Other Mormon Women’s Organizations

Mormonism’s principal denomination is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a worldwide organization with its headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, although there are also numerous smaller Mormon groups. Although the voluminous anti-Mormon propaganda in the 19th-century United States made much of the exploitation of Mormon women by polygamous male Mormon leaders, Mormon women pioneers were able to nurture their own institutions within and outside the church. Even the experience of plural marriage, as painful as it could be for some women, helped foster bonds between women living in the same household. Many women were involved in the defense of plural marriage. Despite the reluctance

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of some of the leaders of the suffrage movement to reach out to Mormon women, Mormons were early supporters of women’s suffrage. Louisa “Lula” Greene Richards (1849–1944) was the editor of the Women’s Exponent (1872–1877), which mixed support for suffrage with housekeeping and child-rearing tips. Margaret N. Caine (1833–1911) was the first president of the Utah Territorial Woman Suffrage Association. Mormon women’s activism led to the inclusion of women’s suffrage in the state constitution of Utah in 1895 and the winning of women’s suffrage in the neighboring state of Idaho the following year. Kate Kelly, founder of Ordain Women, was excomThe most important women’s municated in 2014 for refusing to stop promoting organization in the Church of the ordination of women in the Mormon church. Latter-day Saints is the Relief SociMormonism remains strictly male-led, and feminists who try to change that risk excommunication. ety, whose origins go back to the early days of the movement. The (George Frey/Getty Images) first Relief Society was founded in 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois, then the center of Mormonism. Its president was Emma Hale Smith (1804–1879), the wife of Joseph Smith. Under her leadership, it became a center of women’s resistance to the imposition of polygamy, which led to its suppression and eventual dissolution by the elders of the church. After several abortive attempts to restore the society, it was finally and permanently restored in Utah in 1880, with Eliza Snow its new and very active president. The early Relief Society was engaged in a range of activities, including the introduction of a silk industry to Utah, the opening of a hospital, and the construction of granaries, in addition to the sewing of clothes for the poor and local Native Americans. Today every adult Mormon woman is automatically a member of the Relief Society. Its organization is based on the same territorial hierarchy as that of the church itself, culminating in a president of the Relief Society and headquarters in Salt Lake City. The Relief Society has a number of charitable and religious functions, although it does not operate economic enterprises on the scale of its early days. Unmarried women between 12 and 17 are organized in the Young Women, another organization with roots in the 19th century. The Young Women are headed at the local and state level by adult women in a hierarchy culminating in a general president in Salt Lake City. Their goal is the formation of spirituality and personal habits along the lines of the ideal pious, domestic, and



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child-oriented Mormon woman. Like the Relief Society, the Young Women automatically enrolls Mormon women on reaching the age of eligibility. Women also lead Primary, the Mormon organization for children. Mormon Feminism

In the 1970s, a feminist movement emerged within the Mormon church. Mormon feminists had many issues with the male church hierarchy and the church’s endorsement of strict gender roles. Mormon opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment was particularly influential in radicalizing Mormon women. (The Relief Society was losing a lot of its autonomy at the same time.) Mormon feminists revived figures from the early history of the church, like Snow, who offered role models beyond the church authorities’ emphasis on motherhood and housekeeping. The principal religious issue for Mormon feminists was access to the priesthood, which every Mormon male attains at the age of 12. The opening of the priesthood to men of African descent, which took place in 1978, led to hopes that it could be opened to women. Church leadership has responded by emphasizing the similarity of the spiritual functions of women in the church with those of the priesthood while continuing to reserve the priesthood itself as well as all positions of authority in the church hierarchy for males. However, the Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, the second-largest church in the Mormon tradition, opened the priesthood to women in 1984. Many Mormon feminists, such as Sonia Johnson (b. 1936), left the church, either voluntarily or through excommunication. Others have stayed in the church and tried to work out a synthesis between feminism and Mormon beliefs. William E. Burns See also: Christianity: African American Women; Charity; Christianity in the United States; Clothing; Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Ministers; Polygamy Further Reading Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach, ed. The Personal Writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995. Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach, and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds. Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Cultural and Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Brooks, Joanna, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, and Hannah Wheelwright, eds. Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Solomon, Dorothy Allred. The Sisterhood: Inside the Lives of Mormon Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

MOTHER OF GOD In the Bible

Mother of God in Christianity generally refers to Mary of Nazareth, described in New Testament scripture as the mother of Jesus. Christians believe that Jesus was

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God incarnate; thereby Mary is the Theotokos, from the Greek meaning “God-bearer” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC] n.d., 423–84). Mary plays a pivotal role in most Christian traditions. The conception, birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, according to Christians, is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecies about the coming of a divine Messiah. Mary plays an essential role in the fulfillment of these prophesies, the most explicit of which is Isaiah 7:14: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Emanuel.” In Hebrew, Emanuel means “God with us.” The gospels of Matthew and Luke (scriptural accounts of the life of Jesus) provide some information about Mary. Matthew opens with a genealogy of Jesus that, while focused on paternity, notes Mary’s role as wife of Joseph: “Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah” (Matthew 1:16). Matthew further describes how, when Mary is discovered to be pregnant, Joseph doubts her fidelity to him and considers divorcing her quietly. However, an angel appears to him in a dream and assures him that she has been faithful and that the child is “conceived of the Holy Spirit.” Citing Isaiah’s prophesy, the angel tells Joseph that the child will be called Emanuel. In Luke’s story of the Annunciation, Mary’s call by the angel Gabriel to be the mother of the Messiah, Mary’s virginity is stressed, and the divine paternity of Jesus is affirmed (Luke 1:25–36). Mary’s affirmative response and obedience to this supernatural request is interpreted theologically as the turning point for humans in the war against Satan; thereby she is sometimes referred to as “the New Eve,” or mother of the living, relating to the creation story in Genesis (CCC n.d., 726). In Church Tradition

In Christianity, Mary is seen as the human vessel through which the Divine, Christ, enters the world. Though not seen as a divinity herself, theological doctrine, rituals, and worship developed around the Mother of God over the course of church history. Some of these mark a distinction between Christian denominations. Notable among these are Catholic doctrines known as the “Immaculate Conception,” that Mary was conceived without original sin, and the “Assumption,” that Mary’s body was assumed into heaven (CCC n.d., 491, 966). Denominational differences can also be noted around Mary’s virginity. Catholics and Orthodox stress her “perpetual virginity,” wherein Jesus is “conceived of the Holy Spirit” (CCC n.d., 504). One ancient source for this belief is the apocryphal text the Protoevangelium of James (ca. 145 CE), which testifies about Mary’s sacred origin, divine purpose, and eternal virginity. Most Protestants believe that, after Jesus’s birth, Mary and Joseph assumed normal marital relations, citing gospel passages that mention brothers of Jesus (Matthew 12:46; Luke 8:19; Mark 3:31). Catholics and Orthodox interpret these verses as references to cousins, stepsiblings, or spiritual brethren, believing that Mary remained a virgin. Contemporary feminist theologians have examined questions around the conception of Jesus. In a landmark 1987 book, Jane D. Schaberg argues that Mary was raped. Schaberg was vilified by her contemporaries for her insights.



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Transformations of Pre-Christian Goddesses in the Worship of the Virgin Mary The Goddesses of antiquity, worshipped in the countries around the Mediterranean, did not vanish when the Christian faith started to spread. The Pagan religions were officially abandoned, but in popular religiosity, properties of ancient divinities continued among those who converted to Christianity and began to worship the Virgin Mary. The ancient Goddesses were guardians of household and family, venerated as patrons of childbirth, motherhood, and child care. These fundamental functions were transformed and absorbed by Mary’s authority. In the cultural memory of those who had formerly worshipped the ancient Goddesses, their functions fused with the worship of the Virgin Mary. This is true for the Egyptian Isis, nursing her child Horus, who was popular also among the Romans, as well as the Greek Goddesses Hestia, Guardian of the Hearth; Hera, Patron of Childbirth and Matrimony; and Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, Protectress of the City and Guardian of Justice. Among those Greek divinities whose features were absorbed by Mary, Athena may be the most revered. In the sixth century, the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis, which had been Athena’s home, was transformed into a church dedicated to Mary, and this was not the only temple of a pre-Greek Goddess that was later occupied by the Mother of God. In many cities, pre-Christian temples were dedicated to Mary, who was honored as the new “Queen of Heaven.” In the names of some churches, the memory of the previous “owner” of the place is encapsulated. One of the major churches in Rome illustrates this naming pattern; the Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva (“Basilica of Saint Mary over [the temple of] Minerva”) was built directly on the foundations of a temple originally dedicated to Minerva, the Roman equivalent of Athena.

Marian Devotion

Veneration of Mary through various prayers and rituals can be traced to the second century. The Middle Ages in particular saw growth in Catholic devotion to Mary. Roman Catholicism lists three holy days honoring Mary. Orthodox likewise celebrate feast days in her honor. Some consider her a mediator between humankind and God who can come to the aid of those who petition her. In this role, she is sometimes referred to as “Mediatrix” (CCC n.d., 969). The Catholic rosary is one such devotion, a recitation of the Hail Mary prayer. The first section of this prayer draws from Luke 1:28, the greeting of Gabriel to Mary, “Hail, Oh highly favored one” and 1:42, which describes Mary’s visit to her cousin, Elizabeth, where, “in a loud voice [Elizabeth] exclaimed, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!’” The second section of the prayer, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” became normative in the 16th century after Pope Pius V called for all of Europe to petition for her intercession for a Catholic naval victory over a mighty Turkish fleet at the battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. The Catholics were victorious, and the day was later named the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

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The belief that Mary can petition God on behalf of humans is rooted in the gospel of John 2:1–12, where, during a wedding in Cana, the Mother of Jesus (her name is never mentioned in John) coerces her son into performing his first public miracle. As Role Model

For Christians, Mary serves as the quintessential example of holiness, as, though fully human, she is completely subservient to the will of God. For women in particular, she is traditionally considered a model of virtue, as she exemplifies the values of both chastity and motherhood. As Depicted in Fine Art

The Mother of God is a popular subject in fine art. Earliest depictions of Mary date from the Roman catacombs of Pricilla (1–2 CE). Typically, Mary is shown wearing a long blue dress with a veil covering her head. Earlier depictions often show her seated on a gilded throne, as she is sometimes referred to as Queen of Heaven or the angels. Later Renaissance works depict a more human Mary, sometimes seated in a landscape or nature. Masters such as Raphael painted numerous versions of the Madonna and child. However, Michelangelo’s sculpture Pieta is noteworthy as it depicts Mary holding a deceased adult Jesus on her lap. Contemporary Devotion and Apparitions

Marian appearances have been reported, often by children, throughout church history. Nine of these phenomena have been officially authenticated by the Catholic church, notable of which are Guadalupe, Mexico (1531); Lourdes, France (1858); and Fatima, Portugal (1917). Major shrines to Mary have since arisen in these places, drawing throngs of believers. The legend of her appearances throughout Latin America, especially as a mixed-race woman, to Juan Diego in Guadalupe, inspired hope in an oppressed indigenous population. This spurred the development of popular worship of her as the patron saint of Mexico. Images of “Madre de Dios” dressed in traditional garb are ubiquitous in Spanish culture. Latino feasts often include parading a statue of Maria, Madre de Dios on a pedestal. Patricia A. Clark See also: Christianity: Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious; Art, Modern and Contemporary; Christianity in Europe; Christianity in Latin America; Christianity in the United States; Hildegard of Bingen; Middle Ages; Orthodox Christianity; Pilgrimage; Protestant Denominations; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History; Sex and Gender; Islam: Maryam; Spirituality: Sex and Gender; Syncretism; Women of Color Further Reading Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC). The Holy See. 2016. http://www.vatican.va​ /archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p123a9p6.htm. Cunningham, Mary B. Gateway of Life, Orthodox Thinking on the Mother of God. Yonkers, NY: Saint Vladimir Seminary Press, 2015.



Mystics

Harrington, Patricia. “Mother of Death Mother of Rebirth: The Virgin of Guadalupe.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56, no. 1 (1988): 25–50. “Protoevangelium of James.” In The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. Translated by Ronald F. Hock, 2016. http://www.asu.edu/courses/rel376/total-readings/james.pdf. Schaberg, Jane D. The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1987.

MYSTICS Mysticism is direct experience of the Divine such that the individual perceives a oneness or unity between herself and the Divine; women as well as men have had these experiences. The term mystic is taken from mystery, which has its roots in the Greek word μυω [muo] from the verb μυεω (mueo), meaning to initiate into the mysteries, so that a mystic is one whose direct experience of the Divine reveals mysteries or hidden truths. The term, however, was not in general use until the 17th century, and earlier mystics were referred to, and referred to themselves, in descriptive terms such as visionary, prophet, illuminated one, apostle, or messenger. While most of the Christian women we know of as mystics lived in the medieval period, women have had such experiences throughout history and continue to have them. A mystic may have a single experience that affects the remainder of her life or numerous experiences, and the experience ­varies. For example, the experience may be extrovertive, in which one becomes conscious of the unity of nature overlaid onto one’s sensory perception of the world, or introvertive, in which there is a sense of nothingness or emptiness, with an experience of the Divine resulting from a disengagement from sensory experience. These experiences are then understood and interpreted according to one’s religious, social, and historical context. It is the individual’s response to—and interpretation of—the resulting religious experience that defines its value as a means of revealing hidden truths. William James defined the St. Teresa of Ávila Before the Cross shows Teresa in a characteristics of mystical reli- mystical experience of Christ’s suffering on the cross, gious experience as ineffable, painting by Guido Cagnacci, 17th century. Her crown because they defy expression; of thorns is a sign of stigmata and the lily a symbol of noetic, as a kind of direct chastity and innocence. (Jupiterimages)

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wisdom or inner knowing; transient, although producing a lasting effect; and passive, because the mystic is acted upon rather than actively engaging with the Divine. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) described the first stage of the experience as “dying to self”: “I do not know myself, either in body or soul. And I consider myself as nothing. I reach out to the living God and turn everything over to the Divine” (Letter to Wilbert of Gembloux 1175). Despite such renunciation of a bodily existence, mystical experiences can be very physical, such as Teresa of Ávila’s (1515–1582) vision in which she encountered an angel: “I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God” (Teresa of Ávila and Lewis 2011, 226). Such a “dying to self” allows a union of the soul with God, the second stage of mystical experience, to the extent that there is no sense of a separate existence, although McGinn (2005, 6334) argues that “presence” is more accurate than “union,” since not all mystics have spoken of union with God. The third stage is the readjustment, in which the transient experience is transformative, and the mystic’s nature is transformed and deified, while remaining conscious of the self and the world. Meanwhile there is also a continuous sense of union (or presence) with the Divine, as described in Teresa of Ávila’s discussion of the seventh mansion in The Interior Castle (written in 1577, and first published in 1588), and the soul is felt to be the instrument of God. Christian women’s mystical experiences vary widely. Altered states of consciousness and religious ecstasy are typical, and these may be visual and affective: “The mystic saw and felt truth, saw God or Christ or the saints, and was flooded with love for what she saw” (Petroff 1991, italics in original). They may be triggered by the contemplation of beauty, as was the case with Simone Weil (1909–1943), whose conversion occurred upon hearing beautiful music. The gender of God also varies in these experiences. Many women mystics have experienced Christ as a male bridegroom and their union as a mystical marriage. Others saw feminine characteristics of the Godhead; Julian of Norwich, while using male pronouns for the Christ of her vision, described him as an all-loving mother with numerous traits typically ascribed to women, such as suckling and sacrificing. Others have experienced a complete lack of gender in the Divine. Some women mystics have been endowed with authority unusual in Christian society for those of their sex. Throughout much of its history, church authority and doctrine saw women as weak, sinful, and inferior creatures (mentally, physically, and morally), whose primary role was to procreate. When women were believed, their revelations of divine truth and their ability to experience God directly have been of great value to Christian communities and to the church, and their writings given an audience in societies where women were otherwise expected to be seen and not heard. Such authoritative knowledge of hidden truths by women has, however, typically been accompanied by expressions of extreme humility. This was the case of Julian of Norwich (1342–ca. 1416), who, in Showings (1373), is keen to stress her own humility, saying, “But God forbid that you should say or assume that I am



Mystics

a teacher, for that is not and never will be my intention; for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail” (Yore 2009, 42). Others were more confident and forthright, like Hildegard of Bingen. While she, too, sometimes expressed humility and inferiority, which was conventional among women who stepped above their normal place, she was skillful and confident in her published works, her extensive travel, her open preaching and prophesying, and her correspondence with popes, emperors, and statesmen. She and certain other women mystics enjoyed acceptance as exemplary women of God, and their visions and interpretations were, and still are, seen as direct messages from the Godhead. Despite not being eligible for the priesthood, some women mystics were at times asked to perform priestly functions, such as forgiveness and absolution of sins. Some remarkable women in Christianity have dedicated their lives to revealing religious truths, and not a few have achieved sainthood. Many medieval women mystics pursued their thirst for spiritual knowledge within the religious life, including Hildegard of Bingen, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Ávila, respectively German, Flemish, Dutch, and Spanish nuns. This is not surprising when one considers that convents provided one of the very few environments where women were free to develop their intellectual and spiritual lives, exempt from the expectations of marriage and motherhood. Others, such as Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), did not take the veil but lived ascetic lives apart from society. Still others took full part in secular society; these included Marie D’Oignies (1176–1213), who was married at 14 and then became a celibate devoted to charity and later entered the semimonastic Beguines; Joan of Arc (1412–1431), who led armies and was executed for heresy and later canonized as a saint; and Margery Kempe (1373–1438), a married woman who lived a life of devotion, prayer, and spiritual marriage to Christ within society and not in a monastic environment. Mystics were particularly conspicuous in the Middle Ages, an “age of faith but also an age of crisis” in which such women “were the teachers of the age, [who] inspired leaders who synthesized Christian tradition and proposed new models for the Christian community” (Petroff 1991, n.p.). The 12th and 13th centuries witnessed a remarkable receptiveness to women’s mystical experiences, but in the later Middle Ages, doubts about the authority of women’s and laypeople’s ability to discern the angelic from the demonic—perhaps fueled by the culture of the Papal Inquisition and clerical claims to a unique authority to recognize the Divine—cast greater skepticism on women’s mysticism. This does not, however, mean that mysticism is confined to the distant historical past, as witnessed by the emergence of women such as Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity in the 19th century, and Simone Weil and Edith Stein (both born into Jewish families) and Marthe Robin in the 20th. Amanda Haste and Susan de-Gaia See also: Christianity: Christianity in Europe; Hildegard of Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Saints; Sex and Gender; Sophia; Stigmatics; Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity

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Further Reading James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902. New York: Library of America, 2010. Julian of Norwich. Showings. 1373. Edited by Edmund Colledge, Jean Leclercq, and James Walsh. Reprinted, London: SPCK, 1976. McGinn, Bernard. “Mystical Union in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, Vol. 9, 2nd ed., edited by Lindsay Jones, 6334–6341. New York: Macmillan, 2005. Petroff, Elizabeth A. “The Mystics: Why Did Mysticism Flower in the Medieval World— and Why Did Women Often Lead in It?” Christianity Today 30 (1991). http://www​ .christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-30/mystics.html. Teresa of Ávila, translated by David Lewis. The Life of Teresa of Ávila. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2011. Yore, Sue. “In the Footsteps of Julian of Norwich.” The Way 48, no. 1 (January 2009): 37–56. http://www.theway.org.uk/Back/481Yore.pdf.

ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY According to Orthodox Christianity, men and women are not interchangeable, and both are created equal in the image and likeness of God. They are called to be holy by being united with him, but complete equality does not imply absolute sameness. Being female and male are part of the charisma (gifts) presented by the Holy Spirit to every individual. Women have their special roles that do not diminish their value in God’s eyes. Thus, the Orthodox church proclaims equality between men and women, and the latter are considered the backbone of the church in that they are the cornerstones in their individual communities and families. It is proclaimed that churches cannot be strong unless the smallest nucleus, the tiniest cell of the parish, is raised and educated in the Christian faith. Women play an essential and indispensable role in the family as wives, mothers, parish leaders, and workers, and this is especially true in the Orthodox church since many countries—where this confession is practiced—went through drastic political and social changes in the past century. In lands where Christianity was either prohibited (e.g., Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, the Ukraine) during the communist regimes or curtailed (e.g., Egypt), the female role in passing down the religious practices and doctrines proved invaluable and served as a continuum that linked the previous generations to the future ones. Women were responsible for preserving the presence of faith in their individual communities and secretly baptized the children. In the New Testament, Jesus broke with ancient custom that excluded women from religious instructions and spiritual teachings. Rabbis at the time typically did not offer theological knowledge to females. The Orthodox tradition has a very strong reminder in its proclamations that women should be considered as loyal coworkers and consecrated virgins or widows. Saint Paul, who evangelized in the Antioch region, emphasized that male and female are all one in Christ. The following centuries saw a plethora of saintly and righteous women, many



Pilgrimage

Orthodox Christians, who suffered for their faith. The confession has a high regard for historical women who had professed fervent spiritual devotions, and the Virgin Mary (Theotokos, the Mother of God) is highly revered in the churches and is depicted in icons and hymns. Today, many women are the sole providers of religious instructions in their communities as the parishes cannot make the profession attractive enough for males. Orthodox Christian women can, thus, serve as teachers, public leaders, and musicians, and—similar to the first centuries of the early Christian church—can become deacons in less conservative dioceses. From Greece to Romania and beyond, women are still seen as the backbone of the faith, yet they cannot be ordained as priests. In the Orthodox church, this is a matter of holy tradition as well as a vision of ministry, since there is no strict theological objection to the ordination of women. This holy tradition—which counts as much as scripture in determining the direction of the church—has never supported the practice. With reference to acceptable clothing for contemporary Orthodox Christian women, the ways they dress may differ in terms of their parish’s history and geographical location. Orthodox churches with an older population will require women to wear a head covering of some kind during services. The priests’ wives may also be required to don headscarves in the presence of a bishop. In general, it is more common for Orthodox women in non-Western settings to cover their heads, and tradition dictates that they do so not only in church but also in their homes during prayer. The requirement that all women and girls hide their hair is seen as obedience to God’s command and as a sign of respect for the holy traditions. However, it seems that more young women today prefer to attend Mass without either scarves or hats. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Christianity: Christianity in Africa; Christianity in Europe; Christianity in the United States; Mary Magdalene; Mother of God; Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History; Sophia; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) Further Reading Abbess Theologia. The Perfection of Women in Christ: According to Orthodox Christian Doctrine and Anthropology. Columbia, MO: Newrome, 2016. Cunningham, Mary B., and Elizabeth Theokritoff, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Milovanovic, Aleksandra Djuric, and Radmilla Radic, eds. Orthodox Christian Renewal Movements in Eastern Europe. New York: Springer, 2017.

PILGRIMAGE Since the time of the early church, Roman Catholics have visited the sites of miraculous occurrences, including the places where ancient saints were martyred and the shrines in which the relics (body parts and personal effects) of these holy individuals were stored. Of particular importance were Christ’s mother—the Virgin

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Mary—and Mary Magdalene. Before the Crusades, the most important place of pilgrimage for European Christian laywomen and laymen was Jerusalem due to the belief that sins could be absolved and one’s time in Purgatory shortened by undergoing the hardship of traveling to the city in which Christ had preached. When Palestine was ruled by the Arabs, Christians were protected as fellow worshippers of Allah and permitted to travel on pilgrimages. After the Turks conquered the area, extortionate fees levied on pilgrims helped spark the First Crusade and the capture of Jerusalem by Christian forces in 1099. The Crusades represented a combination of pilgrimage and holy war due to the crusaders’ restoration and veneration of churches, holy sites, and newly discovered relics before and after the battles. Many European women accompanied the warriors, in general, playing a supporting role to the crusader army. Noblewomen served as companions to the knights, nuns cared for the sick, and lower-ranking camp followers worked as cooks, laundresses, water carriers, laborers, or prostitutes (Hodgson 2007). Following the loss of Jerusalem to the Turks, pilgrimages to holy sites in Europe gained greater importance, especially to the city of Rome. Like the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, wealthier women deemed pilgrimages not only proof of their piety but also an opportunity to see the world. Although lower-ranking female pilgrims were uncommon during the early Middle Ages, the 14th century witnessed a resurgence of women from all social classes undertaking pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints due to the increasing popularity of the concept of Purgatory (Sumption 2003). The church encouraged female participation in the hope that pilgrims would leave a donation at the shrines, and although women were expected to request their husband’s consent, some embarked on pilgrimages without permission from their male guardian (Bardsley 2007). In addition, the church could force women to undertake pilgrimages as penance for heresy or repeated domestic disturbances with the intent of both shaming the woman before the community and appealing to her own sense of guilt to ensure that she would purify her soul on earth and thus enter heaven more quickly (Craig 2009). Besides participating in the pilgrimages, medieval and Renaissance-era women, especially elderly widows, supported the pilgrims by providing food and cheap lodgings where low-income pilgrims could spend the night. In addition, from the 12th to the 17th century, French and Spanish nuns ran hospitals, where those under their care included pilgrims who fell sick en route, such as pregnant women about to give birth. Although pilgrimages had been intended to draw people closer to God, many late medieval women deemed them an opportunity to socialize, transcending existing class and gender boundaries by traveling with other women of diverse ages and backgrounds. Renaissance-era Catholics continued to undergo pilgrimages; however, governments influenced by the Protestant Reformation suppressed and destroyed shrines not only because these were deemed superstitious or fraudulent but also through fear that large numbers of unaccompanied female travelers could cause political instability by gossiping or spreading rumors about the monarchy. In Elizabethan England, Catholic recusant women undertook relic collecting as an alternative to visiting the now-lost shrines; the body parts and personal property of



Polygamy

executed missionary priests such as Edmund Jennings were depicted as possessing supernatural power, including the ability to heal the sick and miraculously convert persecutors (Jennings 1614). Catholics and Protestants alike visited places of execution, including Smithfield, where Jesuits had been hanged and pre-Reformation heretics had been burned. On the continent, Catholic women continued to undertake pilgrimages throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, and in England the practice resumed on a large scale during the late Victorian era due to growing interest in biblical archaeology, greater official tolerance toward Catholics, and the romanticizing of the Middle Ages. N. K. Crown See also: Christianity: Mary Magdalene; Middle Ages; Missionaries; Mother of God; Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity; Hinduism: Pilgrimage; Islam: Pilgrimage; Spiritualty: Pilgrimage, Goddess Further Reading Bardsley, Sandy. Women’s Roles in the Middle Ages. London: Greenwood, 2007. Craig, Leigh-Ann. Wandering Women and Holy Matrons. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009. Hodgson, Natalie. Women, Crusading and the Holy Land. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2007. Jennings, John. The Life and Death of Mr. Edmund Geninges Priest. Saint Omer, France: Charles Boscard, 1614. Henry Huntington Library STC/11728. Sumption, Jonathan. The Age of Pilgrimage. Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring, 2003.

P O LY G A M Y The marital custom of a husband being wedded to more than one wife is extremely rare within the Christian tradition. Polygamy is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible but not in the New Testament. Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:31–32 are the closest example, in which he warns, “Anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” This has been understood by some theologians within the Christian tradition as “successive polygamy”: remarrying after divorce or death. While the apostle Paul championed celibacy, he believed that a wife might remarry after the death of her husband (1 Corinthians 7:39–40). The Pastoral Epistles (ca. 100–150 CE), traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul, explicitly state that church leaders should be the “husband of one wife” (1 Timothy 3:2, 12; Titus 1:6). As Christianity spread across the ancient world, theologians such as Justin Martyr (ca. 100–ca. 165 CE), Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 140–ca. 202 CE), Tertullian (ca. 150–ca. 220), Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–ca. 340 CE), Basil the Great (ca. 329–ca. 379 CE), and Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) all promoted heterosexual monogamy as the only acceptable form of marriage. Many of their writings include vicious attacks against the sexual immoralities of Greco-Roman Pagan cults and rival heretical Christian sects, some of which they claim practiced polygamy. While Christian writers noted that God permitted polygamy in the Hebrew Bible, they reasoned that these were special occasions, only done under the direct commandment of God.

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During the Council of Hertford (673 CE), the bishops gathered stated that the Catholic doctrine of marriage would be limited to one man and woman, with death permitting another marriage to prevent bigamy. The council decreed that the only grounds for separation was fornication, but this did not mean divorce; rather the two would live separate celibate lives unless reconciled. Although outright polygamy was forbidden by most Christian doctrine, court records show that church enforcement of monogamy was a fraught issue throughout the Middle Ages and early modern period and that this probably cut across lay/secular, gender, and class divides. Both men and women in the medieval and early modern world were tried for bigamy, including male priests. There were many circumstances that led to this: sometimes people married multiple times in different places and were tried for this offence; sometimes a prior marriage had not been properly terminated when a second marriage was contracted (for example, one spouse abandoned another and was presumed dead but turned up again later). The church’s concern with bigamy was a consequence of its decision to enforce its own strict version of monogamous marriage, forbidden to clergymen, in the wake of Gregorian reforms, and aggressive censure of both clerical marriage (which had been frowned upon but licit until the late 11th century) and marriage practices among the laity. Beginning with the Reformation in the early 16th century, Martin Luther (1483–1546) and other Protestant thinkers wrestled with the examples of polygamy in the Bible and what implications they could have due to the authority of scripture. Luther admitted, “I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture.” John Calvin (1509–1564), on the other hand, condemned polygamy. Influenced by Luther’s writings that polygamy was permissible, Philip I of Hesse (1504–1567) proposed to one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting, Margarethe von de Saale (1522–1566), while already being married to Christine of Saxony (1505–1549). From a similar hermeneutic, the Anabaptists of Münster experimented with polygamy under the leadership of John of Leiden (1509–1536). In reaction to these events and interpretations, the Council of Trent asserted in 1563 that “Christ our Lord has clearly shown that polygamy is not in keeping with the nature of Matrimony.” Within the modern period, a few Christian figures have defended polygamy, with the most noteworthy being the Mormon founder Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–1844). Drawing from the example of the Hebrew Bible and claiming to be under the direction of God, Smith secretly taught and practiced polygamy in the early 1840s, marrying approximately 40 women. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced the practice of polygamy in 1890, fundamentalist Mormon churches throughout the United States, Canada, and Mexico maintain the practice. In recent years, Christian polygamy has occurred in countries where polygamy is still culturally acceptable, mostly within Africa. The Nigerian Celestial Church of Christ, the Lutheran church of Liberia, and the Harrist churches allow members to have multiple wives. This has resulted in these denominations and others that endorse polygamy being banned from the World Council of Churches. In addition, numerous Christian sects, such as the Oneida Community and the Family International, have practiced open forms of marriage. While commentary and criticism



Protestant Denominations

of polygamy within Christianity can be traced to the early church and throughout history, rare Christian forms of polygamy have and continue to exist. Daniel N. Gullotta See also: Christianity: Christianity in Africa; Christianity in the United States; Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Mormonism; Women in the Reformation; Islam: Polygamy Further Reading Bullough, Geoffrey. “Polygamy among the Reformers.” In Renaissance and Modern Essays, edited by G. R. Hibbard, 5–23. London: Routledge, 1966. Daynes, Kathryn M. More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840–1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Falen, Douglas J. “Polygyny and Christian Marriage in Africa: The Case of Benin.” African Studies Review 51 (2008): 51–74. McDougall, Sarah. Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late-Medieval Champagne. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Witte, John, Jr. The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Zeitzen, Miriam Koktvedgaard. Polygamy: A Cross-Cultural Analysis. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008.

P R O T E S TA N T D E N O M I N AT I O N S The role of women and the place of the feminine in Protestant denominations vary significantly, from conservative fundamentalists who limit women to private places that emphasize their roles as wives and mothers to denominations that embrace women’s participation in every aspect of religious life. Women have different places in both mainline and evangelical churches in all the major Protestant traditions (Anglican, Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian/Reformed, Methodist, Pentecostal, and Holiness) as well as in smaller Protestant sects, such as the Shakers. There are different scriptural positions on the role of women in the church (the most prominent of which are the contrasting ideas of complementarianism and Christian egalitarianism), and Protestant denominations exhibit these positions in different ways. Even when denominational structures limit women’s ordination or public participation in church life, women are active in creating religious art and sacred music, practicing liturgy and leading worship, and using their faith to make a difference in the world. Conservative evangelical denominations tend to promote a complementarian view of the role of women. Complementarians believe that, while men and women are equal in the eyes of God, they have different and complementing roles. Denominations that adhere to this view reinforce more traditional views of the role of the feminine. An example is the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In the SBC, women cannot serve in any position requiring ordination (such as a pastor, elder, or deacon), but they do serve in other places, such as children’s ministries, mission boards, and publication arms.

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The SBC encourages women to pursue “biblical womanhood,” which suggests that a woman’s greatest virtues are submission (to her husband and/or church leaders) and diligence (in caring for her household and children). Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary offers a bachelor’s degree in homemaking, which offers women such courses as “Principles of Biblical Womanhood” and “Biblical Model for Home and Family.” Complementarianism does not limit women from serving in prominent positions when those positions are seen as being within their unique purview. Southern Baptist women have historically been prominent missionaries. The most notable of these was Lottie Moon (1840–1912), who worked with the Foreign Mission Board in China between 1873 and 1912. Missionary work attracted many single women, and Moon was one of the first. Moon helped to develop the concept of “women’s work,” the idea that evangelizing and education of women and girls was a central part of missionary work. Moon’s letters home called for the support of women missionaries, expanding their role and giving them financial and spiritual support. Moon’s life also served as the impetus for the creation of the Women’s Missionary Union (WMU—the first organized group of laypeople in the SBC) in 1888. Today, the WMU has a membership of roughly 1 million, making it the largest Protestant organization for women in the world. It dedicates itself to educating and supporting women in missionary work. Annie Armstrong (1850–1938), its founder, lends her name to one of the two major yearly offerings of the SBC, the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering; the other is the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. In mainline Protestant traditions, there are frequently denominational splits between those who embrace complementarianism and those who emphasize Christian egalitarianism (which holds that all people are equal before God and that, therefore, gender, class, or race have no bearing on their ability to lead). While complementarianism reinforces traditional views of the feminine, Christian egalitarianism opens the door to women’s ordination, a theme embraced by mainline Protestants: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist church, and the Anglican and Episcopal churches all ordain women. The early 2000s saw an increasing number of women promoted to very high levels of church office. The Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori (b. 1954) became the presiding bishop of the Episcopal church in 2006; Rev. Elizabeth Eaton followed in the ELCA in 2013. Christian egalitarianism also makes room for notions of alternative femininity in the church. Perhaps the most prominent woman in the ELCA today is Nadia Bolz-Weber (b. 1969), pastor of the House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver and author of the best-selling books Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner and Saint (2013) and Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (2015). Bolz-Weber is an unconventional figure, outspoken and covered in tattoos (including one of Mary Magdalene, who brought the news of Jesus’s resurrection to the disciples on Easter morning). Other Protestant traditions also embrace Christian egalitarianism. Women have had perhaps the largest influence in the Holiness tradition, a branch of Protestantism that has resulted in multiple denominations, including the Salvation Army,



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the Church of the Nazarene, and the Church of God. Holiness teachings were first popularized by Phoebe Palmer (1807–1874), whose public preaching and teaching helped to move the Holiness movement from a branch of Methodism to a separate denomination in the 19th century. Throughout the history of the movement, women have served not just as preachers but also as church leaders and founders of organizations and denominations. In Pentecostalism, an outgrowth of the Holiness movement, the role of women is tied to the theological emphasis on the manifestations and gifts of the Holy Spirit. According to Pentecostal theology, both men and women can equally receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Many women serve in leadership positions in the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. This trend has been true throughout much of the history of Pentecostalism. One of the earliest prominent Pentecostals was Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), who drew enormous crowds with her preaching, teaching, and faith healing. McPherson founded the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles and hosted weekly radio shows beginning in the 1920s, eventually launching the church’s own radio station. Women have also been important in minor Christian sects, such as the United Society of Believers in Christ (also known as the Shakers), which was led by Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784). Lee’s teachings emphasized the equal nature of men and women and argued that practicing celibacy (even within marriage) was the best way to avoid sin. Eventually, her followers came to see her as the female embodiment of Christ. This idea of a feminine embodiment of the Divine is central in Christian feminism, a perspective similar to Christian egalitarianism, but goes further both in religious practice and in leaving room for the idea of the feminine nature of God. Christian feminism, which emerged in the 1970s as an outgrowth of the feminist movement as a whole, emphasizes the primacy of women’s experience and criticizes the patriarchal structure that has dominated Christian history and biblical scripture. Christian feminist theology (or thealogy, using the feminine form of the Greek theo) prioritizes uncovering women’s experiences and celebrating their contributions to Christianity. Some Christian feminists see themselves squarely within Christian orthodoxy, while others reject it as hopelessly compromised by the patriarchal nature of Christian tradition and abandon it in favor of Goddess traditions of pre-Christian faiths. Two of the most prominent Christian feminist theologians are Mary Daly (1928–2010) and Rosemary Radford Ruether (b. 1936), both of whom emerged from the Catholic tradition but have a much broader influence. In the wake of Vatican II deliberations in the 1960s, Daly, a prolific writer and longtime Boston College professor, published The Church and the Second Sex (1968), which asserted that the Catholic church systematically oppressed women and argued for a more equal role for women. In 1973, she published Beyond God the Father, arguing that Christianity is a patriarchal system as evidenced by the strictly masculine language used to refer to God. Rosemary Radford Ruether’s feminist theology argues for recovering ideas of equality that the church has suppressed or marginalized out of mainstream Christianity. For Ruether, patriarchy is the prime example of the sinful, fallen nature of the world.

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Many Protestants reject Christian feminism, arguing that because Jesus Christ (the human embodiment of the Divine) was male, there can be no female Divine. However, there are distinctions, even within this overall theme. Episcopalians and Anglicans, with their close theological and liturgical ties to Roman Catholicism, are more likely to emphasize the role of the Virgin Mary in the Christian story of redemption; conservative evangelicals, in contrast, view the veneration of any human individual except Jesus Christ as heretical. In addition, Christian feminism has influenced major Protestant denominations through the use of gender-inclusive language and feminine images of the Divine in liturgy and song. The strongest example of this is the United Church of Christ’s New Century Hymnal, published in 1996 and designed to be gender inclusive in both language and imagery. Mary Ruth Sanders See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Abortion; African American Women; Art, Modern and Contemporary; Charity; Christianity in Africa; Christianity in Europe; Christianity in the United States; Education; Founders of Christian Denominations; Fundamentalism; Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women; Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Mary Magdalene; Ministers; Mother of God; Pilgrimage; Polygamy; Saints; Sex and Gender; Sophia; Widowhood; Women in the Reformation Further Reading Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon, 1973. Pope-Levison, Priscilla, and John R. Levison. Sex, Gender, and Christianity. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon, 1983. Ruether, Rosemary Radford, and Rosemary Skinner Keller. Women and Religion in America. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981. Scott, Joan Wallach. History and Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Walsh, Mary-Paula. Feminism and Christian Tradition: An Annotated Bibliography and Critical Introduction to the Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999.

R E L AT I O N S H I P A N D S O C I A L M O D E L S I N S C R I P T U R E , A R C H E O L O G Y, A N D H I S T O R Y Christian scriptures and other writings contain contradictory relationship and social models, especially in regard to women and men. Some passages support mutuality and caring, but many present inequality and male dominance as divinely ordained. These models have been criticized on the grounds that they help maintain inequitable and unjust family and social structures. Some feminists have tried to reform Christianity by focusing on interpretations of biblical passages that can be used to support gender equity. Others have looked to archaeology in search of more equitable and less violent models in older belief systems. Still others have suggested that progressive theologians and thealogians come together to sort out contradictory messages using the partnership-domination social scale, a new



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system of classification in which the cultural construction of the roles and relations of the female and male halves of humanity plays a key role. Conflicting scriptural messages regarding women and men have been identified by scholars, from the influential Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen in the 12th century to feminist theologians such as Rosemary Radford Ruether in the 21st century. These include, for example, the two contradictory stories of human creation in Genesis, contradictory views about sex, and care versus violence against women and children. In Genesis 1, woman and man are both created in God’s image. In Genesis 2, God creates woman as an afterthought out of the first man’s rib. The Song of Solomon extols sexual love between woman and man, while in other passages, only sex for procreation is condoned, and even then, grudgingly. Though there are commands to care for widows and orphans, violence against women and children is presented as ordered by God, as in laws that women who are not virgins and sons whom their parents accuse of disobedience and dissolution be stoned to death (Deuteronomy 22:20 and 21:18–21). Another theme running through these writings is that an authoritarian, male-dominated family and social structure are presented as normal and moral to the degree that, as in passages attributed to Paul, women are to be silent, and only men are permitted to teach and lead (1 Timothy 2:12). To counter the authoritarian and violent models of relations in scripture, some feminists, going back to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s The Woman’s Bible (1895), have written scathing biblical critiques. They point out that many religious writings simply reflect the historical realities of their time, justifying norms of inequality and top-down control in both families and the state or tribe. They note that Jesus challenged the authority of the religious leaders of his time, associated freely with women, and, according to noncanonical gospels, had an egalitarian relationship with Mary Magdalene (Gospel of Mary Magdalene, ca. first century CE). But, after the church allied itself with Emperor Constantine, it supported absolute imperial or royal rule, the ranking of men over women, and rigid male control in families. Some feminists who situate religious teachings in their prehistoric and historic context have looked to archaeology in search of more equitable and less violent relational and social models. For example, there is evidence of prehistoric societies (e.g., Çatalhöyük in Turkey, which dates back approximately 8,000 years) that were more peaceful and egalitarian and where women were not dominated by men. Ian Hodder, an archaeologist excavating Çatalhöyük, noted with some amazement in his Scientific American article “Women and Men at Çatalhöyük,” that “even analyses of isotopes in bones give no indication of divergence in lifestyle translating into differences in status and power between women and men,” suggesting “a society in which sex is relatively unimportant in assigning social roles, with neither burials nor space in houses suggesting gender inequality” (Hodder 2004, 77–83). There is also evidence from the Minoan civilization, which flourished on the Mediterranean island of Crete until about 3,500 years ago, contradicting the claim that more centralized, complex, and technologically and artistically advanced cultures require massive inequalities, male dominance, and control through violence. As the Greek archeologist Nicolas Platon noted, in the highly

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technologically developed Minoan civilization, the influence of women is evident, writing that this was a remarkably peaceful and prosperous society in which the whole of life was pervaded by an ardent faith in the Goddess Nature. In their nature-celebrating art, the Minoans seem to have had a great respect not only for women but for our Mother Earth, what we today would call an ecological consciousness (Platon 1966). Some scholars call these earlier societies matriarchies (Stone 1978). There is no evidence that because women in these societies seem to have held high social and religious positions, women dominated men. Instead, they have been described as orienting to a partnership rather than domination model of social organization: a form of organization that offers an alternative to gender and social relations based on domination and subordination (Eisler 1988, 1995). The domination model supports relations based on rigid rankings of domination ultimately backed up by fear and force: man over woman, man over man, religion over religion, race over race, and man over nature. In contrast, the partnership model supports relations based on mutual respect, mutual accountability, and mutual benefit. Here power is defined as power to and power with. There are hierarchies of actualization that empower, rather than hierarchies of domination where power is defined as power over. From this perspective, what is today generally called religious fundamentalism can be understood as domination fundamentalism. While it uses selected scriptural passages to support its goals, it is designed to reimpose a system of top-down rule in both the family and state or tribe. Notably, in fundamentalist teachings, a top priority is ensuring that partnership parent-child relations and partnership gender relations do not replace the kinds of gender and parent-child relations that are foundational to a domination-oriented society. This ideology can also be secular. Feminist scholars have also noted that relationship models in which women and the “feminine” are devalued contradict basic Christian teachings about compassion, nonviolence, and caring. For example, they point to passages such as Leviticus 19:18, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” psalms that often present a gentle and comforting deity, and 2 Isaiah 66:13 where, in sharp contrast to the many threats of eternal punishment for those who fail to follow the commands of a divine Father or Lord, we find a feminine voice of God saying, “As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you.” This reclamation of a feminine voice and face of God is an important feminist religious theme today that is integral to a shift in religious models for relations and social structures from the domination to the partnership side of the social scale. For instance, there are attempts to reinvest the Christian Mother of God with divinity. This reclamation of divinity for Mary counters the idealization of a family in which only the father and son, and not the mother, are divine and provides a model for families in which all members are equally valued and respected regardless of gender. It also provides a model of power in which stereotypically “feminine” values such as nurturance and nonviolence are incorporated into social and religious governance.



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Feminists are making some progress in changing religious language to be more gender inclusive. To buttress their case, they cite biblical passages where God is identified as female. For example, Isaiah 42:14 speaks of God crying out “like a woman in labor.” Isaiah 46:3–4 describes God as having carried the house of Jacob “from the womb.” In Numbers 11:12, Moses says that God should carry the Israelis “in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child” to the Promised Land. In Isaiah 66:13, God tells Jerusalem, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” But despite assertions that God has no gender, the view of God as male persists in both scripture and general culture. While a number of Christian denominations are now ordaining women as pastors, they remain a small minority. Pope Francis as head of the Catholic church still maintains that women must be excluded from the priesthood. This reinforces religious gender and social models of inequality, which in turn maintains a gendered system of values in which not only women but also anything associated with the “feminine” is devalued. Nonetheless, the challenges to this core aspect of domination systems are increasing worldwide, helping to pave the way for a shift to a more equitable and peaceful partnership system. Riane Eisler See also: Christianity: African American Women; Charity; “The Fall”; Fundamentalism; Mary Magdalene; Ministers; Mother of God; Orthodox Christianity; Sex and Gender; Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Judaism: Hebrew Bible; Prehistoric Religions: Crete, Religion and Culture; Neolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Spirituality and Gender in Social Context Further Reading Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988. Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Hodder, Ian. “Women and Men at Catalhoyuk.” Scientific American (January 2004): 77–83. Platon, Nikolas. Crete. Geneva: Nagel, 1966. Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. New York: Mariner Books, 1978.

R O M A N C AT H O L I C W O M E N R E L I G I O U S The phenomenon of holy women, such as deacons, prophetesses, sibyls, vestal virgins, and witches, occurs in every religion. In the Roman Catholic Church, nuns, also referred to as women religious, have been the token of female holiness. In 2014, Pope Francis wrote a letter to the Institute of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life asking all consecrated men and women “‘to wake up the world,’ since the distinctive sign of consecrated life is prophecy” (Pope Francis 2014, II.2). Women religious from the time of Jesus have found a life of dedication

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to God and neighbor and the role of prophet or witness to the gospel compelling and worthwhile. As Christianity developed in the Middle East and Europe, the role of women religious gradually became formalized and institutionalized. Because women were considered to be “imperfect men,” and women religious were laity not clergy, they were not permitted to become priests; thus, the status of nun became a kind of substitute for ordination to the priesthood. Women religious were sequestered in convents and subjected to the governance of the local bishop. Internally also, there was a hierarchical structure of a Mother Superior, a council, a chapter, and the rank and file. The rule and the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience bound the members to norms of belief and conduct. In particular, the vow of chastity and the state of virginity became emblematic of the life of purity and dedication. The earliest organized religious communities of women were in Germany, France, and Italy, but the monastic movement spread throughout the world as the church spread. The missionary impetus sparked by the Reformation of the 16th century led women religious into remote corners of the world to convert and save the “heathens” as well as to found schools and hospitals. For example, Marie of the Incarnation came to Canada in 1639 to educate young girls, especially the native girls, and in 1727, 12 Ursuline nuns founded their convent in Louisiana. In 1790, the persecutions during the French Revolution led Clare Joseph Dickinson, a Carmelite, to settle her monastery in Maryland; Portuguese missionaries went to Indonesia. In 1899, the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, called the White Sisters because of the color of their habit, were called to work in Uganda, Zambia, and later Tanzania in schools and orphanages. The missionary spirit that led nuns to remote places far from their own Western culture resulted not only in good works and conversions but in leading many sisters to a realization that the people they served had their own justifiable culture, including profound religious beliefs and customs. For many communities, this realization led to a new openness to the world. In many ways, missionary sisters paved new roads for women and nuns as they acknowledged cultural differences among peoples and religions. Some were prophetic leaders in respecting other faith traditions and helping women religious to move toward greater respect for those people different from them. The nuns lived communal lives and worked as nurses, teachers, and social workers. They saw their work more as mission and vocation than as profession. They were esteemed within the Catholic world and worked to maintain and model the Catholic community’s identity. For many people, priests were often distant figures, and the nuns represented the Catholic church to them. In general, women religious maintained a semicloistered life and a sheltered apostolic mission until the mid-20th century, when decrees from Pope Pius XII (Sponsa Christi 1950) and the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) opened the windows of the church. The Sister Formation movement began in 1954 as a response to Pope Pius, who said that women religious should be the professional equals of their secular counterparts. Communities immediately began a formal process of sending sisters to college before they went to work in the schools, hospitals, and other missions. Furthermore, women religious were once again defined



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as laity, albeit special laity. The questions raised by such issues as professional credentials, exposure to and increasing engagement with the world, women’s identity and position within the church, social justice, and civil rights led some women religious to question the validity of their state of life. The Second Vatican Council began a process of deep change within the church, but Catholic nuns were the first to understand the social and religious implications of the personal and social issues challenging them and were the first to respond. Change occurred dramatically and quickly after 1965. In 1965, there were 179,954 American Catholic nuns; in 2014, there were 48,546—a 77 percent loss. Worldwide, there were 1,004,304 nuns in 1965; in 2014, there were 705,529—a loss of 30 percent (CARA 2014). More opportunities for women, greater equality in the home and in the workplace, and a loss of numbers in organized religions contributed to this decrease. Roman Catholic women religious today have shed their habits, rewritten their rules, opened their doors, and are living as contemporary women. New communities of women are forming in the 21st century: ecumenical; female and male; married and single; issue-oriented communities, such as the Green Sisters; and other configurations of intentional community with the prophetic motive of the earliest religious communities. Carole Ganim See also: Christianity: Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious; Christianity in Europe; Missionaries; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Contemporary Women; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Women in the Reformation Further Reading Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). “Frequently Requested Church Statistics.” 2016. http://cara/georgetown.edu/frequently-requested-church-statistics. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Pope Francis. “To All Consecrated People on the Occasion of the Year of Consecrated Life, 2014.” November 21, 2014. https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters​ /documents/papa-francesco_lettera-ap_20141121_lettera-consacrati.html. Pope Paul VI. Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. November 21, 1964.

SAINTS Women have been recognized as holy figures in Christianity since its inception, and, like men, the pious deeds of exceptional Christian women were recorded in a genre called hagiography, or “holy writing.” A saint’s life (sometimes referred to as a vita, the Latin word for “life”) combines a biography of the saint and a record of his or her miracles in a format that preserves this information for future memory and provides justification as to why the saint should be formally recognized and venerated in church liturgy and popular religion. Hagiographic accounts of holy women’s lives and deeds date back to late antiquity; over time, as the Catholic church grew more bureaucratic in its affairs, a formal process of canonization was

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established with specific standards for proof of a candidate’s sanctity, including miracles performed during her lifetime and continued miraculous influence associated with her relics and tomb and divine intercession after her death. By the High Middle Ages, this process of canonization had a strong legal procedural component and required the testimony of witnesses as well as written documents. The outcome of a process of canonization also became more complicated as popes could declare an individual as sanctus (sanctified) or beatus (blessed or beatified, suggesting that the individual received official recognition as a holy figure without the full status of sainthood). The historian Carolyn Walker Bynum was one of the first scholars to recognize the great value of the history of female saints for understanding social and religious patterns. Her work drew attention to the ways that female sanctity was shaped by broader assumptions about women’s domestic and caretaking roles and how (usually male) hagiographers understood female sanctity through investing a deep spiritual significance to women’s domestic duties, transferring those duties to the spiritual realm by identifying how women focused deeply on the body of Christ. Innovations in the field of women’s history led scholars to read saints’ lives, particularly women saints’, not merely as pious testimonies but as documents that responded to historical and literary developments and offered insight into social and domestic life, theology, popular belief, and gender relationships. As hagiographical texts were usually, though not exclusively, written by men, scholars have focused much attention on understanding the gender dynamics involved in representing female sanctity and encouraging popular devotion to the veneration of specific women saints. Saints’ lives are written for similar purposes across time and place; as hagiography as a genre changed over time in response to social developments, the selection of specific individuals for special holy recognition depended on the mood and politics of the era. For example, while saints of the early Middle Ages (ca. 500–1100) were drawn largely from the ranks of bishops and monastic personnel, such as monks, nuns, abbots, and abbesses, sanctity in the late Middle Ages saw several important changes that mirrored contemporary social developments: the rise of the lay saint, an increase in the number of women saints recognized for veneration, and the format of the saint’s life, which became oriented toward the formal process of canonization that the medieval papacy instituted through a series of reforms in the 12th and 13th centuries. Female saints thus reveal broader patterns of women’s participation in Christian Religion. The earliest men and women identified as saints were drawn from the Bible and from tales of the early adherents of Christianity who were martyred by Roman authorities. The saints’ lives of Christianity’s early virgin martyrs, whose stories often featured physical torture for failing to renounce Christianity and marry Pagan husbands, were highly fictionalized. Collectively, this type of female saint’s narrative highlighted the innocence of the Christian faithful and compared Christians’ virtues, particularly chastity, favorably to the lust and brutality of their Roman persecutors. Female saints of this genre, such as Saint Barbara, Saint Agatha, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria, were celebrated figures in late antiquity. Their



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stories continued to circulate in anthologies of saints’ lives and popular preaching, and their images appeared frequently as devotional figures in medieval art. Hagiography, like other forms of intellectual work in the early Middle Ages, flourished predominately in monasteries and convents. In this context, vitae of important female monastic founders, abbesses, and occasionally nuns illuminated the contributions of those women to the institution’s history and demonstrated its worthiness as an ongoing recipient of local, noble, or royal patronage. Female saints in the early Middle Ages tended most often to be virginal or widowed women who were associated with the convents in which they lived or exercised leadership. Common themes in female saints’ lives were an early religious vocation, entry into and leadership in a convent, and miracles that the saint performed both during her lifetime and at her tomb/shrine after her death. In the 13th century, women from different classes and vocations were more often recognized as saints even as the process for official sanctity, canonization, became more strictly regulated. Since the 12th century, the papacy had simultaneously sought to engage laypeople in church life and to exercise more direct authority over its doctrines and practices. Inspired by preachers who deliberately cultivated a greater personal engagement with the Christian message, laypeople sought to identify with the monastic ideals of chastity and asceticism while still living in the secular world. Church authorities recognized that pastoral care of laypeople benefitted from the holy examples that lay saints provided; thus the church identified more contemporary and married women (for example, Saint Elizabeth of Thüringia, Bridget of Sweden, and Frances of Rome) and women drawn from the urban merchant and artisan classes (such as Saint Clare of Assisi and Catherine of Siena) as saints. The deep influence of the penitential movement in the popular spirituality of the High and late Middle Ages also encouraged enormous popular devotion to Saint Mary Magdalene—considered to be both a disciple of Jesus and a repentant prostitute—as a pre- Saint Catherine of Siena Exchanging Her Heart with mier example to laypeople of the Christ, by Giovanni di Paolo, 15th century. Author, extraordinary power of penitence. mystic, and stigmatic Catherine of Siena was canonized in 1461, and declared a doctor of the church in 1970. The stories of these women’s (The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Bequest of Lore lives introduced complications Heinemann, in memory of her husband, Dr. Rudolf J. to the narrative norms in the Heinemann, 1996)

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lives of male and monastic saints and often focused on the conflicts women experienced between fulfilling their domestic and conjugal duties and pursuing a life of celibacy and contemplation. Hagiographers frequently used the biblical story of Mary and Martha (Luke 10:38–42) to illustrate how these two apparently contradictory sides of the female experience could be reconciled: laywomen saints, though they started their lives as daughters, wives, and mothers, frequently transitioned to a more spiritual way of life through gradually renouncing the everyday domestic world to develop a mystical relationship with God when entry into a convent or some other form of the contemplative life became possible. From the 13th to the 15th century, women saints appeared in hagiographical literature as mystics, visionaries, champions of the poor, and protectors of other women. Toward the end of the 13th century, the papacy, which had been open to petitions for the canonization of new saints throughout the High Middle Ages, responded to such requests “with extreme rigor for fear of being overwhelmed by the rising tide of local cults” (Vauchez 1997, 137). The proliferation of nonclerical candidates for sainthood increasingly engendered suspicion among church authorities who mistrusted laypeople’s and women’s correct understanding of theology and considered them particularly susceptible to erroneous, heretical, or even demonic influences. The rise of witch trials in early modern Europe exacerbated concerns about women’s spiritual and intellectual weakness, and female mystics’ visions and writings received an uneasy reception in ecclesiastical circles. Such concerns intensified in response to the Protestant Reformation’s attack on the church’s practice of canonization and the reforms of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Catholic papacy greatly limited its recognition of women saints, particularly favoring instead men from the reforming orders of Spain and Italy. Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) proved a notable exception to this preference for male saints. Her activities as a Carmelite nun, mystic, writer, and supporter of reformed Catholicism provided church authorities with a valuable model of humble, obedient, and chaste female spirituality. In the modern era, the patterns of canonization that characterized Saint Teresa continued to be the predominant model. Female saints of the 19th century to the present day are most often celebrated for their lifelong chastity as nuns, their dedication to monastic orders whose work focused on care for the sick and poor, and their humility as they served others in dire circumstances. These ancient patterns in female sanctity persisted even as novel developments, such as the colonization of the New World, introduced new possibilities for female saints’ activities. Saint Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680) was a convert to Christianity in colonial New York and the first Native American woman to be canonized by the Catholic church in 2012. Several other American saints, such as Mother Elizabeth Seton (1774–1821), Sister Rose Philippine Duchesne (1769–1852), Sister Marianne Cope (1838–1918), and Sister Katharine Drexel (1858–1955), illustrate how medieval and Reformation narratives of female sainthood evolved in the context of the missionary saint’s role in conversion and



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ministry to the subjugated people she encountered through colonial settlement and development. Perhaps the most famous recent female saint of this type is Mother Teresa (1910–1997), an Albanian nun who was beatified in 2003 and canonized in 2015 for her care of the poor and sick in the slums of Calcutta, India. Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta was both venerated worldwide—she was honored in 1979 with the Nobel Peace Prize—and widely criticized for her opposition to abortion and the condition of the hospitals in which she tended the sick and dying. The controversies around Mother Teresa and Saint Kateri, whose veneration has been accused of validating colonialist oppression, illustrate contemporary considerations of gender and intersectionality: modern sainthood elevated the status of women and an understanding of their spiritual capacities yet also illustrates how their veneration was marshaled to support and sustain other forms of religious and social oppression. Most recently, Mary MacKillop (1841–1909), whose canonization process began in 1925 but was only finalized in 2017, typifies the tensions between empowerment and subordination in the pattern of post-Reformation female sainthood. An Australian native and Sister of Saint Joseph, Mary MacKillop and the sisters of her order suffered retaliation from episcopal supervisors in 1871 because she denounced a priest accused of sexual abuse. Her bishop attempted to disband her order, and MacKillop was banned from the church when she failed to comply with his demands. A few years later, her dying and repentant bishop rescinded the ban, but the church only issued a formal apology to the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 2009. The claim for Mary MacKillop’s sanctity resonates particularly strongly in the wake of contemporary revelations of clerical abuse and the difficulties the contemporary church has faced in redressing the incidents of sexual abuse worldwide in local parishes and monastic institutions. Katherine Clark Walter See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Christianity in Europe; Mary Magdalene; Middle Ages; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Mystics; Saints; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Women in the Reformation Further Reading Alhgren, Gillian T. W. Teresa of Ávila and the Politics of Sanctity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998. Elliott, Dyan. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. McNamara, Jo Ann, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Mooney, Catherine, ed. Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Salisbury, Joyce. Perpetua’s Passion: The Death and Memory of a Young Roman Woman. New York: Routledge, 1997. Vauchez, Andre. Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

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SEX AND GENDER Sex and gender are formative concepts for Christian practice and theology. Scholars of religion agree that gender is often an important aspect of religion and spirituality because religious narratives explain essential social questions such as the nature of human existence, the origins of a people, and how a culture’s beliefs and traditions came to be. Religious narratives thus incorporate elements that rationalize gender roles in a given society and reflect the tension and conflict that a culture has endured as these roles have changed over time. Saint Paul, one of the earliest interpreters of Christianity, depended on women as leaders and participants in the early churches. He thus needed to address women’s ability but also position their roles in accordance with existing gender hierarchies. Paul wrote in Galatians 3:28 that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” emphasizing the radical, apocalyptic nature of Christ on the life of his Christian followers. On a spiritual level, to follow Christ remade one’s entire existence based on this new adopted faith. Yet, in practice, Paul argued that one’s spiritual state did not necessarily extend to changes in daily life; for example, in 1 Corinthians 11:2–11, Paul reinforced ancient Mediterranean gender norms by affirming men’s authority over their wives and the necessity of women’s (but not men’s) veiling as a sign of submission and modesty. Likewise, in 1 Corinthians 14:34, Paul commands women to be silent in the churches. Each of these letters was written for particular congregations and addressed specific concerns that had arisen within these communities, but over time, Christian followers understood Paul’s letters as general and normative doctrines. His interpretations characterized a Christian understanding of gender and supported a conventional understanding of male authority as appropriate to the governance of the church, community, and household. These conventional, patriarchal perceptions of women’s spirituality and roles in the early Christian movement proved a greater normative force in the early church than the more egalitarian interactions between Christ and his female followers, such as Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, and Mary Magdalene. Another powerful belief that influenced Christian thought was the association between women and the body. The influential philosophies of Plato and Aristotle associated femininity with materiality and masculinity with the spirit, a belief that rendered women inherently lesser than men and more prone to the weaknesses of the flesh. As Christian theology developed in the Roman-dominated Mediterranean world—an environment that many early Christian theologians considered carnal and corrupted—a preference for restraint and asceticism concerning sexuality and the body became important markers of Christian identity. Especially for theologians such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, the curbing of physical “appetites” of all kinds was an important indicator of religious discipline, and they characterized such discipline for both sexes as a kind of spiritual virility: spiritual excellence resulted from the triumph of a masculine will over a flesh that was closely associated with feminine temptation and weakness.



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Early Christian thought also emphasized differences between men and women as indicators for proper roles within the church. Christian authorities depended on women’s participation in and patronage of the church yet mistrusted women’s ability to engage in asceticism, discipline, and leadership as men did. Theologians cultivated female patrons but simultaneously reminded them of the sins of Eve and praised women whose spiritual discipline made them more like men (viragos). For example, the early martyr Perpetua (d. 203), a married woman with a newborn child who was incarcerated with fellow Christians during the persecutions of the Severan dynasty, envisioned her martyrdom in a dream in which she became a man as she faced her executioner in the arena. The image of the Virgin Mary became an extremely important exemplar for women: her powerful intercession on behalf of Christian souls as the Mother of God was tempered with her obedience and submission as the handmaiden of the Lord. Although male authorities were never entirely comfortable with women exercising powerful and influential roles in church affairs, many of the organizers and patrons of the earliest churches were women, often working together with their husbands and/or families to sustain a community after converting. Women served a liturgical function as deaconesses, assisting with the baptism of new converts. Women martyrs were recognized as saints, particularly during the Decian and Diocletian persecutions of the mid-third and the early fourth centuries. By the end of the fourth century, the role of deaconess appears to have declined as a niche for women’s formal replacement in the church, but by the early Middle Ages, the formation of convents allowed women to participate in the monastic life as nuns. Convent life offered an alternative to women’s traditional roles in family life by focusing women’s time and energy on a life of perpetual religious devotion and, in some cases, study and contemplation. Throughout the Middle Ages, nuns who found a lifelong vocation in the monastic life served as teachers, scholars, healers, mystics, and visionaries. A rich tradition of women’s sainthood celebrated female virtue through monastic foundation and leadership; later medieval hagiography also identified holy women drawn from the laity as examples of holiness to be admired and imitated. Women were excluded from official clerical offices such as bishop and priest, but abbesses governed the convent with full authority, and female monastic institutions enjoyed a great deal of autonomy from outside interference. Both abbesses and abbots were considered equivalent in status to the bishop in the early Middle Ages, but this association for abbesses appears to have weakened in the High and late Middle Ages as male clerical supervision of convents became more common. Before clerical marriage was systematically proscribed by the Gregorian Reforms in the late 11th and 12th centuries, priests’ wives fulfilled important functions in the Christian parish. As the Gregorian Reforms established greater clerical authority through stringent celibacy and a sacramental theology, the church adopted policies that deemed women unclean and unworthy of liturgical contact with the altar, the Eucharist, and other sacramental duties performed by the priest. Such arguments continue to support the proscription of women serving as priests in the Catholic church, though several Protestant denominations have in recent times begun ordaining women.

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The sustained conversation about sex and gender in the Christian tradition also invites consideration of the concept of gender itself: though gender norms in the premodern world were organized and expressed as binary—male/female—other ideas about the body, such as chastity for the clergy, complicated these gender dyads. Social roles and identities such as celibate priests, “unmanly” men, “manly” women (viragos), eunuchs, and others have raised questions as to whether a strictly binary understanding of gender can capture these varieties of gender expression. Jacqueline Murray, among others, has suggested that celibacy significantly complicated the male/female binary system. Christian traditions relied heavily on Aristotelian principles that asserted that both masculine and feminine characteristics governed each person’s disposition, and while the binary categories of male and female functioned as powerful social norms upholding the patriarchal traditions into which Christianity was born, Murray (2008, 49) argues that “the very fact that medieval people saw sex and gender as mutable . . . demonstrates a world view that allowed for the accommodation of multiple identities underneath a dominant discourse of binaries.” These reflections on gender categories and experiences in the early and medieval church are instructive for contemporary inquiries into gender that consider whether gender is fluid and based on individual perceptions versus gender as an innate binary phenomenon. They also shed light on the ways in which a “dominant discourse of binaries” introduced conflicting values into Christian doctrine between the inherent equality of all souls before God, on the one hand, and patriarchal perceptions of male superiority and female weakness on the other. Katherine Clark Walter See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Chastity; Christianity in Europe; “The Fall”; Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity; Mary Magdalene; Middle Ages; Ministers; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Mystics; Protestant Denominations; Saints; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Islam: Hawwa; Judaism: Lilith Further Reading Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Elliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women 200–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Macy, Gary. The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. McNamara, Jo Ann. “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System 1050–1150.” In Medieval Masculinities, edited by Clare Lees, 3–30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Murray, Jacqueline. “One Flesh, Two Sexes, Three Genders?” In Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives, edited by Lisa M. Bitel and Felice Lifshitz, 34–51. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Ranft, Patricia. Women and Spiritual Equality in the Christian Tradition. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.



Sophia

SOPHIA Sophia, whose Greek name means “wisdom,” is a feminine form of the Divine, according to certain Christian traditions. Sophia, as the divine form of God’s wisdom, is thought of as permeating all of creation, performing God’s will. Wisdom plays a prominent role in many of the Christian traditions that are now studied as Western esotericism—faiths known as “wisdom” or “mystery” traditions, including Gnosticism, Christian theosophy, Christian Kabbalah, and Rosicrucianism. Sophia is also important in mainstream Christianity to the Eastern Orthodox church, whose symbolic iconography leans toward esotericism. Esoteric traditions focus on the inner workings of the Godhead and its manifestation in creation; and they seek to record and impart these inner revelations through symbolic imagery. Depictions of the Feminine Divine Sophia in scripture, sacred texts, and images reveal the ways she is understood in various traditions across the history of Christianity. In the Christian wisdom tradition, Sophia is the female Creator Goddess ­(Creatrix). This tradition stretches back to the Jewish sages who wrote the Book of Proverbs in the third century BCE. In Proverbs, from the Old Testament of the Bible, Solomon calls Sophia by the name “Wisdom of God,” the “Plan of the Temple.” Solomon (ca. 10th century BCE), who ordered and oversaw the building of the temple in Jerusalem, describes this construction as a creative act of Sophia. In Proverbs 9:1, he refers to building the Temple of Wisdom, the house hewn out of seven pillars. And in this temple, the people of Israel would come to worship Asherah, the Tree of Life and Mother Goddess of ancient Semitic peoples, who was also associated with wisdom. In Gnosticism, both Sophia and Jesus Christ are important figures who together were seen as a single androgynous Savior (Nag Hammadi library of Gnostic scriptures). They are paired specifically in a book called The Sophia of Jesus Christ, written during the first century CE but inherited through centuries-old Egyptian writings. Gnosis is the Greek term for “knowledge” and “inner cognition,” so the Gnostic tradition, practiced even today, naturally evolved alongside Sophia as Wisdom. They conceive of Sophia as uniting all through knowledge and participation in all because she permeates all outer and inner realms of creation. The cosmos is thought of as a hierarchy of beings, ranging from Godhead, to Trinity, to angels, to the divine Sophia, to human beings. Within the practice of contemplation on the cosmic hierarchies, Sophia is perceived as the soul of the human community (church), while Christ is its spirit: she is contemplated as the radiance or breath of Christ directly received by human souls. Where Christ is said to be the Word of God, Sophia may be thought of as the Holy Spirit; together with the Creator, or God the Father, they form the Christian Trinity. In some texts, Sophia is referred to as an archangelic being through whose knowledge the unity of the Trinity becomes perceptible. In the Eastern Orthodox church, Sophia is linked with Mary the Mother of God as the bearer of God’s divine wisdom. After the Great Schism of 1054 CE, the Christian church was divided in two. This split was due in part to the rejection, by what would become the Catholic church, of the prominent iconography practiced by what would become Eastern Orthodox. According to the Eastern

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Orthodox tradition, Mary the human mother of Christ attains theosis—the mystical process whereby human becomes divine—and thus is called Sophia. Sophia is also the name of a saint in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. During the early centuries CE, Christianity was treated as a heretical cult, and martyrdoms at the hands of non-Christians were common. At the turn of the second century CE, a Christian woman named Sophia was martyred by the Romans alongside her three daughters, named for the three theological virtues faith, hope, and charity. Saint Sophia figures prominently in the iconography of the Eastern Orthodox church. In the teachings of Christian theosophist Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), Sophia is the Chaste Virgin, or Wisdom of God, Spirit of the Great World. Boehme, who lived during the Protestant Reformation in Renaissance Europe, conceived of Sophia as the World Soul with three principles in it: Eternal Spirit or Divine Virtue, represented by the elements of air and water; Wrath, or the element of fire; and her body, the Holy Earth. Explaining John 1:1–3 from the New Testament of the Bible, Boehme says that Word, or the exhalation of God, is the emanation of divine will and knowledge. He stipulates that what is emanated is Wisdom. Thus, Christ and Sophia, Word and Wisdom, are envisioned as inseparable. The Eternal One beholds itself in the revelation of Wisdom’s powers, colors, virtues, and characteristics. According to German theosopher Friedrich Oetinger (1702–1782), Wisdom is the protoimage of the Invisible Being, which is eternally born from it. Oetinger practiced Christian Kabbalah during the 18th century. During the 17th century, Princess Antonia of Württemberg practiced this esoteric Christian theosophy using her Kabbalistic teaching painting as a memory device. This master tablet consists of esoteric symbolism from Rosicrucianism and Christian Kabbalah. Female personifications of divine principles figure prominently in the painting, including the cardinal virtues and the theological virtues. The cardinal virtue prudence or Sophia embodies the wisdom to judge the most appropriate action. Sophia as Wisdom is depicted sitting next to Ezekiel’s wheels or inner workings of creation, alongside the phoenix of rebirth, with the book of life open on her lap. Sophia as cosmic intelligence is also connected with Archangel Michael, who mediates cosmic intelligence to humanity. During the 1930s in Western Europe, this pairing of Sophia with Michael was particularly important to Valentin Tomberg (1900–1973) of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy movement. Tomberg argued for the necessity of including Sophia as inseparable from Michael, whom anthroposophists saw as the founder of a cosmic spiritual school, reflected in the earthly school of anthroposophy. Tomberg spoke of an unwritten, wordless revelation of the heart of Sophia, side by side with the written book of the Old Testament. He said that comprehension of this invisible book lived in the heart of Mary. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) See also: Christianity: Apocrypha; Christianity in Europe; “The Fall”; Mary Magdalene; Middle Ages; Mother of God; Mystics; Orthodox Christianity; Judaism: Goddesses; Hasidism; Hebrew Bible; Kabbalah



Stigmatics

Further Reading Benz, Ernst. Christian Kabbalah: Neglected Child of Theology. Translated by Kenneth W. Wesche. Edited by Robert J. Faas. Saint Paul, MN: Grailstone, 2004. Tomberg, Valentin. Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalypse. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2006. Versluis, Arthur. The Wisdom of Jacob Böhme. Saint Paul, MN: New Grail, 2003.

S T I G M AT I C S In a Christian religious context, the term stigmata refers to visible marks on a person’s body that represent the wounds received by Jesus of Nazareth during his crucifixion. Stigmata typically take the form of wounds in the hands and feet and may also include scourge marks, the impression of the crown of thorns, and a spear wound in the chest or side. Hundreds of alleged instances have followed the first known stigmatic, Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226). Although Saint Francis was the first, and Padre Pio (1887–1968) the most well-known recent stigmatic, the vast majority—according to the most exhaustive study, around 90 percent— have been women (Imbert-Gourbeyre 1894, xxi–xli). As a result, beliefs about gender and its impact on religious experience have colored popular and scholarly examinations of stigmata. Historical Overview

Saint Francis, who embraced a life of poverty, prayer, and itinerant preaching, was part of a widespread turn to mysticism and asceticism in 13th-century Christianity. Surveying the long history of stigmata, it becomes clear that its rise and fall in frequency has been tied to such trends in Christian piety. Other medieval stigmatics would follow Francis, such as Saint Gertrude (1256–1302), Angela of Foligno (1248–1309), and Saint Rita of Cassia (1386–1456). As the number of alleged stigmatics increased, striking patterns emerged: the typical stigmatic was a woman and most often either a nun or a tertiary (a person affiliated with a religious order without permanent vows). Stigmatics were also usually ascetics and experienced trances and visions. Following the Reformation, stigmata became heavily concentrated in Catholic lands and especially in Italy. Instances of stigmata decreased during the 18th-century Enlightenment but roared to unprecedented heights during the religious revivalism of the 19th century. It was also at this time that stigmatics came under the scrutiny of modern psychology and medicine as well as the glare of mass media. Nineteenth-century stigmatics such as Anna Katharina Emmerick (1774–1824) and Louise Lateau (1850–1883) were the subject of highly publicized medical examinations as well as church investigations. Interpretations of Stigmatics

Many Christians, particularly Catholics, believe stigmata are supernatural marks that appear in response to a person’s deep prayer and meditation on Jesus’s crucifixion. The institutional church, however, has been reluctant to pronounce stigmata

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cases as miraculous. Of over 300 alleged stigmatics, only about 60 have achieved beatification or canonization (Yarom 1992, 11). Scholarly interpretations of stigmatics have often been influenced by psychoanalytic theory. Michael Carroll, Frank Graziano, Nitza Yarom, and others have viewed stigmatics as persons suffering from psychological disorders. In their analyses, “spiritual mortifications” become “masochism,” “religious fasting” becomes “anorexia,” “visions” become “hallucinations,” and “stigmata” becomes a form of self-harm. They construct stigmatics, and mystics more generally, as a product of internalized, psychologically damaging discourses of human (and especially female) imperfection and inferiority. They also frequently suggest that women are uniquely prone to stigmata and similar religious phenomena, as when Carroll connects stigmata to the Electra complex, and Herbert Moller refers to women’s mysticism as characterized by “excited emotionalism and intoxicated eroticism” (Moller 1971, 305). Caroline Walker Bynum, Andrea Dickens, and others, however, have interpreted women’s Christian mysticism in a different light. In their view, mysticism functions as a suite of ideas and practices that can provide Christian women an alternative means of exercising power in the context of the patriarchal institutional church. By making this argument, these scholars shift the point of origin for women’s mysticism from the individual psyche to the individual encounter with her historical context. Meanwhile, the physically punishing asceticism and gory wounds that characterize so many of these women become for these scholars signs to be read in the light of the mystic’s theology and cultural context, revealing meanings other than those attributed to them, perhaps anachronistically, by modern psychology. Cassandra Painter See also: Christianity: Christianity in Europe; Middle Ages; Mystics; Saints; Sex and Gender Further Reading Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Carroll, Michael P. Catholic Cults and Devotions: A Psychological Enquiry. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989. Dickens, Andrea Janelle. The Female Mystic: Great Women Thinkers of the Middle Ages. London: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Graziano, Frank. Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Imbert-Gourbeyre, Antoine. La stigmatisation: L’extase Divine et les Miracles de Lourdes. Paris: Bellet, 1894. Moller, Herbert. “The Social Causation of Affective Mysticism.” Journal of Social History 4, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 305–38. Yarom, Nitza. Body, Blood and Sexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of St. Francis’ Stigmata and Their Historical Context. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.



Widowhood

WIDOWHOOD The ideal of the Christian widow significantly informed the early Christian church’s evolving views on gender and sexual purity. Widowhood in the Roman world and throughout the Middle Ages was conceptualized as a female-gendered status in both linguistic and symbolic terms and was specifically shaped by female roles and experiences. As generations of clerics revised the concept of widowhood as a social space for women, its representation as both an ideal and as a social status provided male authorities an opportunity to reflect on women’s nature, spirituality, and social roles. The early church fathers described Christian widowhood as a state that was precariously balanced against worldly constraints. Clerics created a description of the good Christian widow that discouraged them from remarriage and redirected their piety, service, and wealth toward the church. While at times this interpretation of the widow’s role offered the potential for a spiritual partnership between men and women, it was more often typified by a pattern in which male clergy expressed their authority over laypeople, especially women, through the regulation of the widow’s actions. Clerical preaching on widowhood was thus inherently contradictory: preachers combined high expectations for the chaste widow’s religious devotion on the one hand with misogynistic assumptions concerning women’s lustful nature on the other. These contradictions persisted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in devotional and secular literature, which warned widows of the perils of sex and remarriage and sharply criticized false widows who used their supposedly devout status as a cover for their lust and greed. The paradoxes surrounding the Christian widow must be seen in a social context in which celibate widowhood was a contested issue for the families involved. Even when a widow preferred to remain single, remarriage was often a necessity for those who lacked other means of financial and social support. A widow’s kin often viewed her remarriage as a renewed opportunity to increase the family’s wealth and prestige through her connection to a new husband. The deceased husband’s family, by contrast, often discouraged remarriage, preferring the widow to maintain her husband’s memory through her image as a perpetually mourning wife. The figure of the grieving widow reinforced important social values, such as spousal loyalty and the strength of the Christian marriage bond. Both secular and canon law were clear that remarriage was a fully permissible decision and did not constitute bigamy in any way, though medieval sources—both sacred and secular—expressed a lingering discomfort with the idea of multiple spouses awaiting the widow someday in heaven. Religious writers chose biblical women to exemplify the qualities and behavior of the ideal widow, and while these figures often bore little resemblance to women’s actual experiences, they allowed male clerics to envision how “real” widows embodied concepts such as chastity, loss, deprivation, and need. Church fathers adopted the language of Paul’s letter to Timothy (1 Timothy 5) to describe “she who was truly a widow” and imagined this ideal widow juxtaposed against the behavior of “real-life” widows, who faced sexual temptation, worldly vanity, and

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social pressure to remarry. The written traditions concerning widowhood were thus largely the products of clerical imagination, but because widowhood was so common in daily life, its interpretation was never a pure abstraction. For women who elected to remain as perpetual widows, their activities in early Christian communities—caring for the poor and sick, tending to their children, and praying “night and day” as the widow Anna in the temple, according to the Gospel of Luke (Luke 2:36–38)—imitated long-standing biblical examples of widows from the Old and New Testaments. From earliest times, the widow’s dress (or “widow’s weeds”) became a distinctive marker of her status and continued to be associated with mourning and perpetual widowhood into the modern era. Throughout every era, historical records indicate that economic hardship was a concern for all but the wealthiest widows, especially widows with young children, rendering the typical Christian widow more like the biblical widow of the two mites (Luke 21:1–4) than a “merry widow” who could indulge in worldly pleasures in her dead husband’s absence. Early church writers nevertheless devoted a great deal of attention to the widow’s chastity and the fragility of her public reputation as she carried out her worldly duties: the management of the widow’s sexuality, and the balance between her focus on secular and spiritual occupations, were often-mentioned concerns of clergymen, who saw their oversight as essential to Christian widows. The literature describing Christian widowhood throughout the premodern era was overwhelmingly authored by men. One of the few women to speak on her own behalf as a perpetual widow, Christine de Pizan (1364–1430), who was well versed in theologians’ interpretations of and warnings about Christian widowhood. She pointed out the disparities between the actual economic and social difficulties widows faced, especially when they were also the targets of disheartening gossip and widespread disbelief about their reputations, and the authenticity of their grief and religious devotion. In early Christian culture, widows were essential members of their local churches. Significant evidence points to an “order” of perpetual widows in the early centuries of the Christian movement. By the fourth century, this “order” seems to have diminished in importance or disappeared. Many church leaders, however, maintained special friendships with widowed female patrons as their advisers, and their letters of consolation and advice retained the ancient sensibility that widowhood was a special and recognized state. Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo (354–430 CE), and the scholar-monk Saint Jerome (347–420) wrote letters of instruction to widowed patrons concerning the state of widowhood and its implications for their spirituality. Medieval writers in turn used Augustine and Jerome’s texts, albeit with a certain ambivalence toward women outside the traditional cloister, to illustrate how formerly worldly widows could adjust to the role of nun. Rituals throughout the Middle Ages testify both to the admission of widowed women into convents as nuns and their consecration as perpetual celibates or “vowesses” living in the world. In the 12th century, a new interest in women’s roles in courtly love, sacramental marriage, and pastoral care of secular women also shaped the history of the treatment of widows, and in the 13th century, the rise of orders of lay religious



Widowhood

such as the Beguines and the Third Order of Saint Francis provided an outlet for the work and pious expression in secular life as well as in convents. Clerics emphasized to widows that their perpetual celibacy after their husband’s death, and the more focused devotion to God that this state permitted, conferred significant spiritual powers. These included greater opportunities to achieve their own salvation and heightened insight into the salvation of others, as the meditations of widowhood allowed devout widows the “spirit of prophecy” associated with Anna in the Gospel of Luke. A few women, such as Elizabeth of Thüringia (1207–1231) and Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373), became internationally known exemplars of this feminine spiritual potential in widowhood through their canonization as saints. The Protestant Reformation generally rejected lay chastity as a superior way of life, but chaste widowhood captured reformers’ attention as an appropriate role for women as the head of a pious Protestant household. Renaissance and Reformation authors placed more emphasis than earlier pastoral writers on the themes of the widow’s grief and her consolation, in part because Renaissance authors favored letters of consolation as a showcase for their literary talents and found the consolation of widows an opportune medium for displaying their proficiency in this genre. The husband’s funeral sermon, letters of guidance to widows, and treatises supporting Christian widows in their bereavement became commonplace, and the widespread use of printing facilitated the circulation and preservation of medieval traditions of Christian widowhood in new print genres. Christian widowhood in the Renaissance and Reformation, however, tended to emphasize the widow’s traditional role as her husband’s principal mourner while downplaying the formidable spiritual capacities of the medieval Christian widow to receive the “spirit of prophecy” or to intercede for the salvation of others through their devotions. In the modern era, the idea of the Christian widow changed as the institution of marriage itself shifted toward a more explicit perception of the marital bond as a mutual partnership undertaken primarily for emotional fulfillment. The literature directed to widows in Victorian England, for example, characterized widowhood largely through the widow’s grief for her spouse, illustrated through highly formalized and stylized mourning clothes and demeanor. At the same time, the 19th and early 20th centuries—perhaps animated by Freudian expressions of anxiety about the feminine—saw a renewed interest in the transgressive and lustful widow, reveling in images of the “merry widow” (for example, in Franz Lehár’s opera of the same title). The biblical widow Judith, who beheaded the Israelites’ Assyrian enemy Holofernes, became a source of morbid fascination in literature and art at the turn of the 20th century, transforming the positive medieval interpretation of the biblical heroine Judith as a strong and dutiful example of religious devotion in widowhood into a terrifying example of unchecked female power. Modern Western attitudes overwhelmingly emphasize new relationships and remarriage as legitimate and desirable for a widow’s emotional fulfilment, rendering the expectation of the widow as perpetual mourner rather obsolete. For those who identify with devout Catholicism or other traditional Christian denominations, however, modern discussions of the scriptural consolations of perpetual

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widowhood still echo the logic of the early Christian fathers. For example, a recently published guide, The Undistracted Widow, reminds today’s Christian widow that Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians (7:32) promotes acceptance of one’s widowhood as God’s will and the embracing of widowhood as a situation that allows one to better serve God, free from anxieties and distractions (Cornish 2010). The persona of the Christian widow thus resonates throughout history as a site of physical and social negotiations. The widow’s body occupied a contested space between chastity and worldliness, men and women, and clergy and laypeople. The threat of sexual danger lurked around the widow’s body and soul and evoked a discourse of male and clerical control over women. The conversation, however, was more complex and multidirectional than merely applying the ideal of chaste widowhood to reinforce female obedience, since the control of women’s bodies also implied the circumscription of the male sexuality that threatened the widow’s chastity. The expectation of widowed chastity often directed women toward life in a convent but also permitted many women to remain living in a secular context, creating a social and spiritual role for women in the world that allowed women to maintain their marital bond to their deceased husband but also afforded a new social identity: widowhood protected women’s reputations even as they engaged in social life and causes in more independent ways. Throughout history, widowhood affected women very differently according to their social class as well as many other factors that defined their social circumstances; amid these differences, Christian widowhood presented an idealized and iconic role for widows, even though not all women could fully participate in it. Although many women did remarry, the norms of Christian widowhood, even if practiced by only a small number of women, influenced perceptions of how “good” women mourned and memorialized their deceased husband and demonstrated a respectable way of life for all women. Katherine Clark Walter See also: Christianity: Art, Modern and Contemporary; Chastity; Christianity in Europe; Christine de Pizan; Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Middle Ages; Saints; Sex and Gender; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Hinduism: Sati; Judaism: Hebrew Bible Further Reading Bell, Rudolph M., and Virginia Yans, eds. Women on Their Own: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Being Single. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Carlson, Cindy L., and Angela Jane Weisl, eds. Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Later Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Cavallo, Sandra, and Lyndan Warner, eds. Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. New York: Longman, 1999. Cornish, Carol. The Undistracted Widow: Living for God after Losing Your Husband. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010. Erler, Mary. “English Vowed Women at the End of the Middle Ages.” Medieval Studies 57 (1995): 155–203. Jalland, Patricia. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.



Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE)

Mirrer, Louise, ed. Upon My Husband’s Death: Widows in the Literature and Histories of Medieval Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Rees, Elizabeth. “Christian Widowhood.” New Blackfriars 76, no. 896 (September 1995): 393–400.

W O M E N I N E A R LY C H R I S T I A N I T Y ( T O 3 0 0 C E ) During the first three centuries CE, many women were engaged in the Christian movement. Women helped the new religion gain cultural and political acceptance, assisted the new movement economically, and were accepted as apostles and disciples of Christ and as preachers and deacons in the early church. Key women were witnesses to the life of Jesus, such as Joanna and Mary Magdalene. From Palestine, Joanna was wealthy and was initially excluded by Jesus’s apostles due to her high social status. She was embraced by the group of “new Christian friends” only after she renounced the economic advantages of her privileged background. As a result, Joanna played an important role in the community: chosen as a female disciple, she helped others with education and finance to do “good” in the Christian community (Cohick 2009, 314–15). Another important woman in church history, and a controversial figure, is Mary Magdalene or Mary of Magdala, a businesswoman who traded saltfish and traveled throughout the north and east across the Sea of Galilee. She was accused of being a prostitute, and she is associated in some accounts with the “sinful woman” in Luke 7:36–50. Although Mary of Magdala was thus accused (falsely), she was accepted as an apostle and according to apocryphal texts was the most beloved of Christ, with an entire gospel written in her name (the Gospel of Mary). Jesus also dined and traveled with Mary Magdalene and other women (including Mary his mother) who were predominant in the movement. Early Christian literature shows that sexism was prevalent among male leaders of the early church. According to Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in the third century (ca. 247 CE), Tertullian (d. ca. 220 CE), and most biblical analyses and commentaries of the church fathers, “the woman was mainly responsible for sin, human perdition and she was also the devil’s gateway” (Coyle 1993, 124). The bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose (a.k.a. Ambrosiaster, 339–397 CE), Diodore of Tarsus (d. 390 CE), and Iranaeus (130–202 CE) all regarded women as inferior to men, not made in the image of God, and therefore not allowed to teach, to take an oath, to govern, or to pass judgment. Even Paul, author of 1 Corinthians, wrote, “Let your women be silent in the assemblies” (1 Corinthians 14:37). Despite these views, female leaders were prominently involved in the growth of the church. There are numerous references to women who contributed as benefactors in the Roman religious and political sphere in the first century: women such as Prisca, Anna, Phoebe, Julia, Lydia, Mary Magdalene, Thecla, the martyrs Perpetua and Felicitis (both d. 203 CE), and rich women such as Joanna, Berenice (the mother of Herod Agrippa I), and Poppaea Sabina (30–65 CE; the wife of Nero). The Roman Poppaea Sabina was exceptionally active in the liberation of priests who were kept in chains.

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These women had a powerful influence both in politics and in the Christian community of the time. Aristocratic women used their resources in aiding the needy, offering gifts and providing food to the poor, and promoting ethical values in the early church. Prisca (or the diminutive Priscilla), the companion/wife of the Roman Aquila (supporter of Paul’s mission), and Anna were teachers and prophetesses in the Christian communities, instructing members of the church. Anna also proclaimed the charismatic identity of Christ to those who were waiting for “the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:36–38). Phoebe, an influential woman in the Christian diaspora (the dispersion of Christians from Palestine), is described by Paul (Romans 16:1–2) as a patron of Christianity and as a minister of the assembly in Cenchreae. Phoebe was a deacon of the church, not just conveying the message and word of God but also assisting the church in its financial and social agenda. She played a missionary role during the apostolic age alongside Junia/Joanna, another prominent apostle in the Pauline churches. In Paul’s letters to the Romans, Phoebe was identified as a spiritual partner in the Christian life, reflecting her virtue and loyalty in the ministry of the church. Among the women of Paul’s church who were influential in early Christianity was Lydia from Thyatira in today’s Turkey. She was a successful trader of purple cloth (known as the woman of purple) and a generous benefactor to the Christian groups. The Orthodox Christian church has recognized her as Equal to the Apostles. Lydia was a Roman citizen who held a prestigious administrative post in the city of Rome. Another woman who had a central role in the development of the Christian movement was Thecla from Turkey. She was one of the female charismatics and itinerant personalities of early Christianity. Thecla was a follower of Paul, and she lived in chastity for the sake of the Christian faith. After many hindrances and persecutions, she became a symbol of the evangelical mission for Christian women who sought the word of God. Among the women who were pivotal in the expansion of the church was the northern African Vibia Perpetua and her slave Felicitis. Perpetua was a catechumen, being instructed in the principles of Christian faith, and she devoted her life to God. She was a woman who put herself in captivity to the Roman Empire to be with her people so that she could free Christians and consolidate a collective Christian identity. Perpetua wrote a prison diary, The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, in which she reports her martyrdom at a very young age (22 years old and mother of an infant son) together with other Christians. This account also displays her enthusiasm for ascetism, prophecy, revelation, visions, and mystical experiences. In addition, Euphemia (d. 303 CE, in Chalcedon) is an early Christian martyr and saint. She is still venerated in the Eastern Orthodox church and in the Roman Catholic Church (on September 16). Euphemia is an example of a woman of faith who was persecuted by “the Great Persecution” (303 CE) under the reign of Diocletian. She was tortured and sent to her death. In the history of the church, Euphemia remains a symbol in Christian iconography and art. Several paintings and narrative images refer to her. For instance, the Basilic of Saint Mark in Venice has a 13th-century mosaic in honor of Euphemia. The Venetian Andrea Mantegna



Women in the Reformation

(15th century) painted Saint Euphemia (1454), and this painting is held at the museum of Capodimonte in Naples. The church (10th century) in Rovinj, Croatia, is very ancient and was built for Euphemia. It keeps the sarcophagus and the relics of Euphemia and also has two frescoes (19th century) that depict the arrival of Euphemia’s tomb in Rovinj and her martyrdom. Similarly, in Verona, Italy, there is another old church (10th century) dedicated to Saint Euphemia, and its believers show their deep adoration to Saint Euphemia by praying to her and bowing in front of her. At its center, Christianity had influential women who contributed to the social and economic world of the church. Women in the early Christian world were seen not only as wives, mothers, midwives, nurses, domestic workers, and slaves but also as public speakers, traders, philosophers, and “guardians/leaders” of the church. Jesus welcomed subaltern (oppressed and marginalized) women, such as prostitutes and the poor working class. The engagement of women in Christianity is important, and it is significant that Paul included women in the Christian communities. In Paul’s famous biblical passage, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), he expresses solidarity in the face of discrimination and subalternity. Women were therefore essential to Jesus and to Christianity as a whole. Marzia Anna Coltri See also: Christianity: Apocrypha; Chastity; Mary Magdalene; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Mystics; Orthodox Christianity; Sex and Gender Further Reading Cohick, Lynn H. Women in the World of the Earliest Christianity: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009. Coyle, K. “Renewing the Face of the Earth” [ecofeminism and theology]. Asia Journal of Theology 7 (1993): 114–127. Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. Haskin, Susan. Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993. McGrath, Alister E. Christian History: An Introduction. Oxford: John Wiley, 2013.

W O M E N I N T H E R E F O R M AT I O N The Reformation of the 16th century shattered Christendom by disrupting the church’s monopoly over salvation. Martin Luther’s “Reformation breakthrough,” the doctrine of justification by faith through grace, dismantled the sacramental system of the medieval church. For Protestants and the more radical reformers, the entire hierarchy of the medieval church (priests, bishops, archbishops, the pope) was no longer a privileged sacred arbiter between this world and the next. The early Reformation was thus an exciting, egalitarian movement in which both women and men exercised considerable charismatic authority within their communities of faith. Only later in the early modern period did the movement crystallize into the institutions that we are familiar with today: Anglicanism, Lutheranism, the Reformed churches, and the various Anabaptist groups (Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites).

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Women from all social classes and backgrounds contributed to the reforming movements of this period. Some women left their religious lives in cloisters and challenged the religious assumptions behind celibacy, marriage, and the family life. Noblewomen across Europe promoted the Reformation through acts of patronage, while reformers like Katharina Schütz Zell (1498–1562) engaged the debates of the era over free will, salvation, and the nature of the church alongside their male peers. Further, many women among the more radical elements of the Reformation prophesied and preached in Anabaptist and Spiritualist communities of faith. Finally, when persecuting regimes across Europe demanded religious conformity within their territories, women from dissenting communities often chose martyrdom rather than abandon their faith. Nuns were an integral part of the spiritual life of the church on the eve of the Reformation. Like monks, nuns lived according to rules within their own hierarchical power structures, beginning with the abbess at the head of the convent. However, with the spread of Luther’s ideas, there were nuns who no longer wanted to live according to the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience; some left their communities at great personal risk. The most well-known example is Katharina von Bora (1499–1552), who later married Martin Luther. With Luther’s help, she and 11 fellow nuns escaped in a wagon from the Cistercian monastery of Marienthron in Nimbschen, Saxony. They were brought to the city of Wittenberg, where Luther was a professor at the university. Katharina von Bora’s marriage to Luther in June of 1525 demonstrated the Protestant rejection of marriage as a sacrament, thus depriving it of its sacred status. This, in turn, shifted the focus of marriage to the relationship of the partners in this world. For her part, Katharina von Bora enjoyed particular responsibilities in her marriage to Luther. She and Martin lived in a converted Augustinian monastery, and she ran the business side of things, including the farm and Katharina von Bora (1499–1552) was a nun who, with the brewery. 11 others, escaped her convent during the Protestant Many contributors to the RefReformation. She married Martin Luther, helping to ormation were women in posiredefine marriage and the roles of women and men in the Protestant movement. (Library of Congress) tions of power and authority



Women in the Reformation

relative to their peers in lower social classes. For example, Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549), princess of France and queen of Navarre, was an open-minded thinker and patron of humanist thought. Humanism was an important educational movement at the time devoted to go ad fontes—that is, back to the classic texts of ancient Greece and Rome. In addition, Marguerite actively protected Protestant reformers in France when such ideas were deemed dangerous to public order. Although a Catholic herself, she sought peace between Catholics and Protestants during the reign of her brother, Francis I (r. 1515–1547). Despite lacking access to formal higher education, there were women who became actively involved in the Reformation. The most well-known example is Katharina Schütz, who was born in Strasbourg in 1497 or 1498 and married the Lutheran pastor Matthäus Zell in 1523. Indeed, Katharina opposed clerical celibacy, and her motivation to marry Zell was partially driven by her desire to blaze a trail for later Christian women (McKee 2006). Largely self-educated, she wrote several pamphlets in defense of the Reformation. Notably, she also engaged in polemical exchanges with her theological opponents on behalf of the Reformation in Strasbourg. After her husband’s death in 1548, Katharina continued to actively support the Reformation in the city. The radical wing of the Reformation may have provided the most opportunities for women during the 16th century. The early Anabaptists and Spiritualists were not satisfied with the Reformation of Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, or John Calvin, who did little (they contended) to dismantle the “Constantinian” alliance between church leaders and secular rulers. They wanted to level class distinctions and live in communities that reflected the lives and practices of their biblical heroes, including Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, Esther, Moses, David, and many others. At times this included polygamy as well as charismatic preaching and prophecy. The tolerant city of Strasbourg was not only home to reformers like Katharina Schütz Zell; Anabaptist visionaries and prophets made their home there in the 1520s and early 1530s. A radical group known as the Strasbourg Melchiorites followed the apocalyptic teachings of Melchior Hoffmann (1495–1543), who believed that women, too, could serve as God’s prophets (Snyder and Huebert Hecht 1996). This group included the visionary Ursula Jost (d. 1532/1539) as well as Barbara Rebstock (active 1530–1534), who both received visions and prophesied on behalf of their community. Finally, many women chose to die for their faiths during the Reformation era. With the breakup of Christendom into competing confessional territories, secular rulers across Europe still believed the medieval assumption that religious uniformity ensured political stability. As such, Protestants in Roman Catholic territories, Anabaptists in Protestant or Catholic states, and Catholics in Protestant areas such as England could often expect persecution. Many chose to practice their faith in secret (commonly known as Nicodemism), while others chose to leave these territories altogether. Others, however, refused to comply with the religious and secular authorities, dying for their faiths as martyrs, or witnesses to their faith. Their tragic ordeals and deaths were recorded by their coreligionists. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (The Actes and Monuments, 1563) is the most well known; this includes

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the stories of Protestant martyrs under Henry VIII of England. A notable example is Anne Askew, a young noblewoman who was both tortured in the Tower of London and burnt at the stake in 1546. The Martyrs Mirror, or Bloody Theater (1660) is a collection of Anabaptist martyr stories from the 16th and early 17th centuries. This book includes the martyrdom of countless women and men who chose to die for their Anabaptist faith. Women of all social classes influenced the direction of the Reformation during the 16th century, including former nuns like Katharina von Bora, nobles like Marguerite of Navarre, urban reformers like Katharina Schütz Zell, radicals like Ursula Jost and Barbara Rebstock, and countless martyrs. The Protestant and Anabaptist women of this era made hard choices and vigorously promoted the beliefs and practices of their communities of faith. Many would sacrifice their lives as witnesses to the truth of their beliefs, and many more would be inspired and heartened by those stories as the early Reformation era slowly gave way to a period of bloody religious warfare during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Adam W. Darlage See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Christianity in Europe; Christianity in Latin America; Education; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Pilgrimage; Protestant Denominations; Polygamy; Roman Catholic Women Religious; Saints; Sophia; Widowhood Further Reading Huebert Hecht, Linda A. Women in Early Austrian Anabaptism: Their Days, Their Stories. Kitchener, ON: Pandora, 2009. Markwald, Rudolf K., and Marilynn Morris. Katharina von Bora: A Reformation Life. St. Louis: Concordia, 2002. McKee, Elsie Anne, ed. Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. McKee, Elsie Anne. Katharina Schütz Zell: The Life and Thought of a Sixteenth-Century Reformer. Vol. 1. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1999. Snyder, C. Arnold, and Linda A. Huebert Hecht, eds. Profiles of Anabaptist Women: SixteenthCentury Reforming Pioneers. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996.

W O M E N W R I T E R S I N E A R LY A N D M E D I E VA L C H R I S T I A N I T Y Women throughout the medieval centuries created a rich body of texts that illustrates their participation in intellectual and spiritual life. Women in the early church were clearly active in the dissemination and teaching of Christian beliefs. Though much of this early activity appears to have been oral rather than written, one of the earliest and most influential Christian texts of martyrdom was written at least in part by a woman, Perpetua of Carthage (d. ca. 203). Her narrative, which includes some of our earliest and most intimate descriptions of a Christian church community and the experience of martyrdom, as well as her visionary dreams and reflections while awaiting her trial, is the starting point for many anthologies on women’s literary contributions in early and medieval Christianity.



Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity

In the early Middle Ages, literacy levels declined in comparison to the Roman era, and monasteries and royal courts constituted the main educational centers. Monastic education offered a handful of talented monks and nuns unique opportunities to gain proficiency in Latin composition and immerse themselves in a study of biblical and classical literature. While not all convents achieved the same level of educational resources and sophistication as male monasteries, many did, and they sometimes worked in partnership with male houses in the study and production of manuscripts. Female monastics such as Baudonivia (fl. 600) who composed a vita of Saint Radegund, and Hrotsvit of Gandersheim (ca. 935–after 973), who wrote a history of the origins of her convent, proved to be significant “rememberers” of their convents’ sacred history and cultivators of patronage and recognition for their institutions in their own day. Monastic authors such as Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, Herrad of Landsberg (1135–1195), and Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) demonstrate the educational potential available to women in the monastic environment, and each contributed unique and monumental works to medieval literature, creating the first theatrical works since the Roman Empire (Hrotsvit), an innovative illustrated scientific encyclopedia (Herrad), and an enormous corpus of works that included visionary literature, scientific and medical texts, drama, and letters (Hildegard). Hildegard’s innovative and original contributions to the theological “wisdom” tradition, liturgical drama, and cosmology of the 12th century cannot be overstated. The High and late Middle Ages witnessed greater urbanization and a rise in literacy, which inspired new forms of writing and composition in vernacular languages and in Latin. Both nuns and women pursuing the religious life while living in the secular world recorded mystic and visionary experiences, often interpreting these experiences to comment on matters of church doctrine (a practice that clerics increasingly viewed with suspicion in the late Middle Ages). The mystic Marguerite Porete (ca. 1248–1310) was condemned and executed for circulating her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, after 15 articles in her text were declared heretical. Other women who more successfully found protection and acceptance within the institutional church, such as the widow Bridgit of Sweden (1303–1373), the Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), and the English anchoress Julian of Norwich (1342–1416), reported extensively on their mystical experiences, often interpreting them in theological terms, in multivolume collections (for example, Bridgit’s Revelations, Catherine’s Dialogues, and Julian’s Showings). Women’s expression of their relationship to the Divine in the late Middle Ages was also informed by developments in secular literature, such as the lyric poetry of the troubadours and vernacular works in the courtly love tradition. Catherine of Siena experienced a vision of mystical marriage with Christ, and many mystics expressed their ineffable love for God in the romantic terms of courtly love and sexual union. The influence of these writers on popular spirituality is evident in The Book of Margery Kempe, which the would-be saint Margery (1373–1438) dictated to a priest in hopes that her piety would gain broader recognition. Margery’s extensive narration mirrors the hagiographical conventions of holy matrons such as Saint Bridget and included Margery’s autobiography, accounts of her pilgrimages, and

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discussions of her mystical encounters with Christ. She consulted the anchoress Julian of Norwich as part of her spiritual journey, and although she was often frustrated in her attempt to be seen as a saint, her book suggests the profound impact of holy women’s writing in the lives of “ordinary” women. The works of these visionary writers of the late Middle Ages shared the depth and complexity of earlier writers such as Hildegard of Bingen but were much more deferential to ecclesiastical authority, reinforcing the church’s preference for female subordination and obedience. In contrast to Hildegard, who ruled her convent with virtual autonomy, women such as Bridget and Catherine exercised their spiritual vocation under the close supervision of male clergy. Julian of Norwich, an anchoress dedicated to permanent, solitary enclosure within a cell adjacent to her church, wrote with some of the unique, autodidactic expression as Hildegard did, but the era of Abbess Hildegard’s remarkable freedom to express and interpret her visions in cosmological terms had passed. Later medieval women’s writing was also strongly influenced by the “penitential ethos,” which expressed a personal identification with Jesus’s suffering and humility and advocated a state of perpetual repentance as important to one’s salvation. In the works of later medieval women mystics, their powerful identification with Christ’s physical suffering also resonated strongly with medieval society’s perception of their own feminine weakness. As Carolyn Walker Bynum has noted, the intense physicality and passion of the penitential ethos also gave women a special role in expressing the embodied humanity of Christ. Already considered more “fleshly,” women writers by the late Middle Ages had fully internalized the role of man as signifying “the divinity of the Son of God and woman his humanity” (Bynum 1991, 179). Female authors frequently acknowledged social norms of gender inequality by defending their authority to speak through a rhetorical declaration of their inferiority. This formulation both acknowledged the perception of female weakness and transformed it into a strength: even though women might be “weak” or “unworthy” vessels, God worked through these lesser creatures to reveal divine wisdom and truth. This “modesty topos”—a preemptive declaration of the writer’s flaws at the beginning of a work and inoculation against critique—was a common rhetorical device for all writers in the Middle Ages, but for women authors, their self-characterization as a “weaker vessel” or “poor little woman” was integral both to the thematic content of their works and their very authority to speak. Female authors of the Middle Ages, such as Hrotsvit of Gandersheim and Hildegard of Bingen, expressed acute self-consciousness about their education and rhetorical skill, recognizing that they were operating in a traditionally male preserve. The beguine and mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1210–1285) likewise expressed her feminine frailty in anticipation of the criticism surrounding her status as an uneducated layperson and as a beguine residing in the world rather than in a formal convent (which clerical authorities increasingly curtailed in favor of women’s strict and formal enclosure as nuns). Very occasionally, women writers such as Christine de Pizan (1364–1430) consciously reflected on the origins of long-standing scholarly and theological claims



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to female inferiority. Christine echoed the 14th-century English poet Chaucer’s sentiments, expressed through his famous Canterbury Tales character the Wife of Bath, about “who painted the lion,” concerning the traditional discourse on women. In her preface to The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine relates that she was distressed by remarks in the Lamentations of Matheolus, a treatise on the vices of women. That text convinced Christine that “judging from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators—it would take too long to mention their names—it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth: that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice” (Richards 1982, 4). Despite the relative scarcity of surviving texts by women, and the tendency of those texts to represent noble and ecclesiastical perspectives rather than the concerns of everyday women, female authors of late antiquity and the Middle Ages engaged in similar genres and reflection to their male counterparts and at times presented a gendered “awareness of themselves, their modes of expression and of self-expression” (Dronke 1984, viii). Many of the works discussed above fell into obscurity after the Middle Ages or remained significant only as part of their national literatures rather than receiving treatment in a broader context. With the rise of women’s studies in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars endeavored to reclaim these works for a wider audience and make them more available outside their countries of origin as well as to consider them systematically within the frameworks of gender and literary theory. An extremely important outcome of this work in recent decades has been the recognition that women’s writing was not a sidebar to history but rather that women’s literary activity both captured and shaped theological reflections on gender and the Divine in medieval culture. Katherine Clark Walter See also: Christianity: Abbesses; Charity; Christianity in Europe; Christine de Pizan; Education; Hildegard of Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Middle Ages; Monastic Life; Monasticism, Medieval Women; Mother of God; Mystics; Saints; Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE); Spirituality: Sex and Gender Further Reading Bynum, Carolyn Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Richards, Earl Jeffrey, ed. The Book of the City of Ladies. New York: Persea Books, 1982. Wilson, Katharina M. Medieval Women Writers. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

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Confucianism

INTRODUCTION One of three major religious/philosophical systems in China where it originated, Confucianism is also central to the cultures of Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam. The other two primary religions of China are Daoism, which also arose in China, and Buddhism, imported from India. In practice, Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism blend with each other and with local folk traditions. While Daoism and Buddhism are considered religions, there is widespread debate over whether or not Confucianism is. It is not usually considered a religion in China (Sun 2013, 1), and among scholars in the West, debate continues. Although the answer to this question is both “yes” and “no” (see Anna Sun’s Confucianism as a World Religion, 2013), Confucianism is included here. It clearly has traits and elements in common with religions, with its highly developed rituals, its blending of ideas and practices with the more religious systems of Daoism and Buddhism, and its concept of becoming a sage, by which humans perfect themselves in alignment with a universal cosmic order. Of the three major religions/philosophies of China, Confucianism is the most socially conservative; it consciously places women at the bottom of a hierarchy that includes heaven over humanity, rulers over men, parents over children (for life), and men over women. The expectations for women in this system are oppressive: women leave the family home at marriage and are then obligated to honor, obey, and care for both their husband and parents-in-law as long as they live. However, it should be noted that this system has not always been widespread or practiced according to its own ideals, that many women have worked outside of the home, and that some women (more in certain times and places than in others) have found other outlets for their creative energies and pursuits. In addition, the influence of Confucianism itself has waxed and waned. The impact of Confucianism on women’s lives cannot be understood without looking at its social context—whether, for example, it is practiced in a society governed by a totalitarian government or a democratic one (see Xinyan Jian 2009). The importance of social factors should not be underestimated. As Julie Remoiville writes in her entry “Women’s Changing Roles,” “Women in East Asia have known a wide variety of roles and positions, not only throughout different periods but also through differences of social status, region, and individual circumstance.” Remoiville further elaborates on women’s roles in Confucian societies in “Motherhood,” adding two important notes. The first is that women’s status is rapidly rising at present in some parts of East Asia. And, second, many contemporary women in Confucian societies strive to resist the oppressive elements of Confucian values and norms. Several other entries in this section discuss women’s traditional roles according to Confucianism. These include “Cult of Female Chastity,” “Filial Piety,” and

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“Classical Confucianism.” In “Books for Women,” Susan de-Gaia discusses books that were written to educate girls on the virtues of submission, modesty, chastity, and the like. But, as Remoiville notes in “Feminine Virtues in Confucianism,” these books written by women and for women and girls have at times supported female literacy, particularly as it came into increasing favor beginning in the 17th century. Confucianism is currently on the upswing in China—this time with greater opportunities for women’s participation and leadership. This phenomenon, called Confucian Revivalism, is discussed in the article of that title. General Bibliography—Confucianism Chan, Alan K. L., and Sor-Hoon Tan, eds. Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History. New York: Routledge, 2004. Foust, Mathew A., and Sor-hoon Tan, eds. Feminist Encounters with Confucius. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016. Gao, Xiongya. “Women Existing for Men: Confucianism and Social Injustice against Women in China.” Race, Gender and Class 10, no. 3 (2003): 114–25. Jian, Xinyan. “Confucianism, Women, and Social Contexts.” In Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2009): 228–42. Kim, S. “The Way to Become a Female Sage: Im Yunjidang’s Confucian Feminism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 75, no. 3 (2014): 395–416. Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Li, Chenyang. The Sage and the Second Sex: Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Mann, Cheng, Susan Mann, and Yu-Yin Cheng. Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Nyitray, Vivian-Lee. “Fundamentalism and the Position of Women in Confucianism.” In Fundamentalism and Women in World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, 47–76. New York: T and T Clark, 2007. Pang-White, Ann A., trans. The Confucian Four Books for Women: A New Translation of the Nü Sishu and the Commentary of Wang Xiang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Raphals, Lisa Ann. Sharing the Light: Representations of Women and Virtue in Early China. State University of New York Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York, 1998. Rosenlee, Li-Hsiang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Slote, Walter H., and George A. DeVos, eds. Confucianism and the Family. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Sun, Anna. Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Widmer, Chang, Ellen Widmer, and Kang-i Sun Chang. Writing Women in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

BOOKS FOR WOMEN Confucians have long promoted the education of girls on traditional expectations for women, such as ritual decorum, modesty, and chastity. Rites of Zhou, a mid-second-century BCE treatise, is an early example. Written for male guardians,



Books for Women

it explained the norms of female virtue, female speech, female expression, and female accomplishment. During the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), a number of books were written for female readers, explicitly to prepare them for their designated place in the patriarchal order of the Confucian family and state. Additional books followed, and eventually four books—Admonitions for Women, Women’s Analects, Domestic Lessons, and Sketch of a Model for Women—were chosen for an edited collection called Four Books for Women. Admonitions for Women was written by female historian and educator Ban Zhao (ca. 45–120 CE) and was intended for the instruction of her daughters. It taught traditional female roles and appropriate female behaviors within Confucian society, including feminine virtues, women’s roles in ritual, and women’s place in the patriarchal order. Another book, Women’s Analects, written by Song Ruoxin (d. 820 CE) to instruct her daughter on how to become a “wise and worthy woman,” and annotated by her sister, Song Ruozhao (d. 825 CE), imitated in form the influential classic Analects of Confucius. Like Analects of Confucius, this book purported to be an edited record of didactic conversations. In Women’s Analects, the conversation was an imaginary dialogue explaining the proper behavior for women according to Confucian ideals. Domestic Lessons (1404 CE), or Instructions for the Inner Quarters, was produced by Empress Xu (wife of the Yongle emperor) to educate women of the court. An edited collection of texts written by earlier authors on women’s education with commentary by Empress Xu, it taught the value and methods of traditional feminine comportment: “Being upright and modest, reserved and quiet, correct and dignified, sincere and honest: these constitute the moral nature of a woman. Being filial and respectful, humane and perspicacious, loving and warm, meek and gentle: these represent the complete development of the moral nature” (Asia for Educators n.d.). Sketch of a Model for Women, by Madame Liu (fl. 16th c), was based on the Confucian ideals of the “three controls” and the “five constants.” The text used stories of virtuous women as exemplars of domestic rectitude, including virtuous consorts, daughters, wives, and mothers, as well as female martyrs and other women. The “three controls” are the prince controlling the minister, the father controlling the son, and the husband controlling the wife. The “five constants” are benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness. Having been widely used to promote traditional feminine virtues and ideals among the elite, these books were eventually collected together and titled Four Books of the Inner Chambers, for Women. Commentaries and subcommentaries were then added, and in 1624, the collection was published by Duowen Tang as The Four Books for Women of the Ladies’ Quarters, with Collected Notes. The Four Books continued to circulate until the Chinese Revolutionary period, educating girls on the virtues and ideals of female behavior—chastity, devotion and submission to one husband for life, and domestic achievement. Despite the collection’s role in promoting female submission, the Four Books for Women did contribute to women’s literacy, particularly among the elite. Written by women for women and girls, their

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authorship and use required literacy. Beginning in the 17th century, they were read by even more females, as girls’ education began to gain favor. Susan de-Gaia See also: Confucianism: Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety Further Reading Asia for Educators. Excerpts from Empress Xu’s Instructions for the Inner Quarters. New York: Columbia University Press. 2018. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/ps/cup/empress​ _xu_inner_quarters.pdf. Chang, Kang-i Sun, and Haun Saussy, eds. Women Writers of Traditional China: An Anthology of Poetry and Criticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Mingqu, Zhang. “The Four Books for Women: Ancient Chinese Texts for the Education of Women.” Translation originally published in B.C. Asian Review 1 (1987). David C. Lam Institute for East West Studies (LEWI), Hong Kong Baptist University. http://www2​ .kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln471/fourbookwoman.htm. Pang-White, Ann A. The Confucian Four Books for Women: A New Translation of the Nü Sishu and the Commentary of Wang Xiang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

CLASSICAL CONFUCIANISM Confucianism, developed in China during the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, supported a social order that relegated women to the service of men. First elevated to state ideology in imperial China’s Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), over time, Confucianism merged with other important philosophical streams in China, such as Daoism, Legalism, and Buddhism. From China, Confucianism spread to neighboring areas, especially Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. One can generally distinguish between classical Confucianism, which lasted until the Sui dynasty (581–618), and the more modern and transformed Neo-Confucianism, which came about during the Tang dynasty (618–907). Due to the Chinese imperial government’s active promotion of it, Confucianism would come to infuse the entire society with its prescriptions to live one’s life per Confucian teachings—affecting the lives of women differently from those of men. Hierarchy was one of the most important hallmarks defining classical Con­fucianism. Mencius (ca. 372–289 BCE; meng zi in Chinese), an important Confucian philosopher, described five (hierarchical) relationships (wu lun, wu chang): familial proximity of father and son, justice between prince (ruler) and subjects, right hierarchy between the old and young, trust between strangers, and the separation of spheres between man and woman. In practice, the separation of spheres between man and woman manifested itself in the distribution of all internal family responsibility to the woman and all external family responsibility to the man. On the one hand, women were given control of family finances, though, on the other hand, this also translated into a spatial confinement of women as having to stay at home at almost all times. Women could only leave the house in palanquins, since they were to avoid being seen by other men. Per this hierarchical thinking, women would serve men for most of their lives, beginning with their father, followed by their husband, and eventually, their son.



Classical Confucianism

This separation of spheres by gender may be seen as reflecting the famous dichotomy of yin and yang, which was originally not Confucian but eventually became absorbed into it and into the amalgam of Chinese state ideology: whereas yin came to be associated with the feminine, weakness, and tranquility, yang stood for the masculine, strength, and movement. The literal translation of yin is “shady side (of the mountain),” and yang is “shiny side (of the mountain)”—clearly also relating back and alluding to the separation of spheres between woman and man. To educate young girls in their expected roles according to Confucianism, they were given the textbook Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü Zhuan in Chinese). Compiled by Liu Xiang (77–6 BCE) in the first century BCE, this textbook was used in parenting girls during most of imperial Chinese history. For example, chapter 4 is titled “The Chaste and Compliant,” teaching the female ideal of chastity and obedience. Many expectations for the behavior of women, especially married women and widows, flowed from these teachings. Generally, women did not have a choice in whom they married in the first place. Should their husband die, widows were not only expected to never remarry but were often encouraged to go as far as “suicide and self-mutilation as means to preserve chastity” (Kinney 2014, xv). This should be qualified, though; although this was written into literature presenting the ideal female behavior according to classical Confucianism, reality often differed from the ideal. Remarrying of widows was not unusual at all, for example. Remarriage was an

Women of the Palace Gather Silk for Garments Worn in Religious Rites The following is an excerpt from The Lî Kî (The Book of Rites), which dates to about 200 BCE but is a compilation of religious practices going back to the eighth century BCE. This passage describes how women gather silk to be used in the preparation of garments worn during religious rites: In this month orders are given to the foresters throughout the country not to allow the cutting down of the mulberry trees and silk-worm oaks. About these the cooing doves clap their wings, and the crested birds light on them. The trays and baskets with the stands (for the worms and cocoons) are got ready. The queen, after vigil and fasting, goes in person to the eastern fields to work on the mulberry trees. She orders the wives and younger women (of the palace) not to wear their ornamental dresses, and to suspend their woman’s work, thus stimulating them to attend to their business with the worms. When this has been completed, she apportions the cocoons, weighs out (afterwards) the silk, on which they go to work, to supply the robes for the solstitial and other great religious services, and for use in the ancestral temple. Not one is allowed to be idle. Source: The Lî Kî (The Book of Rites). ca. 200 BCE. Translated by James Legge, 1885. Book IV, The Yüeh Ling, or, Proceedings of Government in the Different Months. Section 1, Part III, Verse 12. http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/liki/.

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Handscroll illustration shows court women preparing newly woven silk, ca. 11th–12th century. Gathering and preparing silk for ritual garments and other uses was a responsibility of court women under classical Confucianism. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Special Chinese and Japanese Fund/Bridgeman Images)

opportunity of choice for the woman; the ability to select her husband was something she was not entitled to the first time marrying. The same can be said of the ideal of the prescribed female chastity, whereby the reality often reflected a more sexually generous understanding. Although many women did have limited choices, women from wealthy families were more likely to experience greater freedom. Today, Confucianism has certainly moved on from these former ideals and practices, though the mark of paternalistic classical Confucianism and its philosophical successors has left on East Asian societies can still be seen and felt to this day. Lukas K. Danner See also: Confucianism: Books for Women; Feminine Virtues; Daoism: Goddesses Further Reading Foust, Mathew, and Sor-Hoon Tan, eds. Feminist Encounters with Confucius. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016. Kinney, Anne Behnke. Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü Zhuan of Liu Xiang. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Li, Chenyang, ed. The Sage and the Second Sex. Peru, IL: Open Court, 2000.

C O N F U C I A N R E V I VA L I S M Confucian Revivalism is a term used to describe a presently developing but loose cluster of efforts aimed at reincorporating the teachings of Confucius into Chinese society at all levels and sometimes in novel ways. It is not to be confused with Neo-Confucianism, which could be considered Confucianism’s first revival. Women play much more prominent and powerful roles in this second revival than they have in the known history of Confucianism, and more opportunities for their involvement continue to be created as the movement expands.



Confucian Revivalism

Confucianism itself dates to the fifth century BCE, when the Chinese philosopher Confucius developed his writings. Women are included in his original teachings, and these are generally interpreted in the modern era as being oppressive to and controlling of women, particularly for the notorious mandate that females must obey their father, husband, and eldest son starting from a female’s birth until her death, respectively. She is, in this sense, never free to decide the fate of her own life; it is instead tied to the lives of the men in her family. The traditional Confucian ethic encouraged women to be supportive, quiet, and passive for the critical maintenance of those relationships, thus contributing to men’s stability and ability to perform as virtuous Confucians in the outside world. Women are thus immeasurably important in the eyes of Confucianism; however, that importance is played out only through behavior that greatly restricts their activity. After being partly eclipsed by Buddhism’s and Daoism’s growth from the Han period (220 BCE) onward, Confucianism experienced its first revival during the late 800s toward the end of the Tang dynasty. This revival led to the creation of Neo-Confucianism, which was incorporated into the official imperial exam system at the time and became solidly integrated into the academy and lives of the scholar-elite. For the most part—though there are a few exceptions—women were excluded from the official examination system and from official institutions of higher education in accordance with certain Neo-Confucian interpretations of the original teachings. Like other of China’s indigenous schools of thought, Confucianism was blamed throughout the political tumult of the 20th century for China’s humiliating 19th-century defeats and exploitations. Although official Confucianism was abolished in 1905, veins of its teachings and methods, including especially rote memorization of texts, survived through the Republican and Maoist eras, even periodically being invoked as potentially useful for restrengthening or recentering Chinese society and norms. It was never officially reinstated, however. From these veins came the preparation for 21st-century Confucian Revivalism, which necessarily involves a reinterpretation of the original ancient texts to accommodate for the new context in which its growth is occurring and for the inclusion of broader segments of society than just educated and elite males. It takes form mainly as a cluster of grassroots and official educational initiatives across all sectors of Chinese society, including within the education system at grade-school and university levels as well as within official work units, government and community centers, temple-organized educational groups, and completely unofficial and even underground home-schools or other community gatherings. Women take active participatory roles in Confucian Revivalism as adults in their government work unit “national study classes,” organized between government cadres and faculty at Beijing University. Community groups are organized through temples or loose neighborhood contacts to study the Confucian classics. In even more direct contrast with what is currently understood about historical Confucianism, women also take public roles in the movement by founding and leading such study groups and being active members in local associations for the study of Confucianism. Women have started music appreciation groups that teach how Confucian propriety can be accessed via musical arts, they have taken leadership and instructing roles in

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Women and men of the traditional court orchestra in Seoul, Korea, perform in Sokchonje, the spring ritual to celebrate Confucius’s birthday. Contemporary Confucian Revivalism offers women more opportunities for participation and public roles. (Nathan Benn/Corbis via Getty Images)

training and education centers for adults, and they have taken up instructor positions for children’s education groups. The large and growing children’s classics reading movement features female students on advertising posters, and girls are included in the classroom as equals, occupying all rows of the classroom, including the front row. The religious dimension of Confucian Revivalism is growing, too, although not every faction of the movement adopts a religious stance, and many openly oppose “religion” categorically. Part of this may be due to the commonly held perspective that religious activity is humiliating for everyone, but particularly for men. Given the gaps opening in China’s relatively loose restrictions on religious practice, the door is open for women to take up religious leadership roles as part of the new Confucian Revivalism. This is particularly important as Confucianism shares with Daoism an understanding of underlying cosmological forces of yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) and also considers the eternal as a female figure: the Eternal Mother. The blending of Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, and Chinese folk religious beliefs makes teasing apart particular thoughts difficult, but the basic yin-yang element persists throughout. Julia McClenon See also: Confucianism: Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety; Women’s Changing Roles Further Reading Billioud, Sebastien, and Joel Thoraval. The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.



Cult of Female Chastity

C U LT O F F E M A L E C H A S T I T Y The cult of female chastity was a bureaucratically endorsed ideal of female virtue and purity in late imperial China, continuing into the 20th century. The government granted chaste women awards in the form of public honors and donations to construct shrines in their good name. The belief and practice regarding female chastity primarily addressed widowhood in its numerous forms. Though criticized for its overall treatment of women’s rights, at times it allowed women a measure of freedom and choice in their own fate. The cult of female chastity saw precursors in earlier imperial China. However, it was in the Qing dynasty, between the late 17th and early 20th century, that the most well-known government endorsements took hold. It was a “society-wide movement to extol chaste women as cultural heroes and promote the norms of feminine behavior” (Theiss 2002, 47). Qing policies rewarded widows who remained chaste and unmarried after the death of their husbands. Widows could take two acceptable paths to maintain their fidelity: commit suicide or vow to remain unmarried and chaste until their death. Committing suicide was an acceptable response because it reflected the wife’s desire to remain with her partner even in death; such women’s names were honored because they became chastity martyrs. A second option allowed the widow to continue living but remain virtuous and unmarried; these women were also honored by the state because they became chaste widows. By avoiding remarriage, chaste widows were allowed the rights to the late husband’s estate, which allowed them property ownership and a certain amount of freedom for themselves. However, if she was unchaste (adulterous or remarried after her husband’s death), her husband’s estate remained with his family. The cult of female chastity also addressed less straightforward cases of widowhood, such as young girls whose marriages never came to fruition because of their fiancés’ deaths. The cult of female chastity led to the cult of the faithful maiden. Young women intent on remaining faithful to their fiancés could initiate a spirit wedding where the marriage ceremony took place with an effigy or death tablet standing in for the groom. A young maiden could transition from fiancé to bride to widow in a single day. Josianne Leah Campbell See also: Confucianism: Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety Further Reading Lu, Weijing. True to Her Word: The Faithful Maiden Cult in Late Imperial China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Theiss, Janet. “Managing Martyrdom: Female Suicide and Stagecraft in Mid-Qing China.” In Passionate Women: Female Suicide in Late Imperial China, edited by Paul S. Ropp, Paola Zamperini, and Harriet T. Zurndorfer, 47–76. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2001. Theiss, Janet. “Femininity in Flux: Gendered Virtue and Social Conflict in the Mid-Qing Courtroom.” In Chinese Femininities, Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, 47–66. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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FEMININE VIRTUES In Confucianism, there are four feminine virtues that form the prescribed model of womanhood. These virtues reflect the belief that women should hold high moral standards within wifely virtue, speech, comportment, and work. These virtues are closely tied to the Three Obediences, another Confucian belief, which states that women should obey their fathers before marriage, their husbands in marriage, and their sons during widowhood. The Four Virtues and Three Obediences of Confucianism govern the way women function and behave, historically both restricting and freeing women in different ways. Confucius had little to say about women within the Analects, one of the major texts of Confucianism. However, several other texts were written specifically for women’s education, emphasizing Confucian ideals of female conduct. In 1624, Wang Xiang compiled Four Books for Women. It paralleled the publication of Four Books, a well-known and popular Confucian text addressing male audiences that consisted of Analects, Mencius, Great Learning, and Doctrine of the Mean. Four Books for Women reflected the expectations for women in Confucian cultures and was comprised of four texts from various periods: Admonitions for Women by Ban Zhao, Women’s Analects by Song Ruoxin, Domestic Lessons by Empress Xu, and Sketch of a Model for Women by Lady Liu. It was written by women and for women. Ban Zhao, a Han dynasty female writer and educator, was one of the earliest published proponents to outline the four Confucian virtues for women. Her works were taken as the model for feminine virtue. Zhao outlined how a virtuous woman was defined; according to her texts, a woman should maintain personal hygiene, take care to avoid offending others, devote herself to her family, know how to cook, and take care of her home. Zhao also promoted the idea that the inner sphere, known as the nei, was the proper place for women. The interior sphere for women was both literal and metaphorical. A woman was encouraged to focus on wifely and family duties above all else; she needed to be focused emotionally inward. In addition, a woman’s proper physical place was considered to be within the home. This can be considered a powerful placement, as it gave women control over the inner sphere. In contrast, a man’s sphere was identified as the wai, or exterior world. This split between inner and outer spheres was even reflected in the architecture and city planning of the Ming and Qing eras, where courtyard-focused houses were prevalent (Ko 1994). Women’s rooms were placed farthest from the door and had no windows opening to the street (Ko 1994). The purpose of this separation between the inner (nei) and the outer (wai), both physically and philosophically, was the Confucian belief that it kept order. Not all interpretations of the four feminine virtues were positive. Some were physically painful. For example, foot binding was a practice that was believed to support the Four Virtues. “Enduring the pain tested her moral capacities and taught her to control her will. Caring for her feet and learning to walk with grace improved her deportment. She learned to silence her complaints, marking the boundaries of woman’s speech. And, by making her own shoes, she acquired skill with a needle and thread, the essential form of womanly work” (Bosch and ­Mancoff 2010, 227–28).



Filial Piety

Later interpretations of the four feminine virtues allowed for some further freedom for women. In the 17th century, the concept of female virtue was not abandoned in favor of a new model of womanhood; instead, the Confucian virtues and obediences for women became less restrictive in their interpretation. Support for women’s education and literacy gained favor, and the publication of Four Books for Women assisted in this, as women needed to be able to read to learn about the Four Virtues and Three Obediences. As a result, being able to read became an asset to a virtuous woman. Josianne Leah Campbell See also: Confucianism: Books for Women; Filial Piety; Motherhood; Daoism: Daoism in China Further Reading Bosch, Lindsay J., and Debra N. Mancoff. Icons of Beauty: Art, Culture, and the Image of Women. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010. Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Lee, Yuen Ting. “Ban Zhao: Scholar of Han Dynasty China.” World History Connected 9, no. 1 (2012): 34. http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/9.1/lee.html. Pang-White, Ann A., trans. The Confucian Four Books for Women: A New Translation of the Nü Sishu and the Commentary of Wang Xiang. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

FILIAL PIETY Filial piety was one of the core values of Confucianism. It manifested both in the form of worship of deceased patrilineal ancestors and in caring for, protecting, deferring to, and revering living parents. Filial piety originated in the pre-Confucian practice of the Shang (ca. 1600–1046 BCE) and Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE) nobility, involving ancestral sacrifice with human or animal blood. The role of women in filiality, both as the revered mother and the self-sacrificing daughter or daughter-in-law, was deeply influenced by the structure of ancestral worship. It was believed that even though women, as female ancestors, could enjoy sacrifices from male offspring, daughters or daughters’ offspring were unable to offer sacrifices that would be accepted by patrilineal ancestors. As a result, the succession of the male line was of ultimate importance in terms of one’s filial duties. The notion of strict patrilineal succession circumvented the ways in which women could practice filial piety. Nonetheless, filial piety was one of the most important feminine virtues. An unmarried daughter, like a son, was expected to obey and care for her birth parents. A married woman was regarded as her husband’s partner to assist him in fulfilling his filial duties to his patrilineal ancestors and parents. Ultimately, this married woman would be fully integrated into her husband’s patriline through motherhood, and she would achieve the status of female ancestor who was entitled to sacrifice and veneration from her offspring. In Confucian filiality, children were required to follow both father’s and mother’s instructions without question. Confucius (551–476 BCE) suggested

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that children should never disobey parents (wuwei). Song (960–1279) scholars of Neo-Confucianism further developed the idiom that emphasized that there were no occasions on which parents could ever be wrong (tianxia wu bushi di fumu), which was widely accepted in Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1912) China. It is true that in Chinese philosophy women in general were often related to yin, the passive and sustaining force of the universe, and in social discourse they were often perceived as possessing inferior intelligence and moral capacity. But Confucian emphasis on filiality, which was in turn treated as the basis of humanity (ren), assigned higher moral position and superior capacity for judgment to fathers and mothers over their adult and minor offspring and thus subjugated both male and female children’s agency to that of their mothers. This modest gender neutrality in the conceptualization of parental entitlement appealed to the indebtedness most people felt toward their mother for the care they received during their most vulnerable early childhood years. Prioritizing generational order over gender order made filiality appear complete, natural, and persuasive, as maternal authority was fully integrated into parental authority. In fact, two of the most-cited morality tales in premodern China, “filial birds feeding mother birds” (ciniao fan bu) and “lambs kneeling down to receive milk” (gaoyang gui ru), featured filial animals’ revering care for and subordination to their mothers. Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars (Ershisi xiao), one of the most famous didactic texts from its creation in the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368) to the end of the Qing, included more stories about children’s filiality toward their mothers than their fathers. That said, many exemplary filial sons offered their filial piety with religious vigor to their stepmothers, as the Chinese patrilineality rendered the father’s legal wife mother to all his children, including his children born to his previous wives and his concubines. In literary Chinese, zi, the word for the person who was obliged to fulfill filial duties, was a generic noun that meant neutral-masculine, similar to the English “man.” Filial piety was not a male virtue, even though daughters occupied a different position as compared to sons. Women did not continue the patriline of their fathers. Hence, daughters’ expressions of filial piety materialized not in producing male heirs but in providing reverential care for their parents, sacrificing their lives or future happiness to secure their parents’ old-age support, dying while mourning for their parents, or refusing to remarry so that they could serve their parents-in-law after the death of their husbands. Like filial sons, filial daughters often endured terrible hardships to materially support their parents. But since daughters were expected to leave their natal families upon marriage, they had to make even greater sacrifices to gain recognition of their filial piety. In exemplar tales, filial daughters without brothers willingly suspended their life cycles by remaining unmarried and deprived themselves of the possibilities of having offspring and becoming female ancestors. Most daughters carried out their filial duties through less extreme means in everyday life, but they were free to perform morally spectacular acts as they, unlike filial sons, were socially expendable and were not restricted by the Confucian requirement of preserving one’s life to perpetuate ancestral sacrifice. As women needed to go further



Filial Piety

than men to demonstrate their filial devotion, filial daughters were less likely to survive in filial piety tales where they threw themselves into dangerous situations to protect parents or where they were overcome by grief after losing parents. Upon marriage, a woman shifted her primary loyalty and filiality from her birth parents to her parents-in-law. A filial daughter-in-law undertook all duties due to a filial son despite the typically high tensions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. But as an outsider on the inside, a filial daughter-in-law was usually recognized and praised when she performed extraordinary acts. Some filial daughters-in-law remained caring and obedient even when being abused by in-laws. And some refused to remarry, even by mutilating themselves, in order to continue to care for in-laws. As marriage was considered in Confucianism as taking in a wife to continue the husband’s patriline and to serve the husband’s parents, shouldering the filial responsibilities left by one’s late husband often overshadowed a wife’s emotional attachment to her late husband in the cult of chastity, at least in orthodox discourse. Female filial piety was practiced by ordinary women with faith and endurance, but the cost of it was high if it was to be acknowledged in the public domain. Filiality and loyalty were traditionally analogized with one another, with the parent-child bond compared to the ruler-subject bond. The Confucian filiality was sustained by both the legal mechanisms of the Chinese Empire that punished unfilial daughters and sons and by the imperial commendation (jingbiao) system that canonized exemplary filial daughters and daughters-in-law as well as filial sons. The concept of filial piety (kô in Japanese, hyo in Korean) also had a significant presence in early modern Japan and Korea, where Confucianism, especially Song Neo-Confucianism, was adopted as the official doctrine of the Tokugawa and Cho-sen states. As in China, the notion of filial piety made it easier for mothers to command respect and exercise influence. Filial piety required daughters to submit themselves to parental authority while providing them opportunities to gain reputation and acclaim if they performed filial duties exemplarily. In early modern Japan, households without sons often took in sons-in-law to produce heirs through female lines, allowing daughters to extend their filiality to lineage succession. Yue Du See also: Confucianism: Books for Women; Classical Confucianism; Cult of Female Chastity; Feminine Virtues; Motherhood Further Reading Chan, Alan K. L., and Sor-Hoon Tan, eds. Filial Piety in Chinese Thought and History. New York: Routledge, 2004. Du, Yue. “Parenthood and the State in China, 1644–1949: Law, Ritual, and State-Building.” PhD diss. New York University, 2017. Knapp, Keith. Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Early Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott, eds. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

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Oh, Young Kyun. Engraving Virtue: The Print History of a Premodern Moral Primer. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013. Pine, Yuri. Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period, 722–453 B.C.E. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2002. Yonemoto, Marcia. The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.

MOTHERHOOD The particular form in which Confucian motherhood is expressed varies from one society to another in East Asian countries, but essential characteristics are consistent among all. The East Asian societies that constitute the “Confucian core” include China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with various strands of Confucianism originating from China. To understand how Confucianism has shaped motherhood in East Asian societies, it is necessary to come back to a famous traditional Chinese cosmology book, Book of Changes, which divides the world into two complementary elements: the yin and the yang. Yin refers to the feminine or negative principle in nature, while yang refers to the masculine or positive principle in nature. Through this dichotomy, woman and man are expected to enjoy harmony as yin and yang based on role interdependence. By the first century BCE, Confucianism had spread to East Asian countries (except in Japan, where it dates from the seventh century) and exerted a profound influence on women and the meaning of motherhood in those places. It provided the moral principles that guided traditional family life as well as providing religious rituals, which maintained and strengthened family ties. Compared with Western cultures that stress independence and individualism as a main way to understand society, the Confucian philosophy highlights integration and harmony, mainly achieved by the proper relationships and behavior between family members. All Confucian societies are male dominant and emphasize the prevalence of a patriarchal kinship system, where the status of women is considered much lower than that of men. This is supported by Confucian thought, in which it is believed that harmony will result from a specific order of relationships based on the five relations and three bonds. The five relations are respect and care between father and son, separation between husband and wife, order between elder and younger, faithfulness between friends, and loyalty between ruler and subject. The three bonds are loyalty from subject to ruler, filial piety from son to father, and faithfulness from wife to husband. All these work to establish a strict ethical model of social and family relations. Among the five relations, the relationship between father and son is by far the most important, and this is the framework in which motherhood in East Asian countries has to be understood. The meaning of motherhood is culturally and historically constructed and cannot be separated from how society conceptualizes gender, family, and other related constructs. In East Asian societies, Confucianism (as well as Buddhism) is a major source of gender definition and symbolization. The main characteristic of the Confucian gender ideology is its emphasis on the roles and statuses of men and women.



Motherhood

Even after the wedding, a wife’s status remains precarious until she proves fertile and bears a son. Thus, arguably the most important role of motherhood within Confucian societies is to give a social status and an identity to women, inside and outside of the household. Indeed, Confucianism acknowledges women only for the purpose of reproduction; women who fail to produce a son for the family are considered to have committed a moral crime because they have failed their husband’s lineage, and women are honored only when they have produced a son to carry on the family name. We can find here one of the most notable paradoxes concerning women and motherhood in Confucian ideology in East Asia. On the one hand, women are expected to be obedient in front of their husbands. They have to respect chastity and neglect sexual desire that, it is believed, would lead to the collapse of the society. In this way, at the organizational level, the family lineage functions to exclude women, and more particularly daughters and wives. Concerning widows, the absence of a husband to dominate her complicates her position in society. As a widow, she is destined to obey her oldest son. On the other hand, under Confucianism’s extreme idealization of motherhood and the encouragement of reproduction, women can secure their identity only from their status within the family system as a mother. Moreover, particularly in traditional Chinese families, the grandmother has an especially important place; as the one who secures the family line for two generations, she becomes the family’s most powerful person. These two sides of women’s status in Confucian patriarchy give a contradictory image of women and are a common theme in scholarship. Several researchers urge us to reconsider the Confucian idealization of the passive and sequestered mother of traditional East Asian countries. According to Margery Wolf (1972), Chinese mothers have secured their position and exercised their power within a patriarchal family system by creating focal families of their own through the construction of emotional ties with their children and exclusion of the father. Wolf explains the importance of the mother-son bond through her concept of “uterine family,” where the women’s future depends on the quality of their relations with their sons, who are the mother’s single hope for old-age care. In Japan, where Neo-Confucianism was developed and institutionalized during the Tokugawa era (1603–1867), women’s foremost role should be that of good wife and wise mother. Her role sphere, as in all Confucian East Asian societies, should be the domestic one; meanwhile, the male sphere is public and clearly set apart. In the modern era of Meiji through Taisho (1868–1926), there were heroic movements to emancipate women from the structural constraints of Confucianism: women were expected to be good wives and wise mothers not only for their family but also for their country. The Japanese mother tended to feel her child to be a part of herself and developed a sense of double identity in which the child’s identity was fused into her own. In exchange, her grown-up children would not forget her hardship and sacrifice. They would feel thankful and repay her in filial piety. In the Korean version of Confucian family values, women traditionally provide most of the care for elderly in-laws, and now, increasingly, women may provide

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care for their own parents as well. But they also retain the primary responsibility for childcare. In contemporary times in all East Asian countries, because men are not the only breadwinners anymore and women have joined the workforce, mothers are not the “benevolent” parent they were in the past. Many women now see Confucianism as imposing patriarchal values they find unacceptable, and they try to resist it. So despite the persistence of Confucian values in East Asian societies, in some ways they are resisted, especially by women. Even if Confucian ideology still shapes contemporary East Asian concepts of motherhood, contemporary evolutions are characterized by a reinterpretation of Confucian values. Julie Remoiville See also: Confucianism: Classical Confucianism; Cult of Female Chastity; Feminine Virtues; Women’s Changing Roles Further Reading Gao, Xiongya. “Women Existing for Men: Confucianism and Social Injustice against Women in China.” Race, Gender and Class 10, no. 3 (2003): 114–25. Slote, Walter H., and George A. DeVos, eds. Confucianism and the Family. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Tang, Zongli. “Confucianism, Chinese Culture, and Reproductive Behavior.” Population and Environment 16, no. 3 (1995): 269–84. Wolf, Margery. Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.

WOMEN’S CHANGING ROLES Traditionally, the impact of Confucianism on gender roles may be greater than other factors since it clearly presumes different gender roles for men and women in East Asian society and in family relationships. The main characteristic of this division is based on Confucian teachings, which theoretically grant a public status to men and a domestic role to women. In the Confucian book Yi Jing, the hierarchical relationship between men and women is described as follows: “heaven” refers to men’s position and “earth” to women’s. Women’s subordination to men is supposed to be a moral law, and women are described as inferior to men in the Confucian patriarchal family system, in which the father or husband enjoys ultimate authority. Within this family system, gender relationships are systematically created and reproduced: a woman is valued as a daughter, a wife, and a mother but not as an independent individual. A woman must not only be filial to her parents but also must obey her parents-in-law and all the members of the family-in-law. Even though, through control over children and servants, women may have been able to find small ways to control their lives, for the most part, they were always at the mercy of others and of society. In China, during the Song dynasty (960–1279), the rise of a renewal of Confucianism, known as Neo-Confucianism, emerged. This period produced The Book of Filial Piety for Women and Analects for Women, which were written to teach women their roles in society in a more direct language. Neo-Confucianism attempted to



Women’s Changing Roles

keep women quiet and subservient and to keep them at home and out of the public sphere. But at the same time, because works were published for the purpose of being read by women, Neo-Confucian women were able to begin their own intellectual discourse. Indeed, these works invited women to think in an intellectual and moral way, even if this was initially confined to the home. In the same way, the rise of Neo-Confucianism has created a paradox: on the one hand, the rebirth of many doctrines kept the subservience of women to men, but on the other hand, it was an occasion to help women become more independent in a male-dominated Chinese society. Interestingly, women’s position in Confucianism has led to many debates and discussions among contemporary and modern scholars. Indeed, the simplistic picture of the traditional Asian woman as a passive victim of patriarchal societies has recently been challenged. In the 1990s, a different voice in the realm of scholarship on women—predominantly on Chinese women—started to rise, arguing that Confucian philosophy itself was not exclusively against women. Through a review of scholarship concerning women in late imperial China, Paul S. Ropp (1994) demonstrates that, in the 20th century, the Western specialist trend to condemn Confucianism as a source of women’s oppression misses much of the complexity and ambiguity of the past. Without denying the fact that women have been oppressed, several authors assert that most of the discussions on Confucianism and sexual equality mainly focus on the textual interpretation of Confucian classics and that women’s status in Confucianism cannot be properly understood without examining its social context. Most of the descriptions of women in the traditional Confucian society emphasize anecdotal accounts, biographies of elite women, or the “ideal of womanhood” depicted in Confucian classics. Many scholars believe that the traditional role of women is considered from a Eurocentric viewpoint, and they argue that a sociological approach is still lacking. East Asian women’s status and history are often taken out of context. For instance, some historians highlight that Chinese women were not as passive as argued before and were active participants in cultural life. They were also considered as the guardians of morality and stability and were in charge of the protection of harmony within the family. Moreover, Buddhist and Daoist gender ideologies were often overlooked, while they represent an alternative source of empowerment for women in traditional Confucian society. Besides, while the idea of differentiation of roles between men and women is present in Confucian thinking, it existed at the beginning only as a form of labor division, and this does not mean that men are higher than women. Women in East Asia have known a wide variety of roles and positions, not only throughout different periods but also through differences of social status, region, and individual circumstance: some authors argue that we cannot consider “a” woman’s status or position but several. Beyond these debates, women’s condition in East Asian countries has greatly improved in contemporary times, and industrialization and modernization have wrought some changes in female lives. Since the mid-1990s, the Japanese government has been implementing comprehensive measures to promote gender equality. These measures give equal opportunities to men and women to participate in social

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activities without being constrained by the stereotyped notion of men at work and women at home. The same trend has occurred in Korea. After the rapid growth of the Korean economy in the 1960s, the increasing number of women participating in the labor market brought changes to traditional ideas about women’s role in Korean family and society. Policies were reformed to extend responsibilities to fathers as well as mothers, and the sexual division of labor has changed since Korea began to modernize. In China, while at the beginning the main consequences of the implementation of the one-child policy in 1979 were male favoritism and female infanticide, today daughters and sons are equally valued. The Confucian norm of daughters’ low value is increasingly diluted by the lack of children in the family and the increased opportunity for girls’ education. Thus, economic, political, and social developments in East Asian countries during the 20th century are challenging traditional values, and the status of women has improved. Nevertheless, in practice, women’s lives have not changed as rapidly as state policy implies. Recent research shows that contemporary Confucian societies are still facing a number of challenges, including the persistence of a traditional gender-biased division of labor and underrepresentation of women in various fields. Despite certain obvious gains that women have achieved in education and participation in the labor force, the notion of male superiority persists within the family and throughout society. Indeed, in contemporary Korean families, the husband still makes all decisions and has primary responsibility for the family’s economic well-being, while the wife, even if she works outside the household, takes full responsibility for the care of children and domestic labor; women are still doing most of the unpaid work regardless of whether they are involved in paid work or not. In every contemporary Confucian society, women who encounter the changes of Western and modern influence in the idea of gender equality experience confusion concerning the social and behavioral norms they are supposed to follow. It appears to be a conflict between traditional values on the one hand and Western influence through economic and social changes on the other; thus, women’s roles are diversified, including traditional, modern, or a combination of both. Julie Remoiville See also: Buddhism: Feminine Virtues; Gender Roles; Confucianism: Confucian Revivalism; Feminine Virtues Further Reading Li, Chenyang, ed. The Sage and the Second Sex. Confucianism, Ethics, and Gender. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Li-Hsiang, Lisa Rosenlee. Confucianism and Women; A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Mann, Susan. Under Confucian Eyes; Writings on Gender in Chinese History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Ropp, Paul S. “Women in Late Imperial China: A Review of Recent English-Language Scholarship.” Women’s History Review 3, no. 3 (1994): 347–83.

Daoism

INTRODUCTION In the ancient and complex philosophical–religious system of Daoism, the feminine is central and highly valued. Historically, Daoism can be traced to ancient indigenous traditions in China, including Shamanism and a Great Mother Goddess. The concepts of yin and yang also originate in ancient China and are linked with Daoism very early in Chinese history. In Chinese thought, yin and yang should be properly balanced, as too much of one or the other brings disaster, decay, and death. Yang is associated with the masculine, day, sky, brightness, hardness, assertiveness, and outward direction. Yin is associated with the feminine, night, earth, moisture, harvest, darkness, underneath, and pulling in. In the social milieu, yang, by its very nature assertive and outgoing, tends to overwhelm, while Daoism, with its emphasis on yin, the feminine, serves as a kind of antidote. In this way, Daoism balances other trends in East Asian cultures, such as Confucianism. According to Daoism, the Dao is the Source and Mother of everything, yet the Dao does not act. Wu wei, meaning to not act, is the Way of the Dao and is associated with yin. The entries in this section relate some of the important ways that women have participated in Daoist traditions. In “Healers,” Julia McClenon discusses how Daoist women healers, whose practices go back to at least the beginning of the Han dynasty (206 BCE), work(ed) to heal in both the physical and metaphysical senses. Though the communist revolution (20th century) negatively affected the practice, there are currently new opportunities for Daoist women healers in China. In a society under the influence of Confucianism, Daoism has offered Chinese women a spiritual resource, creative outlet, and monastic tradition as an alternative to marriage and motherhood. In “Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination,” Todd LeRoy Perreira relates the institutional and monastic roles that have engaged women in religious Daoism, which in China is called the Way of the Celestial Masters. These roles have provided women with opportunities outside of traditional marriage, with its emphasis on woman as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law in patrilineal and patrilocal family traditions. In Daoist organizations, women could be administrators, ritual masters, and libationers. They could seek the ultimate religious goal of cultivating the Dao and becoming Immortals and Goddesses. Daoist women’s roles are further discussed in “Daoism in China,” which relates women’s history in Daoism from the first century CE to the present, from their early roles as intermediaries and shamans, to their roles in contemporary Chinese Daoism where they may gain admittance into the Quanzhen lineage. The last entry in this section, “Wu Wei,” discusses the concept of wu wei and its associations with the feminine and the Way of the Dao. Wu wei is an ethos

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according to which Daoist practitioners and sages ought to live. An important feature of Daoist philosophy, wu wei is clearly related to yin and the feminine. As conveyed in the Dao De Jing by the legendary founder of Daoism, Lao Tzu, to live by wu wei is to “do nothing” and become transformed. General Bibliography—Daoism Cahill, Suzanne E. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Clark, John J. The Tao of the West: Western Transformations of Taoist Thought. London: Routledge, 2000. Cleary, Thomas. Immortal Sisters: Secrets of Taoist Women. Boston: Shambhala, 1989. Despeux, Catherine, and Livia Kohn. Women in Daoism. Cambridge, MA: Three Pines, 2003. Guangting, Du, and Suzanne Elizabeth Cahill. Divine Traces of the Daoist Sisterhood: Records of the Assembled Transcendents of the Fortified Walled City. Magdalena, NM: Three Pines, 2006. Kohn, Livia. Pristine Affluence: Daoist Roots in the Stone Age. Saint Petersburg, FL: Three Pines, 2017. Laughlin, Karen, and Eva Wong. “Feminism and/in Taoism.” In Feminism and World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, ch. 4. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Reed, Barbara. “Taoism.” In Women in World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharman, 161–81. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Wang, Robin. “Kundao a Lived Body in Female Daoism.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 36, no. 2 (2009): 277–92.

DAOISM IN CHINA Women joined in the Daoist religious movement when it was still in its infancy in the Later Han dynasty (25 CE–220 CE) and early medieval period. During that era, female Daoists were called nü guan (female officials). Their main activities lay in intermediation and shamanic communication, and they were also key participants in sexual rituals and the practice of longevity techniques. There were five classes of female Daoist followers, namely, young unmarried girls, women unable to marry due to inauspicious horoscopes, women forced into marriage, widows, and rejected wives. The dual cultivation practice called heqi (fusion of energy) was the main method of practice at this time. New cultivation practices appeared later in the Jin dynasties and were called jingsi (delicate thinking) and cunxiang (meditation). The early Daoist classics Dao De Jing and Taiping Jing emphasized the balance and harmony of yin and yang. Thus, both the male and the female were indispensable to human reproduction. In Daoist organizations, females were devotees and could also manage administrative affairs. In addition, women sometimes acted as shi (masters) in religious rituals and played a part in political activities. Mrs. Lu, for instance, the mother of Zhanglu, leader of the Celestial Master, helped her son to establish a military regime in the Bashu and Hanzhong areas. Women were also among the founders of the Daoist tradition. Wei Huacun (251–334) married a leading Celestial officer and herself became a jijiu (libationer). She was granted the Huangting Jing (the Yellow Court



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Classic) scriptures from the High clarity and became an important religious figure. Several female Daoists later became Goddesses through cultivation. According to Yongcheng Jixian Lu (Record of the Assembled Immortals in the Heavenly Walled Cities), Du Guangting (850–933) recorded the stories of several Daoist Goddesses during the period. The widow Liangmu once provided shelter for travelers, and Baogu attained immortality with her husband Gehong (284–364), the conspicuous Daoist alchemist, during the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420). The Tang dynasty (618–907) was thought of as the golden age for female Daoists. This period saw the blossoming of Daoism and support from the nation, as Daoist beliefs were widely accepted by the elite class. Daoist activity involving women, and especially upper-class women, reached its peak with 16 princesses ordained, more than 10 female Daoist temples built in the city of Changan, and 550 female Daoist temples constructed throughout the country. The female faithful were called nü guan (female hats). They had legal advantages and economic privileges. They took an active part in socializing and literature gatherings, and several of them—including Li Zhi (713–784), Yu Xuanji (844–871), and Xue Tao (768–832)—gained fame and became poetesses. The Tang dynasty also witnessed the flourishing of local worship. Zu Shu (fl. 889–904), the priestess to whom Lingguang Shengmu (Holy Mother of the Numinous Radiance) transmitted the Path of Pure Subtlety, was considered as one of the patriarchs of that lineage. The number of females in the Daoist movement dropped significantly in the Song dynasty (960–1279), although during that same period, Daoism was recognized by officials and largely supported by several emperors. The total number of Daoist females decreased sharply to 3–5 percent of the original figure. The nation put restrictions on women, and certain female adherents were even forced to resume secular life during the reign of Emperor Song Shenzong (1067–1085). The female followers at this time were also affected by Confucianism and Buddhism. As for female cultivation, Cao Wenyi (fl. 1119–1125) wrote Lingyuan Dadao Ge (Song of the Spiritual Source and Great Dao), a 128-line poem in which she put forward the way of cultivation in an accessible manner. That work is considered to be the first inner alchemy undertaken by a woman. Nevertheless, the situation improved during the Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), when the Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) school was founded by Wang Chongyang (1112–1170) and his disciples. Female leaders featured in the Daoist movement at the time—Sun Buer (1119–1182), Wole Shoujian (1181–1251), Aodun Miaoshan (1199–1275), and Zi Shoushen (13th century)—were important religious figures. Sun Buer made a breakthrough in self-cultivation called zhan chilong (behead the red dragon), an inner alchemy designed according to the physical and psychological nature of women. It was influenced by the development of gynecological theory in traditional Chinese medicine. Female followers were overseen by governmental institutions, such as the Daolu yuan (School of Daoist Record) during the Jin dynasty and the Jixian yuan (School of the Assembled Intellectuals) in the Yuan dynasty. These bodies were mainly in charge of constructing Daoist temples, organizing rituals, and bestowing official certification on Daoist nuns. Nuns had to take tests before receiving a

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certificate within the Daoist organization. These examinations dealt with reciting and interpreting Daoist scriptures. Female Daoist adherents during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) were called nü zhen (female immortals). Being a Daoist nun became an occupation, although the social status of such women was downgraded to sangu liupo (three aunts and six old women), a term referring to the inferior occupations held by women, including Buddhist and Daoist nuns. Society often demonstrated contempt for their work. Despite that development, nü zhen were often associated with powerful ministers and intervened in the process of political nomination. Emperors such as Shizong (1507–1567) sought out the xian gu (female celestials) throughout the country. In 1373, Ming Taizu (1368–1399) decreed that women should not become Daoist nuns until they reached their forties; in 1391, 50 years became the new age limit. In 1527, Daoist nuns were forced to return home and marry, and the buildings and lands owned by Daoist temples were confiscated. Similarly, the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) also put forward restrictions regarding the age of female adherents. In 1736, the minimum age of ordination was 40 years. In the Tongzhi (1862–1874) period, Ding Richang, the provincial governor of Jiangsu, ordered 30 female monasteries in the region to be closed down. It is noticeable that scant records of female Daoists can be found in sources from that time. During the modern era (1913–present), females in the Daoist movement have been deeply affected by the political movements of the early 20th century, and many Daoist monasteries were replaced by schools and hospitals and only returned to their original purpose later, when the People’s Republic of China was established. Daoism in modern China can be divided into the Quanzhen and Zhengyi lineages. Women are banned from the sacred space of Zhengyi rites. In contrast, Quanzhen has always included women in its lineage and practices on an equal basis. The government set up the national Daoist association, and its executive committee has at least three female members. Some Daoist nuns were elected as representatives of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conferences or the National People’s Congress, and that status allows them to take part in politics. Young women who want to become novices must apply to the Front Office of the Communist Party, which supervises religious activity, or to city or provincial Daoist associations. Liang Zhu See also: Confucianism: Women’s Changing Roles; Daoism: Goddesses; Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination; Spirituality: Meditation Further Reading Despeux, Catherine. “Women in Daoism.” In Daoism Handbook, edited and translated by Livia Kohn, 384–412. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2004. Levering, Miriam. “Women, the State, and Religion Today in the People’s Republic China.” In Today’s Woman in World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma, 170–224. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Reed, Barbara. “Taoism.” In Women in World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharman, 161–81. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.



Goddesses

GODDESSES From earliest times, representations of the Goddess in Daoism, the major indigenous religion of China, relate her numinous connection to the natural world and its celestial counterpart to two overriding and perennial human concerns: the this-worldly need for refuge in the face of adversity and an otherworldly desire for transcendence in the quest for immortality. Daoism, with its dynamic binary scheme of correlating mutually interpenetrating feminine (yin) and masculine (yang) relationships, constitutes a metaphysical framework by which to realize the transformation of the individual into a celestial being. Accordingly, Daoist Goddesses are generally of two types: (1) celestial deities born of utterly pure, cosmic energies, and (2) deified real women who successfully penetrated ordinary physical existence to become translucent immortals by harmonizing themselves with the subtle and mysterious transformations of the Dao at its root, primordial level. Among the most popular and enduring of these deified ancestral women were persons of exceptionally acute perception who lived ambiguously between the  social world of humans and their institutions and the myriad processes of nature and the cosmos. As such, they are evocative of the archaic matrifocal roots of the Goddess in China, which predate Daoism and were predominantly shamanic in character. During the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE), with the ascendancy of a Confucian ethos as the chief organizing social principle, popular interactions with the Goddess began to express certain tensions within Chinese society. In negotiating the fulfillment of, or else resistance to, the gender norms demanded of women— particularly the expectation that they be dutiful daughters, submissive wives, and self-sacrificing mothers—the need to adapt perceptions of the Goddess to the changing contingencies of people’s lives and situations emerges. These expectations, in turn, were profoundly shaped by China’s bureaucratic view of religion, which maps the institutional realms of the state onto parallel realms in heaven while privileging a hierarchical order based on the patriarchal structure of the family. While female deities like the Mother of the Dao generally served to mirror and legitimize the reification of the ideal life cycle of women from daughter through wife to mother, there are numerous examples of Daoist Goddesses who defy social expectations and deviate from accepted cultural norms by refusing to marry or procreate. Deified women, as such, are emblematic of how feminine power has been imagined, symbolized, and deployed as a spiritual strategy of popular religious sentiment in the longue durée of Chinese history. The earliest and most prominent Cosmic Goddess in the Daoist celestial hierarchy is the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), who presides over the mythical western paradise known as Mount Kunlun. Ancient pre-Daoist references to her are traceable to oracle-bone inscriptions of the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–ca. 1028 BCE) and stone tomb carvings from the Western Han period in which she appears as an androgynous demiurge who is childless yet the mother of all things. In her association with the shamanic complex of Chinese religion, she is described as a cave-dwelling mountain tiger spirit with a human face, sharp teeth, a leopard’s tail, and disheveled hair, who makes strange whistling sounds. In this guise, she was

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cast as the fearsome Goddess of Epidemics who ruled over various guishen, the harmful demons and sundry spirits of pestilence. By the third century CE, the Queen Mother emerged as the leading Goddess in one of the first known cultic movements of Chinese popular religion. A powerful salvific figure, she is invoked in poems and inscriptions to guide the souls of the dead to paradise and grant them rebirth among the immortals. She became the central object of worship in major cults and sanctuaries in 26 prefectures and provinces throughout medieval China. She was later transformed into Daughter of the Celestial Emperor (Tiandi), a Goddess of incomparable beauty and perpetual youth—indeed, the very embodiment of what constituted the feminine ideal in the Tang male imagination. In some popular texts, however, her attainment of the Way was achieved through a kind of sexual vampirism. By obtaining the vital energies of her male sexual partners—all of whom were young boys who fell ill during intercourse with her—the Queen Mother nurtured her yin essence and became increasingly more radiant, smooth, and transparent (i.e., immortal). During the Tang (618–907), she taught and empowered women of all ages and statuses but was the special protectress of women no longer circumscribed by their social obligations to the family. In this capacity, she is most closely identified with female hermits, artists, prostitutes, and nuns, as well as young women who refused to marry and older, often widowed or childless women who were alone. Apart from the Queen Mother of the West, there are several other prominent Daoist Celestial Goddesses. Mediating between heaven and earth is a body deity known as Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannü) who manifests a miniaturized version of herself inside the body of the adept along the central meridian and is associated with the circulation of breaths that nourish the vital spirits necessary for longevity. The Goddess of the Morning Clouds (Bixia yuanjun) rose to prominence in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and was best known for aiding women in their plight. The Mother of the Dipper (Doumu) syncretized ancient Chinese star worship with the Tantric Buddhist bodhisattva Marı-cı- during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Major sanctuaries and temples dedicated to her from Qingyang gong (Gray Sheep Temple) in Chengdu through Louguan (Lookout Tower) near Xi’an to Mount Tai in Shandong can be found today. From about the eighth century onward, as Daoism became more integrated with local cults, deified Ancestral Goddesses emerged in certain regions to supplant Cosmic Energy Goddesses like the Queen Mother. This is especially well attested in the mainland’s coastal regions of the east and south, where female personages associated with river and mountain Goddesses, shamanesses, and cultic founders continue to flourish down to the present. Among the most famous is that of the Lady Near the Water’s Edge (Linshui furen) in Fujian. Originally named Chen Jinggu, she initially refused to marry but chose instead to study ritual techniques under a renowned Daoist Immortal. Unable to escape her filial obligations, however, she was compelled to marry and became pregnant. At the same time, a serious drought then plagued the Fujian region, and the people sought her assistance. Because a pregnant woman could not shamanize, she induced a temporary abortion and hid the fetus, which was subsequently devoured



Healers

by a white snake. She performed a rain-making ritual that succeeded in bringing much-needed relief. However, unable to reimplant the aborted fetus, she died at the age of 24 of a hemorrhage (or miscarriage), sacrificing her life-giving blood to restore water for the people but not before killing the serpent in retaliation. Her cultic powers began to manifest after her death, and she was eventually canonized a Goddess. Today she is worshipped in Fujian and Taiwan as a Goddess who protects boy spirit mediums (jitong) and women during pregnancy and childbirth. She has also emerged as a patron of lesbians who eschew traditional marital arrangements in favor of same-sex relationships, which, apart from Taiwan, have yet to be legally sanctioned anywhere in Asia. Today the most popular of all later divinized Ancestor Goddesses is Mazu, “Holy Mother in Heaven” (Tianshang shengmu), Guardian Angel of Seafarers and Travelers. She is venerated today in shrines and temples built by the Chinese diaspora. Beyond mainland China, ancestral temples dedicated to Mazu and bearing the designation Tianfei (Celestial Consort) or Tianhou (Cantonese: Tin Hau, Celestial Empress) are maintained independently or else are interconnected transnationally through a global network of port cities and towns such as Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, Nagasaki, Melbourne, and Macau. There are 40 temples dedicated to Mazu in Hong Kong and a trail of Mazu altars in various coastal towns dotting the Indonesian archipelago. In Manila, Chinese Filipino Catholics venerate the Virgen de los Desamparados (Our Lady of the Abandoned) as a manifestation of Mazu and Guan Yin, underscoring the Chinese propensity for syncretism. In Taiwan, where there are well over 500 temples dedicated to Mazu, she is widely viewed as a political symbol of independence and sovereignty, while certain mainland Chinese officials look to her as a potential symbol of unification. Todd LeRoy Perreira See also: Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Confucianism: Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety; Motherhood; Daoism: Daoism in China Further Reading Cahill, Suzanne E. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Despeux, Catherine. “Women in Daoism.” In Daoism Handbook, edited and translated by Livia Kohn, 384–412. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000. Despeux, Catherine, and Livia Kohn. Women in Daoism. Cambridge, MA: Three Pines, 2003. Schafer, Edward H. The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1980.

HEALERS Female Daoist healers represent a diverse category of socially, spiritually, medicinally, and sometimes politically powerful women whose recorded existences and activities span the life of Daoism itself. These healers could be both physicians

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(what are now called doctors) and metaphysicians in the sense that their treatments were directed both at the physical body and the metaphysical, and their modalities include herbal medicine, moxibustion, acupuncture, shamanic-like practices, internal alchemy, skin scraping and brushing, bloodletting, “sorcery” and magic, physical operations and surgery, and to some degree divination, particularly as a diagnostic tool. The impact of these women is such that some have been deified after death, while others have inspired their own followings or received official titles and recognition by national and local governments. Their significance and followers, like Daoism itself, stretch across China’s national borders, particularly, although not exclusively, into Southeast Asia. Since the link between Daoism and traditional Chinese medicine is strong but imprecisely recorded, scholars accept that there is a degree of subjectivity in labeling healers and doctors as Daoist or not-Daoist. Clear records of female Daoist healers date to at least the Han period (206 BCE–220 CE), coinciding with some of the earlier records of historically traceable Daoism. Records from this era and up through the Song contain descriptions of how Daoist healers—both male and female—received their medicinal skills in a variety of metaphysical ways, for example, through direct revelation, a “visit” from an immortal, or through literally glowing messages emblazoned on geological features and flora, such as rock faces, the bark of trees, mountains and cliffs, waterways, or leaves. Though episodically bombarded with criticism and threats of prohibitive governmental control, female Daoist healers enjoyed a good degree of prestige and success in premodern China through at least the Song period. Healers could generally be divided into healers for the common people and healers for imperial and well-to-do families. The former specialized in medical skills now synonymous with traditional Chinese medicine, while the latter were usually specialists in women’s health. During the Ming and Qing periods, the last imperial dynasties of China, female Daoist healers were often attacked politically and ideologically under the accusation that, as females, they were not as effective as males at healing. In addition, as was the case for both female and male healers at this time, they were urged or forced to distance themselves from their Daoist heritage, lineage, teachings, and practices. Despite the increasing criticism and attempted dereligionization of medical practice, female doctors remained important assets to the imperial families. These court-summoned female healers are well documented in relation to their commoner counterparts, whose existences are recorded indirectly via the criticisms and disdain written down by male doctors. In contrast with the European situation, records indicate that women healers continued their practices relatively unfettered in spite of the rhetorical backlash against them. Throughout their recorded history, Daoist female healers and others not necessarily affiliated with Daoism have been known and trusted for treating women and children. This is also the case for modern healers, although it is not known to what extent concurrent social norms and historical reputations dictate the women’s specializations or whether such specialty is inherent to the practice itself. Half a century after the end of the last imperial dynasty in China, the Communist Cultural Revolution decimated traditional and Daoist Chinese healing practices,



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institutions, and practitioners of both genders. It has been unsafe to practice either physical or metaphysical healing in China until the last few decades because the former type of healing was considered by Communist revolutionaries to be an educated practice and thus belonging to the elite, and the latter was considered superstitious or religious and thus a significant source of cultural humiliation, both of which (eliteness and backwardness) were ordered to be eradicated during the first half of China’s communist era. Today, as the imminent danger and chaos of the revolution have receded, and as restrictions are being partly eased, Daoist healing offers a unique opportunity for modern Chinese women, because while women are often encouraged and even expected not to work, Daoist and other forms of healing are considered unfit jobs for men. Though dwindling in some areas, the demand for Daoist and other spiritual healers remains, so women are stepping into roles of Daoist healing that have now expanded to sometimes include serving as spirit mediums and engaging in possession and exorcism, spirit writing, and other practices deemed controversial both within Daoist circles and to the atheist government. Julia McClenon See also: Daoism: Daoism in China; Spirituality: Healers Further Reading Bellebuono, Holly. Women Healers of the World: The Traditions, History, and Geography of Herbal Medicine. Brandon, FL: Helios, 2014. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, ed. Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Zurndorfer, Harriet T. Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic, 1999.

P R I E S T E S S E S , N U N S , A N D O R D I N AT I O N A religious order of precept holders, formed into an institution with a governing structure and a clear hierarchy of offices, is conspicuously nonexistent in the earliest historical phase of classical Daoism (fourth–first century BCE), China’s major indigenous religion. It is only during the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), in response to the introduction of Buddhism from northwestern India, that a formal order based on the teachings of the Dao (Daoshi) emerges as a social reality in western China. From around the middle of the second century CE onward, followers of this quasimonastic religious movement, commonly known in English as Daoism (a term that has no counterpart in China), called it the Way of the Celestial Masters (Tianshi dao) and declared it to be both orthodox and unitary (zhengyi). Along with the Mount Mao community of Tao Hongjing, these pioneer communities consisted of administrators and practitioners who were male and female, married and unmarried, sexually active and celibate. In direct contrast to Buddhism, with rules that placed the most senior nun below the most junior monk and that taught that women could advance spiritually with the caveat that they be reborn as males, the Daoist ecclesia from its inception generally assumed that women as women

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were equally as capable as their male counterparts of attaining the most prominent positions and spiritual goals in the religion. From the onset of institutional Daoism, women of all ages, even preadolescent girls, could be ordained providing they secured their parents’ consent if they were still living at home or else declared their intention to their relatives. Thereafter, the novice (dao-nü) lived either in a hermitage or with a teacher (guided by another woman or married priest), typically secluded in the mountains apart from society. After periods of dietary regulation, purification, and training, the novitiate (lusheng) could advance to intermediate level (nü-kuan) by pursuing higher levels of ordination. The more advanced positions and roles a woman could assume ranged from initiator, preceptor, and transmitter of sacred texts to conveyor of the ritual arts, petitioner of unseen powers, fabricator of talismans, community or parish leader, married priestess, and master abbess. Different sets of precepts, scriptures, ritual methods, and vestments were bestowed pertaining to the respective level of initiation conferred by the ordination and the corresponding register (lu) transmitted. The register verified an individual’s rank within the church and formally installed a group of protective spirits in the adept’s body to guard against malevolent forces. Upon completion of their training, women could become libationers (jijiu), what in English is dubbed Daoist priestesses or Ladies of the Dao (Daogu), with the highest-ranking member appointed a parish or convent to administer as Daoist Mother (Dao-mu). According to a Six Dynasties (220–589 CE) text known as the Protocol of the Outer Registers, the Celestial Masters made provisions for admitting women based on five distinct social categories: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The maiden living at home (typically a virgin between the ages of 7 and 16) Unmarried daughters who left home to avoid marrying Married women Single women (e.g., a widow) Daughters who return to their natal home (e.g., an estranged wife)

The Celestial Masters thus became the first institution in China to legitimize an alternative social role for women of an uncertain or rejected status. Buddhist monasticism similarly provided women with a new social outlet but offended Confucian sensibilities, which saw leaving the family to become a celibate nun as a threat to filial piety. By not requiring celibacy and by actively encouraging the admission of married women and their spouses into the order, the Celestial Masters deflected such critiques and were thus able to cast a wider safety net as a place of refuge, spiritual advancement, and self-determination for women in Chinese society. An early and historically significant Daoist matriarch is Wei Huacun (251–334 CE), the first and only woman to be designated a Grand Master of the Highest Clarity (Shangqing) school. Wei famously received visits from immortals who transmitted dozens of meditation manuals, including the Perfect Book of the Great Grotto (Dadong zhenjing), which taught mortals how to purify themselves by projecting their qi (vital breath or life energy) into a visualized feminine being like the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannü). To Wei are attributed



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popular longevity techniques, such as the method of ingesting germinal “sprouts” (the essence of clouds or mist), which represent the yin principle of heaven in its nascent state. By fasting on or “eating” the vital breath of the universe in its subtlest form while chanting invocations at dawn, the adept seeks to absorb through her saliva the essence of the four directions. Assimilating these into her body, she aims to dispel the “three worms” (i.e., death) that lie within and, by so doing, attain the ability to fly and appear or disappear at will and achieve immortality. It is during the Tang (618–907 CE), with vigorous support from Emperor Xuanzong (r. 713–756), that the participation of women reached its zenith. Of the 1,687 Daoist temples documented in the eighth century, 1,137 housed men while 550 cloistered women, or a third of the total Daoist clergy. Women from all sectors of society were ordained, including the wealthiest and most prominent, like the two princesses of Tang Ruizong (r. 684–690, 710–712) and the sisters of Tang Xuanzong (r. 712–756), who became Daoist nuns in Chang’an monasteries. At the same time, women from less esteemed social locations were also attracted to Daoism, including peasants, ethnic minorities, and farmers’ daughters from across and beyond the region, like the Yao in South China and Southeast Asia. A recurring theme in the biographies associated with the religious careers of these ordained women is their ability to circumvent the power structures that confine them to the traditional roles of wife and mother while nonetheless managing to help their families and communities. One such example is Wang Fengxian (ca. 835–885), daughter of a peasant family in Xuan prefecture (in modern Anhui), who avoided marriage by shaving her head and disguising herself as a nun in a Buddhist temple, where she was subsequently mistaken for the bodhisattva Guan Yin. After ascending to the Heavenly Palace, she is greeted by an immortal who offers her a cup of jade broth to drink that enables her to fast for the next 30 years. She returns home and delivers public talks on the Dao of loyalty, filial piety, uprightness, and rectitude—themes far more evocative of a Confucian ethos. She takes on disciples and teaches secret Daoist practices for refining the body. In the final years of her life, while residing on Mount Qianqing, she transforms into an immortal with the luminous complexion and snowy flesh of a young virgin. Narratives like these signaled new possibilities for conceptualizing how a woman could be filial and loyal beyond the traditional householder model. From the Song dynasty (960–1279) onward, Daoist practices for men and women were separated, and women’s ability to leave the home for religious objectives was sharply curtailed. In 1077, for instance, there were 700 ordained Daoist women compared to 18,500 men. By 1677, all lineages of Daoist priestesses were extinct. Given the vicissitudes of social life in late imperial and early modern China, with its resurgent patriarchy and authoritarianism, the situation for Daoist women worsened. By the end of the Qing (1644–1911), Daoism itself was in serious decline, branded a superstitious relic of a bygone era. Today, in the post-Mao period, a vigorous revitalization of Daoism is underway. Temples in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia have played an important role in the revival of Daoism on the mainland and in the transmission of Daoism to the

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Daoist nuns chant scriptures in Taipei, Taiwan, 2014. Daoism is currently on the rise after centuries of decline, with temples in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia playing an important role in its revitalization and transmission to the West. (Craig Ferguson/LightRocket via Getty Images)

West. Celibate nuns in the ascetic Quanzhen (Complete Perfection) school can once again be found practicing in remote mountain monasteries and nunneries that were shuttered a generation ago during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Since the 1980s, traditional Zhengyi (Orthodox Unity) rituals have been revived, especially in rural areas of southern China. In 1995, the National Daoist Association restored the ordination of the Zhengyi order and today officially recognizes and certifies the status of the ordained married priest (sanju daoshi) who performs liturgical services and ceremonies on an ad hoc basis. While there has been no attempt to revive the lineage of female libationers or married priestesses that died out centuries ago, this is a propitious time of resurgence and resilience for Daoist women and their monastic sisters. Todd LeRoy Perreira

See also: Confucianism: Classical Confucianism; Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety; Daoism: Daoism in China Further Reading Despeux, Catherine. “Women in Daoism.” In Daoism Handbook, edited and translated by Livia Kohn, 384–412. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2000. Despeux, Catherine, and Livia Kohn. Women in Daoism. Cambridge, MA: Three Pines, 2003. Jia, Jinhua. Gender, Power, and Talent: The Journey of Daoist Priestesses in Tang China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Kleeman, Terry. Celestial Matters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016.

WU WEI AND THE FEMININE Wu wei is an ancient abstract concept stemming from some of Daoism’s most well-known texts, including the Dao De Jing and the Zhuangzi. Wu wei overlaps



Wu Wei and the Feminine

in important ways with women and the feminine in Daoism, particularly for the complex passivity and strength inherent to this desirable state of being. Wu wei is a concept and practice intended to be applied to the whole of one’s life. The phrase can be translated literally in several ways, using combinations of some of the translations for wu (non, not, without, un-) and for wei (to act, to do, to be, to move). Wu wei is often translated as nonaction, not doing, or without doing. There are two camps of interpretation for this phrase, one that takes the legalist perspective, which focuses on governance, and one that takes  the philosophical perspective, which focuses on a state of being in the world for the Daoist adept or sage. The former emphasizes what emperors, kings, and other rulers should do—or not do—while in office; for example, in the Inner Chapters of the Zhuangzi, it is exalted as an ideal way for rulers to behave and govern. The latter interpretation, which the remainder of this article will concern, is a somewhat vaguely outlined manner according to which Daoist practitioners and sages ought to live. Wu wei is often symbolized by water in ink paintings and is described as having similar qualities as water. It is taught that through the gentle cultivation of wu wei, one can achieve the wisdom of the Dao. To engage in wu wei is to act without struggling; it can also mean doing nothing, in the sense of letting things unfold naturally. Rather than exert great force over matters in life, wu wei teaches that one should adopt a philosophy of “letting be,” and in so doing, the Dao will manifest its way, which is intrinsically harmonious. Struggling in action—the opposite of wu wei—is disruptive to harmony and therefore disruptive to the Dao. The Dao itself is characterized as wu wei, “doing nothing,” and wu wei is also called “quiet and unexciting.” For the Daoist adept, male or female, in doing nothing, one can “rest in the instincts of the nature with which he is endowed” and “things will of themselves be transformed” (from the Zhuangzi). In the Dao De Jing it is considered most advantageous or superior to engage in wu wei, or nonaction, and truly devoting oneself to the Dao results in the high attainment of doing nothing. Daoism has at its core the interplay and completeness of two complementary elements, yin and yang, where yin typically represents the female aspect of the universe and yang represents the male aspect. Yin is identified as having such qualities as passivity, receptivity, flexibility, quietness, and stillness, and therefore femininity and the feminine in Daoism are commonly considered to embody the same. Yin is even called the mother of the Dao, and it is ultimately to a yin, “preheaven” state that the Daoist alchemist intends to return. In this sense, yin is the ultimate state in which one can ethereally hear the wisdom of the Dao. At the same time, engaging in wu wei allows practitioners to reach the Dao, and the two— yin/femininity and wu wei/nonaction—are equals in this respect. The passivity of wu wei is abundant in yin, and by nature those who more readily embody yin qualities will have quicker and more direct access to wu wei and thus to the Dao ultimate. Rather than exerting control, the feminine, yin, states are receiving energies, just as the doctrine of wu wei avoids excessive exertion or struggle to act or control. Likewise, that which wu wei avoids is embodied in the male yang aspect, reinforcing the concept’s natural alignment with the feminine in Daoism.

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There is thus a sacred and sometimes acknowledged power centered within all that is feminine, including women themselves, for this solid connection between yin, wu wei, and the Dao, according to Daoist schools of thought. Julia McClenon See also: Confucianism: Filial Piety; Daoism: Daoism in China; Goddesses Further Reading Slingerland, Edward. Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Zhuangzi. Zhuangzi, 350–250 BCE. Translated by James Legge. 2017. https://ctext.org​ /zhuangzi.

Hinduism

INTRODUCTION Hinduism contains an abundance of philosophical concepts, attributes, and names that connect the feminine to the  Divine, sacred, or Ultimate Reality. Of the 29 entries in this section, nine focus on the Feminine Divine in one form or another, including Aditi, Devi, Draupadi Saraswati, Prakriti, Shakti, Sati, and Durga and Kali. Powerful beings of light and dark, Hindu Goddesses are slayers, life-givers, or both. One might think, given the prominence and power of the Feminine Divine in Hinduism, that women would be viewed as powerful, capable beings. But, as T. Nicole Goulet notes in “Devi,” “while the Goddess may be empowering for some women, feminist interpretations of her rarely address the systematic oppression of women, particularly as demarcated by caste and class” (citing Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 1998). While traditional feminine ideals, such as purity, chastity, and selflessness, are not fully embraced by all contemporary Hindus, they permeate the culture and are reinforced in sacred texts. Further, many of the Goddesses, while powerful, are depicted as completely devoted to their husbands, sometimes to the point of sacrificing their own lives. Still, Hinduism is not alone in combining female power and freedom in divine representation and a lack of it in the lives of real women. Hinduism, while syncretic in nature, is one of the oldest religions in existence, with aspects that can be traced to prehistoric times. The ancient myth of Purusha (10th book of the Rig Veda) hints at the beginnings of the social order in India. From the primordial man, Purusha, were made the various castes, the Brahmins (priestly caste) from his mouth, the warriors from his arms, the peasants from his legs, and the servants from his feet. This ordering of persons in scripture sacralizes (makes sacred) the stratification of human beings into higher and lower status and occupation according to birth. Despite its being unconstitutional since 1950, the caste system continues to affect Indians today. In “Caste,” Deepra Dandekar offers a clear, in-depth discussion of the caste system and expectations within it for women. Sati is the burning of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands (see “Sati”), a practice encouraged by the extremely low social status of widows in India. Satis were sometimes culturally transformed after their deaths into deities called sati-mata and worshiped, with shrines built in their honor. To end the practice of sati, the government had to outlaw not only sati but also the worship of sati-matas. Women’s roles in Indian society and their links to religious traditions are further discussed in the entries “Marriage,” “Ideals of Womanhood,” and “Stage-of-Life Rituals.” And in “Matriliny,” the special case of two matrilineal societies in India is discussed.

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Particular movements in Hinduism are discussed in several entries. Bhakti (devotionalism) is extremely popular in Hinduism (see “Bhakti”). From the eighth century on, Krishna has been a central deity of bhakti. The entry “Radha and GopıGirls” relates how tales of the gopı- girls who made love to Krishna represent the female bhakta (worshipper) as one totally devoted to God. Hindu texts tell of the gopı-s leaving their homes and families—even their husbands—to meet Krishna in the forest. This act involved sacrificing everything, including honor and status, for the love of a deity. Krishna, for his part, multiplied himself so he could embrace all of the gopı-s in the Dance of Love. Other entries on movements in Hinduism include “Fundamentalism” and “Tantra.” Women’s participation in Hindu worship and ritual takes many forms. Entries that focus on particular aspects of this are “Dance,” “Devadasis,” “Household Shrines,” “Festivals,” “Pilgrimage,” and “Vedic Hinduism.” In the latter, Komal Agarwal relates women’s roles in Vedic Hinduism from the Vedic period through to the present. The ancient Vedic scriptures, dating from about 1500 to 500 BCE, speak of women’s roles as seers and of their participation in the rites that center on the fire sacrifice. Over this long history, women have at times been part of the rites and at other times excluded from them. They have been authors of texts and at other times excluded from authorship. In recent centuries, Agarwal explains, “discrimination against women crept into Indian society in the last few centuries, as a result of which women were not allowed to undergo upanayana, perform sacrifices, enter temples and perform worship in the inner sanctum, or become pujaris/ purohitas (priests).” Nevertheless, Hindu women are resisting this form of male dominance, going so far as to sue for the right to enter the inner sanctum of the temples, and taking their case all the way to the supreme court of India. As in other religions, a look at the texts, sacred stories, images, social customs, and laws across different periods reveals flux and change for women’s status in religion and society over time. General Bibliography—Hinduism Amazzone, Laura. Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power. Baltimore: Hamilton Books, 2010. Bhattacharyya, Narendra Nath. History of the Shakta Religion. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996. Bose, Mandakranta. Women in the Hindu Tradition: Rules, Roles and Exceptions. New York: Routledge Hindu Studies Series, 2010. Dehejia, Vidya. Yogini Cult and Temples. New Delhi: National Museum, 1986. Denton, Lynn Teskey. Female Ascetics in Hinduism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Fell McDermott, Rachel. Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Foulston, Lynn, and Stuart Abbott. Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2009. Hawley, J. S., ed. Sati, The Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Hawley, John S., and Donna M. Wulff. Devi: Goddess of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.



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Jacobson, Doranne, and Susan S. Wadley. Women in India: Two Perspectives. 3rd ed. Columbia, MO: South Asia Publications, 1995. Jennett, Dianne. “A Million Shaktis Rising: Pongala, A Women’s Festival in Kerala, India.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 35–55. Johnsen, Linda. Daughters of the Goddess: The Women Saints of India. Saint Paul, MN: Yes International, 1993. Kersenboom, Saskia C. Nityasuman.galı-: Devadasi Tradition in South India. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. Khandelwal, Meena. Women in Ochre Robes: Gendering Hindu Renunciation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Kinsley, David R. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Leslie, Julia, ed. Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass, 2015. Menon, Kalyani Devaki. Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Mitter, Sara S. Dharma’s Daughters: Contemporary Indian Women and Hindu Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Narayanan, Vasudha. “Brimming with Bhakti, Embodiments of Shakti: Devotees, Deities, Performers, Reformers, and Other Women of Power in Hindu Tradition.” In Feminism and World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, 25–77. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Narayanan, Vasudha. “Hinduism.” In Her Voice, Her Faith, edited by Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, 11–57. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2018. Pauwels, H. The Goddess as Role Model: S-ıta- and Ra-dha- in Scripture and on Screen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pintchman, Tracy, ed. Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Robinson, Catherine A. Tradition and Liberation: The Hindu Tradition in the Indian Women’s Movement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Rodrigues, Hillary Peter. Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of the Durga Puja with Interpretations. Albany: State University of New York, 2003. Schweig, Graham M. Dance of Divine Love: The Rasa Lila of Krishna from the Bhagavata Purana, India's Classical Sacred Love Story. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007. Sharma, Arvind. Goddesses and Women in the Indic Religious Tradition. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2005. Urban, B. Hugh. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Wilkins, W. J. Hindu Mythology, Vedic and Puranic. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1882.

ADITI Aditi is the name associated with the Mother Goddess according to early Hindu beliefs. She went by many titles and epithets: Great Mother, Goddess of Innocence, Primordial Vastness, Mother of the Sun, Earth’s Center, Unbound, and Infinite. The figure of Aditi was reflected most famously in Rig Veda, the oldest sacred text made up of Vedic hymns to the Hindu deities and written in Sanskrit. Aditi is primarily discussed within three contexts: as a mother, as a female deity championing freedom, and as a manifestation of creation encompassing all of

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heaven and earth. Though she was a powerful figure early on, she faded away in later Hindu beliefs. Aditi was seen and celebrated most in her contributions to other male and female divinities. She was known as Mother of the Adityas, a group of deities sometimes noted as 6, 7, 8, or 12 in number. Like their mother, they were associated with the sky and ruled the moon, sun, and celestial spaces. By some accounts, Aditi was also said to be Mother of Vishnu, Indra, and Krishna. However, Aditi’s own creation was less straightforward. In Rig Veda, “Aditi is said to have sprung from Daksha, and in the same verse Daksha is called her son” (Wilkins 1882, 15). This speaks to one of the paradoxes regarding Aditi; she was Goddess of Past, Present, and Future. In giving birth, she was born. Aditi’s name indicates her second major attribute. The word diti means “to be bound.” The addition of the prefix a- to the root word reverses the meaning; aditi means “unbound” or “boundless,” which many people also equate with the idea of freedom. As such, people prayed to Aditi to release them from bonds, both physical and mental. Though there is no single hymn completely dedicated to Aditi, she is called by name in several mantras in Rig Veda by people petitioning for freedom. Aditi is the nonphysical manifestation of heaven and earth. To match her boundless nature and name, she has no physical description. Aditi’s presence is, again, paradoxical. She is an individual Goddess, but she is not bound in a single form. She is everywhere at once. In Rig Veda, she is described as all-encompassing: “Aditi is heaven. Aditi is the midspace. Aditi is the mother; she is the father, she is the son. Aditi is the All Gods, the five peoples. Aditi is what has been born; Aditi is what is to be born” (Jamison and Brereton 2014, 222). Josianne Leah Campbell See also: Hinduism: Sacred Texts on Women; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Jamison, Stephanie, and Joel Brereton, trans. The Rigveda. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Vision of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Wilkins, W. J. Hindu Mythology, Vedic and Puranic. Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1882.

BHAKTI Avvaiya-r, believed to have lived around 500 CE in Tamil land, ancient India, is regarded as one of the most important literary figures in Hinduism. Dedicated to serve her chosen deity, Vighne-s´wara, or Ganesha, it is told that with divine blessings, Avvaiya-r escaped her suitors, attained the status of a saint, solved people’s issues, counseled local kings against war, and preserved the land’s cultural harmony. Her ethical treatises, such as a-tti Chu-d.i, Nı-ti Ven.ba-, and Nanneri, are recited by schoolchildren in Tamil Nadu to this today. Avvaiya-r is the earliest of the female saints in what later came to be called the bhakti movement in Indian cultural tradition. Other bhaktas include three female saints among the 63 saints recognized in Tamil



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Shaivism: Saints Ka-raikka-l Ammaiya-r, Mangaiyarkaras´iya-r, and Is´ai Jña-niya-r, who lived and preached between 400 and 600 CE. They came to prominence for their devotional songs in praise of the God Shiva. Women saints acquired a significant position in southern India’s literary and cultural life, composing devotional songs in local dialects, thereby giving the dialects a literary status. Not much is known about their lives, but the Peria Pura-n.a, attributed to Se-kkizha-r—prime minister of the Chol.a emperor Kulottun.ga II (CE 1133–1146)—provides an account of Saint Ammaiya-r. She composed 101 verses in Tamil, known as Arpuda Tiruvanta-di, and a garland of 20 verses called Tiru Irat.t.ai Man.ima-lai. She is believed to have had a vision of Shiva and gone on a pilgrimage to Mount Kaila-sa. This way of life—devotion to a personal deity—became a trend in Indian cultural discourse and practice. Both female and male saints moved about the land, engaging people in social and religious spheres in and after the seventh century. Women saints—in places such as modern Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Odisha, Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Kashmir—gave public performances, reciting devotional songs and mystical experiences, counseling people on day-to-day issues, and showing them the path of devotion for greater sociocultural harmony. Modern scholarship presents this trend as the bhakti movement. Bhakti is devotion to a personal deity. The Sanskrit term bhakti (noun) is derived from bhaj, which means “to belong to” and “to worship.” Bhakti ma-rg is the path of devotion—against the popular karma ma-rg (work path) or jña-na ma-rg (knowledge path)—and is believed to be a path of liberation from the perceived imperfect world. The bhakti poet-saint submits to a personal deity, and so does its practitioner. It can be defined as a human-divine relationship as experienced from the devotee’s side. The term bhakti was first used in the Bhagavad Gita (Gı-ta-)—a central holy scripture of Hinduism believed to have been composed in the third century BCE and part of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata—to designate a religious path of devotion. As a religious movement, bhakti is essentially a significant departure from other forms of worship. While classical prayer manuals dictated prayers of specific time and place, bhakti is represented in the Gı-ta- as human submission to the Divine at any time and place. This meaning is authoritative, and the bhakt (devotee) takes the liberty of breaking the orthodox tradition of time, place, and formalized action prayer. The Gı-ta- is a prescriptive text, preaching to the protagonist, Arjuna, on ways to achieve bhakti; bhakti practitioners, however, depart from this trend, assume that they possess bhakti, and sing songs in praise of a deity. In public performances, it is the singer’s experience that is narrated, yet the audience is encouraged to participate in her world view; the deity is supreme and locally concerned with the devotee. The bhakti movement flourished in southern India starting in the 7th century, and in the 14th century CE, the phenomenon moved northward, producing poets of eminence, such as La-l Ded and Mı-ra- Ba-i. In religious devotion, it affected southern Indian culture, including literature, rituals, and kingship. During this period, Shiva’s ardhana-rishwar form (half male and half female) gained momentum, and Shiva bhakti constituted a distinctively popular Tamil religiosity, though devotional

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hymns to Vishnu, in his various incarnations, such as Rama and Krishna, also flourished in local languages. The Vaishnava bhakti saints—a sect of people who believe in the worship of Vishnu in his 10 different incarnations—idealize Krishna as the only male in Vrindavan and respond to the gopı- ideal of a spiritual marriage with Krishna. The Tamil saint Andal of the seventh century CE is believed to have been a God-gifted child to Periazhwar, who nurtured her Krishna bhakti and spiritual genius at a tender age. Andal, lovelorn like a true gopı-, developed a passionate desire to marry Krishna. She moved to Vrindavan—the epicenter of the Vaishn.avite bhakti movement—and lived the life of a love-stricken gopı-. Her lovelyric Tiruppa-vai (translated as “The Divine Song”), a poem in 30 stanzas, is presently sung in every Vaishnava shrine. Bhakti here is a theology of embodiment where the practitioners—hymnists, poets, priests—take an individual path to personal salvation. It is important to recount that the bhakti movement hardly gave a unique status to the women practitioners in its initial periods, and women bhakti saints were not always considered saintly figures in their respective communities. Notable among them are Jana-baı-, Ra-jaı-, and Gona--ı in Maharashtra; Gaurı-ba-i of Gujrat and Chan.krottu Amma; and Kuru-r Amma of Kerala. These women embraced the path of serving a personal deity, singing, and counseling people to follow the path of devotion, and apparently, they were also deeply critical of the patriarchal ideology of their contemporary times. Mı-ra-’s life is a case in point. She was a despised woman in her Rajput culture, and for a long time, Mı-ra- (named for a term of abuse) faced the charge of promiscuity. With M. K. Gandhi’s evocation of Mı-ra- as a saintly figure during the Indian nationalist struggle of the 20th century, Mı-ra- and her followers gained a place among middle-class Indian society, and consequently the bhakti movement institutionalized the women saints. Controversies surround the lives and preaching of the women bhaktas who directly challenged the patriarchal structure of family and society; they moved out of the confines of home to experience a life of celibacy and practiced bhakti in public domains. Parita Mukta (1994), while commenting on the life of Mı-raand her refusal to accept the prevailing caste system, observes that devotion was stronger when women abandoned home and gathered to sing. Such bhakti practitioners who were domesticated by the lower castes and subordinate classes became a vehicle of opposition to caste and gender oppression while they remained instrumental in forming homosocial bonds. The bhakti phenomenon of the action prayer provides a public performance where the singer-devotee narrates her mystical experiences of union with the divine being. Their performative desire for unity with the Supreme Being shifts to their boundless love for humanity. In addition, with community participation, women’s own hardships were represented by figures such as Sita-, Radha, and Draupadi, which gave the bhakti movement a distinct characteristic. The fact that most of the bhakti practitioners idealize a male deity is a point to be noted. In the absence of security in a male-dominated world, in the philosophy of bhakti, a male divinity, celibacy, and renunciation of earthly pleasures become means taken up by women during the bhakti movement for an unencumbered



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spiritual life. One of the popular southern Indian bhakti saints who succumbed to stereotypes surrounding women saints is Akka Mahadevi, a 12th-century Kannada poet, who composed numerous poems in praise of Shiva. In quest of the God Shiva, she gave up the physical comfort of a palace and conjugal relationship and lived like a mendicant in pursuit of salvation. Her sayings in rhythmic Kannada prose, popularly known as vachanas, are an important part of Kannada literature. A short collection of sayings called Yoga-n.ga Trividhi, ascribed to Mahadevi, is a phenomenal work acclaimed as high literature. Trapped in a forced marriage to Prince Kausika, she would engage in Shiva worship and compose fresh vachanas projecting her mystical experiences. She would soon leave her husband in pursuit of a life of renunciation. Mahadevi reached Srisaila, a holy mountain, and was subjected to temptations from her parents and husband but overcame earthly attachment, and it is believed that she proceeded to Mount Kaila-sa for penance. There, as the spiritual bride of Shiva, she waited, felt the unbearable physical agony at the absence of the supreme bridegroom, and composed her love lyrics. Apparently, Mahadevi reaches a point of salvation in her writing and composes her vachana that is witness to the form she aspired to in the divine union: I have seen Him and the thirst of my eyes is quenched I have seen the great Lord whom the men among men serve but as wives. I have seen the Supreme Guru Chenna Mallikarjuna sporting with the Primeval Sakti And saved am I. (Walker 1955, 40)

When Shaivism moved northward, it witnessed the participation of several poet-saints, and Shiva bhakti became a phenomenon in itself. Its effect can be seen in the works of Lalles´wari, popularly known as Lalla Yogı-swarı- or La-l Ded. La-l Ded, a 14th-century Kashmiri bhakti poet, is a precursor to all other bhakti poets, such as Tulsida-s, Mı-ra- Ba-i, Na-nak, Kabı-r, Caitanya, Candi Das, and Vidya-pati. La-l Ded accepted the monastic philosophy of contemporary Kashmir and asserted that the human soul is one with the Divine, and the Divine is the reality behind everything. Leaving her home at a young age, she is believed to have moved half-naked, singing songs in praise of the deity. The Divine in La-l Ded’s work is both immanent and transcendent. Attaining the status of a yogini, she felt absorbed in the pure consciousness of the absolute. In La-l Ded, we see the amalgamation of two distinct categories of bhakti: nirgun.a, in which the poet-saint addresses a formless deity without attributes, and sagun.a, in which the practitioner imagines a personal deity with physical attributes. While La-l Ded moves further along the path of devotion, the bodily form of Shiva ceases to exist. It becomes the supreme energy that in a later day Na-nak and others would popularize. The absolute power in La-l Ded is thus projected in the following verse: There nor even Siva reigns supreme, Nor his wedded Energy hath sway. Only is the somewhat, like a dream, There pursuing an elusive way. (Walker 1955, 46)

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It is important to recount the significance of Mı-ra- Ba-i, a central poet-saint who revived Krishna bhakti during a time when the Rajput-Muslim conflict gained momentum in 16th-century northern India. She fought the patriarchal Rajput forces and was subjected to domestic torture, and it is widely believed that, thanks to divine intervention, the poison she was served turned to nectar. Mı-ra-’s work consists of poems composed in Rajasthan, her birthplace, and at Dwaraka, where she died, besides her untraceable commentaries on Gı-ta--Govinda. In modern times, Mı-ra-’s work has been influential in the foundation of Vaishn.avite Hinduism, and it is estimated that about 150 million inhabitants in India follow this path. Her legacy is visible in religious shrines such as Mathura, Vrindavan, Mewar, and other places where women bhaktas—chiefly Brahmin and other caste widows who are dubbed Mı-ra-ba-is and maintain themselves on public charity— idealize Mı-ra- and domesticate an attachment to Krishna. Thus, the articulation of bhakti is, in modern times, situated within high Hinduism; in the meantime, most Vaishn.avite worship has shifted to towns and cities, and bhakti has become an urban phenomenon. Within the bhakti trend, which has a regenerative power to transgress cultures, saints such as Mı-ra- Ba-i and others encouraged a community to search for a better alternative that could accommodate the spiritual worlds of women. They broke the orthodox patriarchal tradition, and in seeking an alternative life, they gave voice to a future generation of spiritually inclined women. Rejecting familial boundaries and the Indian caste system, they lived like mendicants in pursuit of an intensely personal life. Their rejection of family is a significant case in point that gets excluded from modern discussion on spirituality to this day. These are some of the most powerful symbols that the bhakti tradition nurtured for individual gains. Besides these significant saints and their works, there are numerous poet-saints who emerged in the bhakti tradition, who, while taking the movement further, became instrumental in presenting bhakti as a religious phenomenon with its own distinct characteristics. Akshaya K. Rath See also: Hinduism: Dance; Draupadi; Durga and Kali; Festivals; Gurus and Saints; Household Shrines; Ideals of Womanhood; Lakshmi; Marriage; Pilgrimage; Prakriti; Radha and Gopi Girls; Sacred Texts on Women; Saraswati; Shakti Further Reading Hawley, John Stratton, and Donna M. Wulff, eds. The Divine Consort: Ra-dha- and the Goddesses of India. Delhi: Motilal, 1982. Prentiss, Karen Pechilis. The Embodiment of Bhakti. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Schomer, Karine, and W. H. McLeod, eds. The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India. Delhi: Motilal, 1987. Sharma, Arvind. Women Saints in World Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Walker, Kenneth. Women Saints of East and West. London: Ramakrishna Vedanta Centre, 1955.



Caste

CASTE Caste is a Hindu religious system and institution that produces social hierarchy among individuals and groups by culturally fabricating physical and occupational variation among them as a method of demarcating social stratification. The institution of caste also demarcates the right to practice occupational knowledge, craft, and technique as inherited property that is sought to be conserved through endogamy and marriage within occupational clan and caste groups. Only children born within endogamous caste are considered to have the right to inherit requisite traditional caste occupation, and membership of caste is often associated with networks of social and cultural capital that consist of coprofessionals who strengthen caste through intracaste marital alliances that transfer and coshare property among inheritors. It is considered women’s religious duty within Hinduism to undertake duties of motherhood and childbearing to perpetuate caste endogamy and embody its purity as vehicles of caste. To reproduce caste through childbearing is considered women’s chief occupation and religious duty or dharma, wherein their reproductive bodies are considered their occupational implements and the home and caste-endogamous marital relationship their workplace, where they contribute domestic labor. Women as wives and as mothers within caste endogamy who are successful in facilitating the intergenerational inheritance of occupation among their sons therefore gain enormous prestige and social status. Caste, a generic colonial epithet (derived from Portuguese) describes two overlapping conceptual Hindu frameworks known as varna and ja-ti. While varna refers to inherited personal characteristics associated with the capacity to practice occupation, the fourfold varna system produces individual predispositions to occupational tasks as preordained destiny and inborn biological capacity, even as this status is ritually marked. Brahminical theory of varna is associated with ancient Hindu texts (such as the Rig Veda), even as these texts never describe women. Since women are objectified and often understood in terms of their fertility, like agrarian land, their tasks are limited to childbirth that reproduces varna and facilitates varna inheritance and occupational purity. According to varna rules, the Brahmin (the learned and fair emerge from the head of the primordial and divine man, the Purusha) is followed by the Kshatriya (the warriors of red countenance emerge from the arms and are also associated with agriculture), the Vaishya (traders and artisans who practice crafts and manufacturing emerge from the thighs), and finally the Shudra (servants, menials, and cleaners emerge from the feet). While the first three varna of Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya are considered twice-born (dvija) and are ritually initiated into a second birth of pure masculinity that entitles them to occupational ownership and inheritance through the donning of the sacred thread, Shudras are considered too impure for second birth into pure masculinity. Shudra masculinity is therefore viewed as impure or unfit for ritual initiation within Brahminism and is viewed as demonic and only fit to be vanquished as part of dharma. Sanskrit mythology surrounding many Hindu male and female deities involves the vanquishing of demonic and Shudra masculinity, and this vanquished masculinity is ritually enacted and

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paraded in many festivals for male and female deities in India, wherein animal sacrifices in festivals represent vanquished demons, who are depicted as castrated. Although some exemplary and Brahmin women scholars of high birth, who were allowed the sacred thread, are known (such as Ghosha, Lopamudra, Gargi, and Maitreyi)—and the Goddess of Learning, Saraswati, is depicted in iconography with a sacred thread—they are also marked as exceptional and upper-caste women. Most women are generally reduced in Hindu legal texts to ritual impurity due to menstruation, sexuality, and childbirth and are encouraged to maintain caste endogamy, occupational ownership, and varna inheritance through marriage and childbirth. Hindu lawgivers in texts, such as Manusmriti, have repeatedly exhorted society to control women and channel their energy into reproduction and domesticity. While varna purity can only be determined by endogamy, and since Hindu lawgivers such as Manu considered this situation ideal, they also conceded to exceptions and warned Hindu society against varna impurity, brought about by intervarna marriage that allegedly resulted from the sexual promiscuity of women. They therefore provided for detailed rules that could guide intervarna marriage in ways that upheld masculine superiority and maintained patriarchal control over . reproduction and inheritance. These rules, known as varn.asamkara, provided for allowances and disallowances within marriage depending on the varna of the bride and groom. Allowed or anuloma marriages (meaning “in the direction of the hair follicle” and not abhorrent to varna rules) encompassed unions where grooms belonged to superior varna, while pratiloma marriages constituted disallowed unions (meaning against the direction of the hair follicle and abhorrent to varna rules) where grooms belonged to inferior varna. Although many debates exist on . the varieties and admixtures within varn.asamkara, its tenor remained patriarchal, since it benefitted men of superior varna, punished women for stooping outside varna endogamy, and demonized lower-varna men for expressing their masculinity. It also becomes clear from the utter stigma and shame heaped upon progeny born from pratiloma marriages in Hindu religious texts that such unions were reviled as examples of female licentiousness that abetted the danger of Shudra masculinity and its expression. Progeny from such “impure” unions suffered from ostracism and were stigmatized as untouchable or Ati-Shudra. Ati-Shudra was a term that described the fifth varna among Hindus. A child born to a Brahmin woman and a Shudra man, for example, was demarcated as a new ja-ti of cremation-ground workers (do-m) and became defined as Ati-Shudra. These ja-ti, according to lawgivers, served villages as society became increasingly complex and diversified. Intermarriage between varna was therefore understood, in Brahminical terms, to give rise to various and numerous ja-ti. Ja-ti was a theoretical category created within Sanskrit texts to describe various endogamous occupational communities that became integrated and fused together in complex society but were viewed as originating . from intervarna marriage or varn.asamkara. Every varna that was considered, due to women’s sexual nature, to have fragmented itself across many different ja-ti also simultaneously defined these ja-ti as products of varna and of a history of anuloma and pratiloma marriages and finally as linked to overarching concepts of Hinduism and its hierarchy.



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Though the varna-ja-ti system remained Brahminical, the colonial internalization of Sanskrit texts and its knowledge as superior and all-encompassing for the entirety of vernacular, regional, and local India, calcified Brahminical structures in administration even further by fusing varna and ja-ti together into caste in the British period. As Indians became enlisted within the British anthropological census, thousands of small occupational and endogamous clan-groups became administratively enlisted as castes. Endogamous and occupationally specific ja-ti became nested within varna, wherein the latter were sought to be described and affixed in terms of their components: traditional and inherited occupation and work acumen, food and dress, deities, myths of origin, concepts of purity/impurity, and other matching cultural details. The term caste began to be defined as a reference for endogamous groups in the colonial period in India that could describe both ja-ti and varna together and the interrelationship between ja-ti and varna, even if members had no access to Sanskrit texts. Similarly, women as a group, Indian Christians, and Indian Muslims also referred to themselves as ja-ti because they adhered to endogamous groups and associated themselves with defined occupational roles, even if in overlapping ways. There are many nomadic and transmigrating endogamous ja-ti in India who are considered castes in one state but tribes in a neighboring state. While fluid administrative ascriptions may support women’s relationships, fixed caste ascriptions may intensify stigma, especially for the lowest rung of the hierarchy, since it not only produces certain groups as Shudras but also produces certain others as Ati-Shudra ja-ti among the Shudra, leading to further isolation and exploitation of women among them. Postindependence administrative India has retained colonial categories of encompassing varna-ja-ti as caste and women from lower castes: scheduled castes (known as Dalits) and tribes suffer tremendously from gender discrimination in addition to Dalit discrimination. Dalit women are forced into gendered tasks that Dalit men do not perform, such as the cleaning of afterbirth or menstrual blood from upper-caste homes, manual scavenging (cleaning night soil and excreta from homes that do not have flush toilets), and sexualized entertainment. Postindependence India has introduced caste-based reservation (a form of affirmative action) in education and government jobs for women and Dalits. And though caste reservation is commendable, Dalit men have benefitted enormously from these reservations as they have represented the political interests of Dalit minoritization. Very few Dalit women from “reserved” sections have been able to seek empowerment and equality unless they have been able to become activists and political leaders themselves. India is proud of Shrimati Mayawati, a woman and Dalit political leader, even though her tenure as chief minister of one of the largest states of India has been as controversial as other ministers’. Many women from reserved quotas belong to dominant castes, and they become puppets erected by their marital clans, who use reservation to influence dominant-caste opinions. Dalit women therefore suffer double social discrimination: as Dalits and as women, as Dalit men occupy positions of minority representation and as dominant-caste and Brahmin women occupy positions of women’s reservation. Moreover, Dalits

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who convert away from Hinduism to Islam or Christianity are considered ineligible for caste reservation. Religious conversion from Hinduism has been a major political struggle to combat caste oppression in India. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), one of the most charismatic political leaders of postindependence India, who headed the Indian constitutional committee and who was instrumental in writing its chief features, led hundreds of Dalits to conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism, calling Hinduism a “veritable chamber of horrors.” He wrote many informative tracts on how Hindu lawgivers such as Manu enslaved women to reproduce caste through endogamy. Many women, Dalits, and anticaste activists in India celebrate Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s views by ritually cremating or burning copies of the Manusmriti as symbolic of their independence from Hindu Brahminical decadence and as a celebration of India’s modernity and secularism that provide Dalits and women with freedom from caste violence. Deepra Dandekar See also: Buddhism: Mahayana; Women in Early Buddhism; Hinduism: Bhakti; Dance; Devadasi; Draupadi; Durga and Kali; Festivals; Ideals of Womanhood; Marriage; Sacred Texts on Women; Sati; Tantra; Sikhism: Guru Period; Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles; Spirituality: Sex and Gender Further Reading Chakravari, U. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Calcutta: Stree, 2003. Dandekar, D. Boundaries and Motherhood: Ritual and Reproduction in Rural Maharashtra. New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2016. Rege, S. Against the Madness of Manu: B. R. Ambedkar’s Writings on Brahminical Patriarchy. Delhi: Navayana, 2013.

DANCE In Hinduism, dance has evolved from being religious to challenging the patriarchal architecture of Indian society. Evidence in antiquity of dance in India can be located in the Vedas, epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and also in prehistoric artifacts, such as a bronze statuette of a dancing girl (ca. 2500 BC) excavated from Mohenjodaro and a bas-relief from Barhut and Sanchi, from the first and second centuries BCE. Different forms of dance, called Bharatnatyam, Kathakali, Kathak, Kuchipudi, Odishi, and Manipuri, originated from the second century CE. Further, dance forms from the periphery, such as Gotipua, Chhau, Rabindra-Nritya, and others, have received critical acclaim in modern times. Sage Bharata’s dance treatise, the Natya Shastra, composed in Sanskrit between the second and fourth centuries BCE, provides a mythical account of the divine origin of Indian dance. According to the myth, women were included in dance to add grace and beauty to the performance. There is reference to the court of Indra (Lord of Heaven) being adorned by dancing nymphs (apsaras) and consorts. The Natya Shastra describes Indian dance technically and elucidates its three components as the dramatic element of a stage, known as natya; the rhythmic movement of body



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portraying abstract gestures, known as nritta; and the element of dance suggesting sentiment (rasa) and mood (bhava), known as nritya. In its theme, early dance in India draws upon subjects from religious scriptures, such as the Vedas, Puranas, and epics. According to Hindu belief, dance is a pastime worthy of the Deities and is believed to have been taught to humans by dancing Gods Shiva (Lord of Dance) and Krishna along with their consorts, Goddesses Parvati and Radha, respectively. The active principle or energy of Lord Shiva being considered feminine gets symbolically represented in the female consorts (shakti), taking many forms that embody diverse qualities, as exemplified in Sati, Uma, Parvati, Meenakshi, Durga, and Kali. Serving as the destroyers of evil, the consorts present the female archetype. Women may dance to seek attention from their male counterpart and to be accepted as his consort. It is told that Parvati sings and dances divinely, winning the companionship of Shiva, and passes on the skill to women of the world. Emulating godly life and existence, dance is passed on to human folk, and women dancers gradually find a place in temple dancing. The dancers (devadasis or maharis) gain entry into temple premises to participate in religious rituals, contributing their enigmatic performances to seek the blessing of the deity of the shrine. With the involvement of socially powerful heads in religious affairs, the devotion to the Divine becomes a mere showcase, and the loyalty projected through temple performance shifts to patrons to gain favors and benefits. According to archeological evidence and accounts of foreign travelers, the transformation of temple dancers (devadasis) to courtesans (rajadasis) further evolved into making public prostitution sacred in Hindu culture by 1442 CE during the Vijaynagar Empire (Arole 1990). The higher degree of professionalism maintained by the dancing girls that once earned social honor now elicits resentment from the public since the introduction of Western rationalism initiated by the reform campaign of the British, which also transformed the professional guild into a caste of prostitutes. Goddesses as dancing partners/consorts gradually led to dancing and singing as part of worship by followers. The bhakti women saints such as Mı-ra- Ba-i (16th century CE), idealized Radha and Krishna, while the Ramakrishna group (19th century CE) worshipped Kali. The followers of bhakti emulated Radha taking to dancing and singing, performing the divine dance of love (rasa lila) as a way of union with the eternal lover Krishna. From scriptures to temples to local courts to rural landscapes, the presence of dance in Hindu cultural existence can suggest the multiplicity of nature, landscape, mood, and life. It is important to note that individual female dancers entertaining a male audience slowly gave rise starting in the sixth century to women dancers in the bhakti movement who brought dance from the temples and royal courts out into the streets. Scholars believe that the dance tradition for women has to do with freedom and sensual pleasure since it leads to liberation (moksha) through renunciation of ego and casting off of earthly relationship and illusions (Schweig 2007). The rasa lila performed by Krishna with his consort Radha and milkmaids (gopı-s) replicates a mystical dance exhibiting erotic longings of devotees for the divine lover seeking union between the two. Female bhakti mystics, such as Akka Mahadevi (12th century

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CE) and Mı-ra- Ba-i, yearning for male lovers Lord Shiva and Krishna, respectively, could break free of familial, conjugal, caste, and class boundaries and draw a large number of followers dancing in the streets. Performing in resemblance of Radha, the mystical dancing saints could empower culturally and politically distressed women and men, challenging the mainstream Hindu tradition that believes in the achievement of divinity through self-imposed asceticism and renunciation. The risk undertaken at the cost of defamation as immoral yet leading the bhakti movement and providing an alternative religious thought to the marginal groups—women and untouchables—could gain the mystical women dancers a place of idealization in Indian nationalist discourse of the 19th century. Women, dancing as mystic performers or as artists associated with the temple and otherwise, create a greater realm of life through their art, expanding the consciousness of both the performer and the spectator and heightening the sense of ecstasy, harmony, and tranquility. With the rise of Indian nationalism and postcolonialism, Indian dance has undergone a renaissance. Artists such as Uday Shankar (1900–1977), Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Rukmini Devi (1904–1986), Madame Menaka (1899–1947), and Mrinalini Sarabhai (1918–2016), Kumudini Lakhia (b. 1930), and Birju Maharaj (b. 1938), to name a few, have been actively involved in bringing dance to the curriculum of institutes and universities for technical expertise and breaking the autocracy of religious guilds of dancers and teachers. The shift from religious purpose to novel social awareness of topics such as freedom struggle, dowry, suicide, labor exploitation, and others have changed society’s attitude toward dancers, encouraging active involvement of women as dancers and furthering it with more innovations and experimentations. Rasheda Parveen See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Devadasis; Gurus and Saints; Radha and Gopi Girls; Vedic Hinduism; Yoginis Further Reading Arole, Meera. “The Institution of Devadasis in Literature and Archaeology.” Bulletin of the Deccan College Research Institute 50 (1990): 135–140. Bowers, Faubion. The Dance in India. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953. Schweig, Graham M. Dance of Divine Love: The Rasa Lila of Krishna from the Bhagavata Purana, India's Classical Sacred Love Story. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007. Singha, Rina, and Reginald Massey. Indian Dances: Their History and Growth. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. Spencer, Sidney. Mysticism in World Religion. London: Penguin, 1963. Vatsyayan, Kapila. Bharata: The Natyasastra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1996. Vatsyayan, Kapila. Indian Classical Dance. 2nd ed. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1992.

D E VA D A S I S Devadasis are persons, typically female, who are dedicated to Hindu deities in temples through ritual marriage. Traditionally, devadasis were viewed as repositories of divine fertility and auspicious power (nityasuman.galı-), since, as deities’ wives,



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they were considered to be beyond widowhood. In India, in the case of rich temple establishments, they were formerly legally protected through endowments. Devadasis followed traditional Hindu temple duties but were better known for honing musical skills and dance based on devotional temple traditions. However, since devadasis belonged to the deity, and the temple and deity belonged to ruling elites and other upper castes, devadasis were also used sexually, providing rural fiefdoms with musical and dance performances and upper-caste elites with sexual entertainment. Although the practice of assigning a young girl to be a devadasi has been illegal in India since 1988, the practice is still followed, especially by the poor of lower-caste families in southern India (Kidron 2011). After marrying deities, devadasis undertake a duty of servitude to temples and to those ruling and upper-caste elites who own village temples. Subservience to deities and temples is therefore subservience to ruling elites. Persons chosen for dedication are either considered ritually marked by the deity or dedicated because of an intergenerational tradition of devadasi dedication in their families by caste. Being a devadasi is therefore a gendered and social role and a marriage duty. Though, according to classic understanding, devadasis are always women, boys from lower castes are also dedicated to village deities as temple servants, such as in the case of the jogta-s dedicated to Goddess Yellamma- in Karnataka. This makes deity dedication a larger gender issue, since all those lower in patriarchal hierarchy in India (such as lower castes) are systemically produced as women when dedicated. Male devadasis are considered the transsexual wives of deities and are made to wear women’s clothes, perform temple duties, and undergo ritualized castration in many cases. Devadasis, therefore, do not form a uniform category. Colonial opinion about devadasis reduced them to dancing girls, decrying their social practices as oriental immorality and instituting the first reforms against temple dedication in 1861. In the postindependence period, temple-based kingship gave way to bureaucratic administration in South Asia, and devadasis faced extreme poverty, as sex work remained their only possibility for earning a livelihood. Feminist activists sought a ban on deity dedication, too, and promoted the education of women and poorer and lower-caste sections of society instead. Pointing out the charade of auspicious fertility, feminists sought to reveal the reality of sexual slavery that the institution of devadasi and temple dedication facilitated for upper-caste rural elites and ruling groups. However, a strand of postcolonial feminist historical research has viewed precolonial devadasis to be potentially empowered while critiquing colonial reforms as disempowering for the traditional Hindu family systems. Transsexuals active in queer political movements also increasingly seek social acceptance as women through practices of temple dedication, as they undertake ritual marriage with deities to express their feminine sexuality and undergo ritualized castration. Postcolonial feminist studies also discuss how sex workers today become devadasis to empower their sexual expression with increased agency and pleasure, since this locates them outside the pressures of patriarchal marital structures while providing them with ritual acceptance as auspicious, without the stigma of widowhood or childlessness. Deepra Dandekar

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See also: Hinduism: Caste; Dance; Marriage Further Reading Jordan, Kay K. From Sacred Servant to Profane Prostitute: A History of the Changing Legal Status of the Devadasis in India, 1857–1947. New Delhi: Manohar, 2003. Kersenboom, Saskia C. Nityasuman.galı-: Devadasi Tradition in South India. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. Kidron, Beeban. “Devadasis Are a Cursed Community.” The Guardian, January 21, 2011. http:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/21/devadasi-india-sex-work-religion.

DEVI Devi is the name of a Hindu Goddess who may also be called Mahadevi, or Great Goddess. As Creatrix of the universe, she is a powerful force who manifests not just as one Goddess but many, representing a unification of all Hindu Goddesses. As such, any female divinity may be referred to as Devi. She is worshipped by both men and women and especially among adherents of Shaktism (worship of the Goddess as Divine Godhead). Despite, or perhaps because of, her popularity in contemporary times, debates ensue about whether or not Devi signifies empowerment or oppression of women. Devi emerged as the Great Goddess representing all Goddesses later than the discrete Goddesses of the Vedas, not gaining prominence until the medieval period. The earliest example of writing about Devi is found in the Devi-mahatmya, dating to approximately the sixth century CE, as part of the larger Markandeya Purana (ca. 300–600 CE). This text represents Devi as the highest reality and as Brahman (ultimate reality). As the Highest Reality, she is greater than any of the Gods combined. As saguna (with attributes) Brahman, she is the Great Cosmic Queen; as nirguna (without attributes) Brahman, she is beyond all qualities, regardless of sex/gender (Kinsley 1986). As the Creatrix of the universe, Devi is typically depicted as youthful, beautiful, and regal. She upholds order in the cosmos and continues to oversee her creation. In this sense, she is also attentive to her devotees, much like a protective mother. She is ferocious in this capacity, as noted by the fact that she can manifest in both auspicious and terrible forms, most notably in the Goddesses Durga and Kali. Durga is the most popular auspicious representation of Devi, as the Creatrix and Overseer of the universe. In the form of Durga, Devi grants wisdom, learning, and liberation (moksha). She continues to be Mother to her followers in this form, but she is also a Warrior who is brave and physically powerful. In her terrible form as Kali, Devi is terrifying and destructive. Her unpredictability makes her dangerous, and this danger is reflected in her need for animal sacrifices by her practitioners (unlike Durga, who requires none). Kali’s thirst for blood is resolute. Kali is also one of the Mahavidyas (great revelations/manifestations). Mahavidyas refer to 10 Goddesses who represent different forms of the Goddess. Similar to Vishnu’s avatars, Devi manifests these aspects of herself to help maintain the universe. While the most famous Mahavidya, Kali, is very famous indeed, most of these manifestations go unrecognized by practitioners unless they are presented



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as a group. Temples across India are dedicated to them because of their connection to Devi, and while they are worshipped as protectors of the universe, they are represented as chaotic Goddesses who are depicted as fearsome and unstable. They are, for the most part, a far cry from the constant of Durga, yet like her, they are aspects of the Great Goddess (Kinsley 1986). In the eyes of her followers, then, Devi is the most powerful deity in the pantheon; she has created everything in the universe, including the other Gods and Goddesses. For some, Devi’s power is a model for understanding ordinary women as embodiments of the Goddess. This has contributed, for example, to positive opportunities for women to gain political power as well as support of, and justification for, women’s movements in India. Yet, while Devi is a positive, nurturing power, she is also a negative, destructive power, an idea that has reinforced stereotypical assumptions about how women should behave and the potential dangers of women having power. And as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan notes, while the Goddess may be empowering for some women, feminist interpretations of her rarely address the systematic oppression of women, particularly as demarcated by caste and class, that is also part of her worship. Marginalized women such as Dalits and Shudras, for example, are typically excluded from the Goddess-as-feminist discourse (Rajan 1998). T. Nicole Goulet See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Caste; Dance; Draupadi; Durga and Kali; Sacred Texts on Women; Shakti; Tantra; Vedic Hinduism; Yoginis Further Reading Hawley, John S., and Donna M. Wulff. Devi: Goddess of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Kinsley, David R. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder. “Is the Hindu Goddess a Feminist?” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 44 (1998): WS34–WS38.

D R A U PA D I Draupadi (also called Pancali) is a significant Hindu Goddess whose story can be traced back to the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata. She symbolizes the figure of the unprotected woman in a largely patriarchal society, feminine honor that is to be guarded even in adverse circumstances, prosperity and abundance in harmonious times, and feminine wrath that can unleash unbridled destruction when challenged. Draupadi, the heroine of the Mahabharata, stands out among other strong female characters in the epic. She is born not out of a woman’s womb but of a sacrificial fire to King Drupada of Pancala. Draupadi’s birth is accompanied by the prophecy that she will bring about the ruin of the Kshatriyas (the warrior class). She is depicted as beautiful, virtuous, independent, fiery, and learned in the scriptures. In a svayamvar (a contest organized for a young princess, where she can choose her husband), Arjuna, the third Pandava brother, wins her hand in marriage by winning

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the contest organized by Drupada. However, she is married to the five Pandava brothers in accordance with the command of their mother, Kunti. The epic gives several explanations for the polyandry of Draupadi, one of them being a story from Draupadi’s previous birth where she performed austerities after which Lord Shiva asked her what she wanted. She asked for a husband and repeated it five times. She was hence destined to receive five husbands in another birth. The epic also projects Queen Draupadi as an incarnation of Sri, the Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity. The apocalyptic moment in the Mahabharata is the dice scene in the Sabhaparva (The Book of the Assemble Hall) where Draupadi is supposed to be reduced to the status of a dasi (maid servant/slave) after her husband, Yudhisthira, the eldest of the five Pandavas, wagers her in a game of dice after losing all his possessions and himself and loses her to his cousins, the Kauravas. Menstruating and wearing a single garment stained with blood, with her hair disheveled, a protesting Draupadi is dragged into the assembly hall. Rather than resign herself to her fate, Draupadi rebels against her oppressors, including her husbands, who should be her protectors. She disputes Yudhisthira’s right over her, especially since he has lost even himself in the game. Draupadi turns her plight into a legal and moral question regarding the rights of a husband over a wife and the freedom of a wife/woman. When she poses this question to the assembly of men—kings and lawmakers—the assembly cannot arrive at an answer. However, the Kauravas continue to humiliate her: Karna questions her honor and chastity because of her five marriages, Duhsasana attempts to disrobe her, and Duryodhana makes an indecent sexual gesture toward her. Infuriated, Bhima, Draupadi’s second husband, pledges to kill Duhsasana and Duryodhana in a bloody war. There is also the metaphorical transformation of Draupadi, the embodiment of Sri, to the furious and bloodthirsty Goddess Kali, who is going to lead the Pandavas to the inevitable destruction of the Kauravas. In the climactic moment of this scene, she is granted two boons by King Dhrtarastra, the father of Duryodhana, who is terrified at the ill omens portending all around, and Draupadi demands the release of her husbands only to be exiled for 13 years as a result of another sequence of events. Nevertheless, there is an all-engulfing fratricidal war waged by the Pandavas that annihilates the Kauravas as well as Draupadi’s father, brother, and five sons. The prophecy about Draupadi’s birth thus comes to be true. After ruling the kingdom of Hastinapur for 36 years, Draupadi, along with her husbands, embarks on mahaprasthanam, the final journey to heaven, and meets her death on her way along with her other husbands’, except Yudhisthira, who is the only person to reach heaven alive. The story of the Goddess Draupadi from the Mahabharata, especially the episodes recounted above, have found myriad interpretations and transformations, thus leading to numerous literary, dramatic, folkloristic, and ritual retellings and transmissions. Many of the stories that have developed around Draupadi transform her from a mythological heroine to a folk Goddess or local deity. From this has arisen a worship of Draupadi, as seen in the dedication of temples to her, the celebration of Draupadi festivals, and reenactments of her life in local rituals and practices. Interestingly, these festivals are very assimilative in sociological terms, as they witness the participation of a lot of people from the lower castes and transsexuals.



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Worship of Draupadi is found in different parts of India and South Asia but mainly in Tamil Nadu, where Draupadi is regarded as a form of Devi (Goddess) or Shakti (Goddess of Power and Strength). Renowned Mahabharata scholar Alf Hiltebeitel has done extensive research on the folkloristic and ritual dimensions of Draupadi worship. He has traced the oldest Draupadi temple to the north of Gingee town built by Tubaki Krishnappa, founder of the Nayak line of Gingee kings (1490–1520 CE) (Hiltebeitel 2011, 34). In addition, Draupadi is deeply rooted in the Indian popular culture. She is an inspiration for many women who become victims of sexual violence (sometimes at the hands of their in-laws) to speak up and report their suffering and pain. She is also an exemplar for the practitioners of polyandry in Kinnaur (Himachal Pradesh), parts of Punjab, and several parts of southern India. Draupadi’s story is also connected to the ritual of fertility and productivity. There are festivals celebrating the onset of menstruation in teenaged girls, like Raja Parba in Orissa and several other Himalayan and tribal cultures in India. These and many other aspects of Draupadi’s narrative have been exalted in the Indian cultural life. Komal Agarwal See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Devi; Festivals; Shakti Further Reading Hiltebeitel, Alf. The Cult of Draupadi. 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988–1991. Hiltebeitel, Alf. Rethinking India’s Oral and Classical Epics: Draupadi among Rajputs, Muslims and Dalits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Hiltebeitel, Alf. When the Goddess Was a Woman: Maha-bha-rata Ethnographies—Essays. Vol. 2. Edited by Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee. Texts and Sources in the History of Religions 132. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011. McGrath, Kevin. Stri: Women in Epic Maha-bha-rata. Ilex Foundation Series. Boston: Ilex Foundation; Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Trustees for Harvard University, 2009. Sharma, Arvind, ed. Women in Indian Religions. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.

DURGA AND KALI Durga and Kali are Hindu Goddesses believed to be manifestations of the Great Goddess Devi and of Shakti, the female embodiment of the absolute and ultimate divine principle out of which all creation is birthed and consumed. Hindus embrace the circle of life—birth and death—as a cyclic divine process, and they understand that whatever is created out of the absolute must return to it. In the Hindu tradition, God and Goddess are inseparable, as two archetypal and interchangeable halves of the Androgyne (nonbinary gendered divinity). As female counterparts of Shiva the destroyer, Durga and Kali are often depicted as weapon-wielding and skull-wielding Goddesses, respectively. Kali in particular is  described and depicted as deep blue, a color associated with the transcendent absolute; she wears a necklace made of the skulls of her children, whom she has

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Artistic rendering of the demon-slayer Bhadrakali, a manifestation of the Great Goddess Devi, from a Tantric Devi series, ca. 1660. Here she is shown as the highest Divinity, worshiped even by the three supreme male deities of Hinduism—Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. (Fine Art Images/ Heritage Images/Getty Images)

devoured. As Bhadrakali, worshipped by the Gods, her form combines the two Goddesses into one: Bhadrakali’s skin is deep blue, and she wears a deep blue sari; wielding weapons in her many arms, she stands on the dead body of her vanquished foe. During the Hindu age of devotion, or Upasana Kanda, the monotheistic Creator-God Brahman began to take on many personifications. “The metamorphosis from elitist Vedic ritualism to populist Hindu theism witnessed the rise of three theistic schools between 400 BCE and 300 CE” (Pattanaik 2003, 143). These schools worshipped Shiva, Vishnu, and Devi. In the latter theistic school, “Shaktism was the worship of the Goddess, or Devi, as Vishnu’s consort Lakshmi, Shiva’s consort Gauri, Brahma’s consort Saraswati, and her more independent forms, Kali and Durga” (Pattanaik 2003, 143).



Durga and Kali

Dragon’s Mouth at Yellowstone National Park is a natural image of the archetypal Earth Goddess. The Hindu Goddesses Durga and Kali are seen as female embodiments of this Absolute Divine principle, out of which creation is birthed and consumed. (Kathryn LeFevers Evans)

Hinduism is a consciously syncretistic religious tradition, where male and female deities undergo transmutations under the vigilant and loving praise of their devotees. Kali personifies untamed nature, manifesting the duality of nature as life-giving Sexual Goddess and as life-taking Goddess of Death. The Devi Bhagavata Purana tells of the eight-armed bride-warrior Durga, who is formed when the fires of the devas or Gods fuse together. Riding a lion or tiger, Durga impales the Asuras, or demons, with her trident. In the Kalika Purana, Devi transforms into Kali, the Dark Goddess, naked and with hair unbound. Where Durga holds weapons and wears a red sari and bridal jewelry, Kali holds skulls, bones, and severed limbs and wears no clothes. Kali is an expression of the universal Earth Goddess as archetypal Mouth of Hell. Her form is similar to that of Tlaltecuhtli in the Aztec tradition, who was depicted as a fierce Eagle Goddess inhabiting earth, considered to be the middle world between heaven and hell. With a sacrificial river of blood flowing from her tongue, she supports and guards the upper world using her hand-talons while crushing the dead in the underworld with her feet-talons. Like Tlaltecuhtli, Durga upholds and protects the order of heaven with her weapons, and Kali destroys the order of earth, thus creating the chaos of hell. The Kailasa Shiva temple of carved stone in south-central India depicts Durga—along with the Goddesses Lakshmi and Parvati—another Shiva-consort

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manifestation. Goddesses in a demon-destroying mode are portrayed with multiple arms. When Goddess Durga destroys the buffalo-demon, she frequently has 18 arms, each holding a different weapon. At the carved caves of Elephanta, India, Shiva and Parvati are shown merged in a single androgynous form, emphasizing the duality of life. The Shaiva cave called Mahishamardini, or Slayer of the Buffalo-Demon, has a square entrance hole encompassed by a semicircle of stylized, snarling animal heads (Dehejia 2006, 131–32, 140). This archetypal construct is also depicted in Christian iconography as the medieval European Hell’s Mouth and by the Aztec as Tlaltecuhtli, all of which can be linked with the archetypal Earth Goddess who births and devours. We see this in nature as well, in Dragon’s Mouth at Yellowstone National Park for example. This is nature’s expression of this ancient archetype. A carved stone wall inside Mahishamardini depicts the battle, after which the cave is named, between the Goddess Durga and the buffalo-demon (Dehejia 2006, 197–99). Native Gods and Goddesses of Tibet, the Ancient Protectors wear a necklace of skulls representing the protective mantras they invoke. In the Tibetan veneration of Tara, they are worshipped by the Drukpa Kagyu—the Dragon Kaju lineage— named by its founder while on pilgrimage for the nine dragons seen roaring out of earth and into the sky. In the Mahabharata, two “Praises of Durga” coin new names for Goddess Uma or Parvati. She is called Durga, “The Terrible One,” a great protectress who delivers humans from dangers of the wilderness and other terrors. The veneration of Tara appropriates elements of Durga’s prowess, exemplified in these lines from a protective incantation: “Dark-blue light like sapphire . . . The dark-blue light dissolves into me . . . and thus I will never be terrified or defeated” (Beyer 1978, 50–51, 229, 457). Durga in her many manifestations is the subject of devotion during Durga Navratri, the annual 11-day October celebration, when the nine Shaktis of Durga are invoked. Young unmarried girls are also worshipped during Durga Puja. There is a saying among Hindus that Kali claps her hands with glee when one of her children gets away. That escape from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth signifies that Kali’s devotee has attained moksha or liberation. A few lines from Sathya Sai Baba’s oral tradition, in the form of a bhajan, or devotional chant to Mother Kali, summarize the intimate devotion of her devotees: Some say Your aspect fills them with fear But to Your children, You are so dear My Blue Jewel, Kali Ma My Blue Jewel, Kali Ma Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles)

See also: Buddhism: Tara; Hinduism: Bhakti; Devi; Festivals; Lakshmi; Sacred Texts on Women; Shakti; Tantra Further Reading Beyer, Stephan. The Cult of Tara: Magic and Ritual in Tibet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.



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Dehejia, Vidya. Indian Art. New York: Phaidon, 2006. Pattanaik, Devdutt. Indian Mythology: Tales, Symbols, and Rituals from the Heart of the Subcontinent. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2003.

F E S T I VA L S Festivals make up a large part of the religious, social, and cultural fabric in Hinduism, including many significant to women. These festive occasions allow people to come together as a community and celebrate culture, spirituality, art, and the cycles of birth, life, and death. A festival may be observed with acts of worship, offerings to deities, fasting, feasting, rituals, charity, celebrations, and fire ceremonies. The festivals often celebrate events from Hindu mythology and coincide with seasonal changes. There are many festivals that are primarily celebrated by specific sects or in certain regions of the Indian subcontinent. Festival dates are usually prescribed according to the lunar calendar. There are many festivals significant to women as well as those devoted to the Feminine Divine. Some of the most important festivals across the Indian subcontinent, such as Navaratri and Diwali, honor the power of Shakti both in living women and the Divine. Other festivals have more regional significance and honor women’s life passages or local Goddesses who are believed to protect and bring harmony to the community.

A woman in Bhopal, India, ties a thread to a Banyan tree as part of the Vat Savitri Amavasya festival, 2015. Observed by married women in western India, this festival involves a day of fasting, ritual, and prayer for the prosperity and longevity of one's husband. (Mujeeb Faruqui/ Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

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Navaratri/Durga Puja/Dashain

The Durga Puja (Festival) or Navaratri (Nine Nights of Tantric Worship) is a celebration of Divine Mother Durga in her many forms as Creatrix (Mahasaraswati), Sustainer (Mahalakshmi), and Destroyer (MahaKali). Goddess is understood as the power behind and pervading all existence. The annual fall harvest festival begins on the new moon after the fall equinox and continues for nine nights. Today, the number of days of public worship varies: some communities perform rituals only on the first and final three days of the festival. However, home pujas are performed daily for all nine days, culminating in a 10th day of celebration (Vijaya Dashami) that brings together the entire family and community. The Durga Puja, or Dashain, as it is known in Nepal, dates back thousands of years and possibly has roots in the ancient Sarasvati Valley Civilization. Seal stones from this period (3500–1700 BCE) share similar symbolism with the contemporary rituals in Nepal, Bengal, Rajasthan, Orissa, and other parts of India and suggest a persistence and continuity of devotion to the Divine Mother in her various forms. The iconographic expression and development points to agricultural forms of continued worship of the Goddess as plants, pots, grain, and water. While objects of worship and the murtis (sculptures) continue to express agricultural themes, the contemporary festival ritual follows the mythic narrative of the Goddess Durga’s battle with demons destroying the harmony of all the worlds as outlined in the Devi Mahatmyam (Hindu religious text, fifth century CE). This epic describes the battles of the Goddess who takes numerous forms to stop the demons (symbolic of human failings and the afflicted ego). Devotees recite chapters from this text daily, offering their own negativity, attachments, and ignorance to the Goddess. While the Durga Puja’s agricultural roots are still celebrated in Nepal and other rural areas of South Asia, this ritual festival has also become an opportunity for celebrants to coparticipate in the cycles of creation on philosophical, personal, and communal levels. Some scholars have described this festival as a reunion of women and mothers and daughters (see Rodrigues 2003). Durga’s numerous forms are said to express the different stages and times in a woman’s life from child (Kumari, Bala Tripura Sundari) to mother (Lakshmi, Parvati) and crone (Chamunda and Dhumavati and others). The Durga Puja is a very auspicious and joyous time of year when many blessings and gifts are exchanged and innumerable pujas (rituals) take place both in the home and at various Goddess temples and shrines. Women dress in new saris and receive red adornments, such as bindis, red combs, bangles, and tika powder for their hair. The Durga Puja culminates in Vijaya Dashami on the 10th day, commemorating the victory of good over evil when families come together in celebration of the victories and successes in their own lives. This annual festival brings together Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious and spiritual communities across the Indian subcontinent and throughout the world. Other Popular Festivals Centering on Women’s Life Cycles and/or Goddess

Pongal: Pongal is one of the most popular harvest festivals of southern India. It occurs in the middle of January every year. The Pongal festival lasts for four days.



Festivals

Celebrations include a drawing of Kolam (a special mandalic design made of rice powder), swinging on special swings created for the festival, and hundreds of women gathering in the streets to sit over small fires and cook a pot of rice for the Goddess until it spills over, which is an indication of her blessing. Vasant Panchami, also called Saraswati Puja: On the fifth day of the waxing moon in January or February, the blessings of Saraswati, Goddess of Wisdom, Creativity, Education, and the Arts, are invoked through dancing, music, ritual, and worship at temporary shrines throughout the cities and villages that are created specifically for the Goddess. At dusk, her statue is taken to the nearest body of water and submerged. It is understood that the Goddess is returning to the waters of creation from which we all come. Mahashivaratri is celebrated on the new moon in February or March. It is an important festival celebration of the God Shiva and also a celebration of his sacred marriage to the Goddess Parvati. It is an especially significant day for women. Unmarried women fast from dawn to dusk to attract a good husband. Married women also fast, but for the protection of their families and to ensure a long, prosperous married life. As Lord of the Universe, Shiva is known for his powers of destruction and creation. Worshiping Shiva in the form of the stone Shiva Lingam connects him to the indigenous forest peoples who have worshiped Shiva in this form for thousands of years. Shiva lingams with the yoni have also been found in the archeological remains of Sarasvati Valley Civilization. The lingam also has philosophical and cosmological significance as a fiery pillar of light and consciousness in the Puranas and other Hindu texts. During the festival, natural offerings representing the senses and elements are made to a stone Lingam in a temple or shrine, and it is believed that continuously singing and chanting Shiva’s name with devotion will liberate all from their karmas and the cycles of death and birth. Diwali, which means “row of light/lamps,” is a five-night festival that begins on the dark moon in November and honors Lakshmi, the Goddess of Harmony, Wealth, and Abundance. Every home, building, and temple displays rows of lights to symbolically and literally dispel darkness and invite the Goddess’s blessings into that place. Like most Hindu festivals, Diwali has agricultural origins as a celebration of the harvest. In earlier times, and even today in more rural parts of South Asia, Diwali marks the gateway into the coming winter season, when food sources and warmth may wane. This festival invites the Goddess of Light and Abundance to bless the families throughout the darkening times to come. Kali Puja is one of the most popular Goddess festivals in Bengal and occurs on the dark moon in November, the same night as Diwali. Kali, Goddess of Power, Death, and Transformation, is worshiped and propitiated through Tantric rites and ceremonies throughout the night until dawn. Some of the ritual elements of this festival are similar to that of the Durga Puja, so this festival may share similar roots. Temporary shrines (pandals) are created in the various districts throughout the cities and towns. Clay sculptures of the fierce Goddess Kali are dressed, adorned, and worshiped.

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Makar Sankranti marks the sun’s passage into the zodiacal sign Capricorn. While the majority of festivals are based on the lunar calendar, Makar Sankranti is the Hindu winter solstice (based on the solar calendar). In some parts of northern India, the festival is focused on newly married women presenting gifts to their in-laws, husband’s older sisters, and husband’s older brothers and their wives. It is to promote friendly relations and goodwill between the new wife and her husband and his family. The intention behind some of the festivities is to clear the past of any arguments or disagreements and to pave the way for amicable relations. The women clean their homes and take a ritual bath before parading singing through the streets. They carry their gifts to the different family members as a sort of vow to agree and get along (Freed and Freed 1998). In Rajasthan and west Mahdya Pradesh, the givers and recipients of the gifts differ. Women gift any type of object (related to household, makeup, or food) to 13 married women. A newly wedded woman’s first Sankranti also involves family, but in these regions it is the wife’s family who invites the new wife and husband to their houses to feast. People also invite friends and relatives (especially their sisters and daughters) to their home for a special festival meal and give out many kinds of sweets and small gifts. Laura Amazzone See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Devi; Durga and Kali; Household Shrines; Lakshmi; Marriage; Prakriti; Saraswati; Shakti; Tantra Further Reading Amazzone, Laura. Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power. Baltimore: Hamilton Books, 2010. Fell McDermott, Rachel. Revelry, Rivalry, and Longing for the Goddesses of Bengal: The Fortunes of Hindu Festivals. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Freed, Stanley, and Ruth Freed. Hindu Festivals in a North Indian Village. Seattle: American Museum of Natural History, University of Washington Press, 1998. Jennett, Dianne. “A Million Shaktis Rising: Pongala, A Women’s Festival in Kerala, India.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 21, no. 1 (Spring 2005), 35–55. Rodrigues, Hillary Peter. Ritual Worship of the Great Goddess: The Liturgy of the Durga Puja with Interpretations. Albany: State University of New York, 2003.

F U N D A M E N TA L I S M Hindu fundamentalism, in contrast to other religious fundamentalisms, does not rely on literal understandings of religious texts but instead focuses on Hinduism as a nationalist tool. Emerging in India during the late 19th and early 20th centuries under British rule, its origins lie in the concept of Hindutva (Hinduness). Hindutva was formulated by Indians trying to establish a strong Hindu nation to challenge Christian, colonial rule and to distinguish themselves from Muslims. While the details of Hindu fundamentalism vary from group to group, it is generally articulated in terms of a masculine Hinduism marked by martial spirit and combined with Indian nationalism. Embedded in this fundamentalism are what are assumed



Fundamentalism

to be traditional attitudes about gender. Men are designated as protectors of the home—the location of culture and religion—and women are the embodiment of that home. Of particular significance is that the ideal of traditional femininity became deified within Hindutva, and certain Hindu Goddesses became emblematic of Hindutva. These early conceptions of Hindutva created a foundation for contemporary nationalist movements that continues to have an impact on how women are expected to behave. Women are measured by fundamentalists against gendered tropes such as the heroic mother, chaste wife, and celibate warrior. While some argue that these roles can be viewed as empowering for women, others contend that they detrimentally maintain traditional gender norms (Banerjee 2005). Early fundamentalism relied especially on middle-class Hindu women to represent the inner or spiritual domain of the nascent Hindu nation, a domain that needed to remain untouched and unsullied by colonialism. They provided a battleground in which Hindu intellectuals could engage their British rulers in open conflict. We can see this in the debates about the “Woman’s Question,” which pertained to laws and reforms affecting women’s rights as related to marriage, widowhood, financial protections, and so on. Partha Chatterjee argues that while leading figures sought to uphold tradition during these debates, what emerged was a created tradition in which a new woman developed under a new patriarchy. Specifically, it became the woman’s main responsibility to maintain the spiritual realm. This entailed resisting westernization; exemplifying chasteness, passivity, and devotion via limited contact with others; and learning to read and write in Bengali to pass on this elementary learning to her offspring (Chatterjee 1993). Prominent women, including Bhikaji Rustomji Cama (1861–1936) and Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), also propagated this idealized Hindu woman, simultaneously arguing that military violence could save Mother India from colonialism. The Goddess Kali figured prominently in this rhetoric, representing a ferocious Mother Goddess who would do anything to protect her children. Kali symbolized the importance of militarism in maintaining fundamentalist ideals but also the need to protect the Hindu nation and the feminized domestic space that was its spiritual heart (Banerjee 2005). Three contemporary organizations that promote Hindutva in India include the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). While the RSS and VHP are social organizations, the BJP is strictly a political party. Each organization has its own mandates, but all three groups have an identity rooted in militaristic resistance to dangerous external forces (since Independence, this is primarily Muslims). Women are encouraged to join in the fight, not only by way of maintaining their sexual purity but also through female-only neomilitary training. As in earlier forms of Hindu fundamentalism, middle-class women represent the ideal models of religious home life. As heroic mothers, women are meant to encourage their sons to protect Mother (i.e., Hindu) India. Women are expected to be chaste wives, and the health and spiritual development of the nation continues to be monitored through female sexuality, which fundamentalists believe should be confined to heterosexual marriage. And those not sexuality active either because they are unmarried or of a certain age are to act as

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the celibate warrior. Critical to all three of these roles is the importance of women protecting themselves, as the embodiment of the Hindu nation, from violation and impurity. The connection between feminism and Hindutva is highly complex. On one hand, it can be deemed feminist by women who are articulating and using these roles to empower themselves; on the other hand, they can be viewed as ascribing to a fascist feminism that determines women’s importance within a deified domestic realm. The latter stance, for some, is ultimately antifeminist because it fails to conceive of women outside of their sexuality (Banerjee 2005). Arguably, Hindu fundamentalism is becoming increasingly prevalent, as indicated by the political support of Narendra Modi, who as leader of the BJP became prime minister of India in May 2014. Since then, claims of increasing violence against Christians and Muslims and instances of forced conversion have been reported in news media (Al Jazeera 2015). However, even prior to Modi’s successful election, bouts of violence between Hindus and Muslims existed, as seen in the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindus. This, in turn, led to a series of riots and loss of life. T. Nicole Goulet See also: Hinduism: Durga and Kali; Ideals of Womanhood; Marriage Further Reading Al Jazeera. “India’s Hindu Fundamentalists,” October 8, 2015. http://www.aljazeera​.com​ /programmes/peopleandpower/2015/10/indias-hindu-fundamentalists ​ - 151 ​ 0 08​ 073418225.html. Banerjee, Sikata. Make Me a Man! Masculinity, Hinduism, and Nationalism in India. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments, Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Hansen, Thomas Blom. The Saffron Wave, Democracy and Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Menon, Kalyani Devaki. Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Sinha, Mrinalini. Specters of India, The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

GOPI GIRLS See Radha and Gopi Girls GURUS AND SAINTS In Sanskrit, guru means a person who is a mentor, guide, teacher, or an expert of a specific field. In the religious context, guru is the person who guides and mentors his or her disciples on the path of enlightenment and spirituality. Traditionally, gurus in Hinduism have been male. The female counterpart is gurvi, although in common usage female teachers are referred to as guru as well. Similarly, while a



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male saint is commonly known as a sadhu, his female counterpart is sadhvi. In colloquial language, a sadhu is a man who practices austerities, has renounced the world, and is engaged in meditation for the attainment of the Divine. A sadhu is considered to be a holy person. A sadhu or sadhvi is not necessarily a guru or a teacher. Nor does a guru or gurvi have to practice the austerities of an ascetic life. The latter, from a religious perspective, is a spiritual leader who may have attained divine vision and mastered knowledge through inner insight and who imparts that knowledge for the betterment of individuals or society, which draws him or her a following. There is no formal canonization process to become elevated to guru or sainthood in Hinduism. Both men and women who have followed the path of renunciation and attained high levels of spirituality have had followers or devotees who considered them as their spiritual teachers. Thus “sainthood” is often interchanged with terms such as gurus or swamis, which may denote the same. Becoming a guru or a saint is neither determined by any condition or specific action nor by gender. Thus, there is an abundance of female Hindu gurus and saints who are revered both locally and universally in India, regardless of sectarian association. They have become gurus through their ability to teach and to lead by their wisdom, which focuses on building and guiding the relationship between humans and the Divine through practices such as devotion, meditation, and adoration. Early references to female saints and gurus are found in the Vedas. The Rig Veda mentions Lopamudra, the wife of sage Agastya; Maitreyee, the wife of sage Yajnavalkya; Gargi, daughter of sage Vachaknu; Ghosha; and others. Most of these women composed hymns and were well versed in the Hindu scriptures. Six stages can be discerned in the narratives of women saints: early dedication to the Divine, denial of marriage, defying social norms, initiation and total devotion, and dedication to the Deity and the Deity’s service. Mı-ra- Ba-i was a saint known for her undaunted love for Lord Krishna. Born in 1499 to a Vaishnava family devoted to Lord Krishna and married at a young age to the Rana (king) of Chitor (Mewar District, Rajasthan), Mı-ra- Ba-i encountered the chagrin of the society. However, she was undaunted in her devotion. She eventually abandoned her worldly life and walked barefoot to Vrindavan (the abode of Lord Krishna) in search of her spiritual love. Mı-ra- Ba-i expressed her piety through bhajans (devotional songs) that immortalized her spiritual love for Lord Krishna. The dedication, innocence, kindness, and joy in her songs and discourse about Lord Krishna have made her one of the greatest saints in the Hindu-Vaishnava tradition. Ma Sarada or Saradadevi, also known as Sree Ma (Holy Mother), was a saint and guru. As her name denotes, Saradadevi was the Universal Mother. Married to Sree Ramkrishna of Bengal, who was an ascetic, ecstatic devotee of Goddess Kali, Saradadevi was his ideal spiritual consort. She was the epitome of motherhood, kindness, simplicity, and dedication to spirituality, which she manifested through the worship of the Divine and through her love for humankind. After the death of her husband, she went on a pilgrimage and eventually attained nirvikalpa samadhi, or the unquestioned and highest stage of meditative consciousness. She considered Sree Ramakrishna’s disciples her own children. With her strong maternal instinct, she dedicated her life to caring for them, and soon she had a following. Due to her

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kindness, in spite of her own abject poverty and hardships, she came to be known as Sree Ma or the Holy Mother. She had both male and female disciples, but it was the latter that ultimately grew to form the Sarada Mission, a charitable monastic women’s organization named after Sree Ma. The organization promotes philanthropy, education, and relief activities. Sree Ma’s teachings emphasized meditation, purity of mind, respectfulness, forbearance, and simplicity. As one of her devotees, Sister Nivedita stated, “Her life was one long stillness of prayer” (Stavig 2010, 222). Prayer, meditation, and simplicity, which formed the basis of Hinduism, were carried forward in many directions by other female gurus and saints. Anandamayi Ma (1896–1982), another celebrated female Hindu saint, said about spirituality, “The supreme calling of every human being is to aspire to self-realization. All other obligations are secondary” and “Only actions that kindle man’s divine nature are worthy of the name of actions” (Lipski 1993, 60). However, she did not ask everyone to become a renunciant. “Everyone is right from his own standpoint,” she would say. She did not give formal initiations and refused to be called a guru, as she maintained that “all paths are my paths” and often said, “I have no particular path” (Lannoy 2006, 186). Essentially, to her, life and religion are one; all that a person does should be done with sincerity, love, and devotion, with a firm conviction that true living means perfecting one’s spiritual existence in tune with the universe. Female saints and gurus of India carried with them primarily their maternal instincts and spread the notion of bhakti (reverence), sadhana (meditation), bhava (emotional disposition), and dhyana (meditation) through them. The fact that they were almost all referred to as Ma or Mata—that is, Mother—is significant. Some were referred to as Sadhvi—that is, female saint. They unpretentiously used everyday language, and their discourses were simple enough for the common people to understand. Regardless of whether the discourses emphasized Saiva (pertaining to Shiva), Sakta (pertaining to Shakti), or Vaishnava (devoted to Krishna as the incarnation of Vishnu), the female saints and gurus extolled them in a simplified form that drew followers from all walks of life. Their story is almost the same, whether it is Sadhvi Auvaiyar Ma, Bhaktha Meera of Tamil Nadu, Akka Mahadevi (12th century, Karnataka, devoted to Lord Shiva), Janabai (Maharashtra), or Andal (eighth century; mystic poet and devoted to Lord Vishnu), among others. Many of them defied social norms and devoted themselves to the service of the Divine. Despite their regional diversity, Hindu female saints share some common traits. They are most often talked of in their domestic contexts. Often born in abject poverty, with their lives stretched beyond the ordinary, often to eccentric boundaries, they transcend the expected social conventions and experience unusual divine revelations, often through miracles and dreams. Through their worldly experiences, simple living, and caring ways, as well as the use of the local language, they interpret and present spirituality in informal ways that are easy to understand and practice by the common people. Female gurus and saints with tremendous inner strength, insight, and inde­pendence are often images that contrast with the stereotypes of subordinate Indian women in a male-dominated society. They are the embodiments of divine



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knowledge. Many have ashrams (hermitages) where devotees congregate to meet their gurus for spiritual salvation or enlightenment. Monolina Bhattacharyya See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Marriage; Renunciation; Sacred Texts on Women; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Charpentier, Marie-Therese. “Indian Female Gurus in Contemporary Hinduism: A Study of Central Aspects and Expressions of Their Religious Leadership.” 2010. http://www​ .doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66264/charpentier_marie.pdf. Gupta, Sanjukta. “Women in the Saiva/Sakta Ethos.” In Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women, edited by Julia Leslie, 193–210. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidasss, 2015. Johnsen, Linda. Daughters of the Goddess: The Women Saints of India. Saint Paul, MN: Yes International, 1993. Lannoy, Richard. “Mataji’s Methods.” In As the Flower Sheds Its Fragrance: Sri Sri Anandamayi Ma Diary Leaves of a Devotee, edited by Brahmlin Atmanand, 185–88. Kankhal, India: Ma Anadamayee Sangha, 2006. Lipski, Alexander. Life and Teachings of Sri Anandamayi Ma. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1993. Stavig, Gopal. Western Admirers of Sri Ramakrishna. Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2010. Young, Katherine. “Introduction.” In Women Saints in World Religions, edited by Julia Leslie, 1–38. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.

HOUSEHOLD SHRINES Household shrines signify purified spaces within Hindu homes where clan deities are ritually worshipped. Shrines and deities are considered to produce Hindu households as imaginative and structural microcosms that provide every clan member with social roles and relationships. This relationship between household shrines and clans is enabled through a ritual known as pra-napratisht.ha- that is considered to bring household deities alive. This microcosm of clan households’ shrines also signifies the body politic of larger sociopolitical and territorial units, such as localities and villages in South Asia. Traditional homes in India were often built according to va-stu s´a-stra (a traditional system of architecture based on ancient Indian texts dating approximately to the sixth century CE), wherein the household shrine enjoyed central space. Although India prides itself on becoming largely urban and modern today, va-stu planning still remains important for household construction. However, the importance of household shrines has diminished, except for in some rural pockets, and even ritual practices hark retrospectively to memories of ancestral traditions. Household shrines and deities that once structured gendered roles and relationships and spatially ordained women’s lives as part of a planned microcosm upheld ritual traditions and patriarchal clans. Shrines (deva-ra-) assumed a central position of power and honor in traditional and patriarchal Hindu households, occupying its innermost chambers (devghar), which epitomize its core moral

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values. While the outside-facing portions of a household usually constituted its boundaries, women’s spatial position and moral duty was bound to the daily rituals of the household’s inner core, which was defined by the clan deity’s rituals and traditions. Customs surrounding household shrines were taught to women as part of their gendered upbringing within patriarchal households, producing women as pure and chaste upholders of marital clans: as wives and mothers and as dutiful daughters-in-law of the household’s ancestral spirit and its male leadership. Women within patriarchal households also lived in the home’s innermost chambers and hardly ventured to its outside-facing portions that received guests, since encountering strangers was considered the domain of men. Women’s lives revolved around the cloistered existence of the deva-ra-, the devghar, and the ritualized serving of clan deities, as the daily chores and care of the shrine were considered their primary responsibilities. The shrine and deities were ceremonially cleaned by women twice a day. So that the deities were never left in darkness, oil and butter lamps were continually lit in accompaniment with incense sticks. Religious chants and songs were sung to the deity by various clanswomen throughout the day as they meditated in the devghar after finishing their domestic tasks. Women had to prepare elaborate vegetarian ceremonial meals for the deity before any of them could eat the remaining ritual food (prasa-d). Puja necessitated establishing states of constant ritual purity and physical cleanliness for women, which included seclusion during menstruation and periods of postnatal birth impurity. Women continued this worship, known as puja, intergenerationally, passing on and teaching their daughters and daughters-in-law this gendered clan culture as tradition, which produced all of them as chaste wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. Household shrines also constituted significant places of refuge for clanswomen even though they structured women’s position within clans as cloistered repositories of patriarchal morality. Women unburdened their hearts to clan deities, confiding their innermost pain and difficulties in them. The deva-ra- became a place for discussing and mitigating clan disputes and a place where daughters would confide in their mothers in privacy. It was a place where all separations and farewells were articulated before women left for their marital homes, and, finally, deities were observed as bearing witness to the tears that widows or young brides shed in solitude. Although there are no available statistics on the prevalence of household shrines or the nature of deities within them, South Asian Hindus and their deities number to more than 800 million and 330 million, respectively. The nature of the household has undergone a gradual change in South Asia due to modernization, an increase in urbanization, and a paucity of space. Urban centers see the rise of more secular homes, and working women in South Asia may not have time for devotion to elaborate ritual activities and may follow few patriarchal traditions. The diminishing importance of the household shrine has been accompanied by a concomitant rise of street shrines and temples at nearly every corner of the South Asian city, where large communal festivals and processions are organized. The appearance of the shrine has also changed with modernization. The traditional household shrine was earlier complete with a deva-ra- in a devghar and



Ideals of Womanhood

resembled a small, ornate alter or seat with a decorated canopy that was sometimes designed like a golden or silver palanquin, wherein the small bronze idol (or idols, if a clan had multiple deities) was placed and worshipped with food, flowers, incense, lamps, and the singing of songs and chants. Clanswomen were earlier primarily responsible for this daily worship as clan deities became real persons for them, structuring their daily lives as their confidants and companions of the household’s inner chambers. The devghar was decorated with pictures of the pilgrimage center of the deity’s main shrine. Since the household deity was the clan’s tutelary deity, household shrines mirrored pilgrimage centers, including the home as a microcosm and its gender relationship within the larger territorial body politic of Hinduism, configuring women’s role within it. Modernization and secularism have changed the role and shape of the traditional shrine, which has become diminished to a few images of important deities decorating the mantelpiece today. Stickers of deities are placed over the refrigerator so that their presence can bless and purify food, and an incense stick in the morning and evening over the mantelpiece has come to replace the entire day-long ceremony that was once required of women in household shrines. Ritual purity is no longer considered important as women work and acquire education and as meat is freely eaten in many homes. Deity talismans are placed inside cars to afford riders safety in hazardous journeys now, and the images of political leaders are observed to accompany images of clan deities as family benefactors. Deepra Dandekar See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Caste; Festivals; Marriage Further Reading Glushkova, Irina, and Anne Feldhaus, eds. House and Home in Maharashtra. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

IDEALS OF WOMANHOOD Aspiring to the status of chaste wives and mothers of sons is considered the feminine realm of worldly achievement and the ideal of Hindu femininity and womanhood. Widely known and accepted as stri-dharma (the Hindu religious law of womanhood), every Hindu woman is supposed to undertake wifehood and motherhood as her personal duty, to be socially accepted. According to stri-dharma, encoded in Hindu religious texts such as the Manusmriti, it is feminine chastity, wifehood, and motherhood that provide women the right to enjoy marital clan property, since husbands and sons are expressly meant to propagate patriarchal and patrilineal tradition and inheritance. The ideals of womanhood therefore also produce masculine leadership or potential kingship in Hindu society. Potential kingship or raaj-dharma for men also links stri-dharma with concepts of Hindu divinity and nationhood. Hindu religious mythologies, such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and epic heroes and heroines therein, endorse the ideals of raaj-dharma and stri-dharma, exemplifying how their mutual association

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is soldered with divine nationhood. Queen Sita follows her husband Rama to the forest to coendure his exile out of stri-dharma, which elevates her status from that of the perfect wife and queen to infallible Hindu Goddess. Queen Gandhari from the Mahabharata decided to blindfold herself out of stri-dharma because her husband was blind. Forfeiting her right to eyesight because her husband was unable to enjoy it was considered to have bequeathed Queen Gandhari with power and a divine internal vision that she gifted her son with on the battlefield. His mother’s gaze full of the power of stri-dharma was considered to provide the Kauravas victory in the ultimate battle of the Mahabharata. Following Hindu stri-dharma to perfection produces a woman as pativrata (a woman completely devoted and subject to her husband). A woman’s willful self-subjection to her husband earns her tremendous righteous superiority, power, and social respect. Only a true pativrata is considered capable of producing a true potential king. Therefore, being a true pativrata almost unto her death also produces women as potential Goddesses, which in India have assumed metaphoric status for perfect nationhood. Practices of pativrata-dharma, chastity, and submission to spousal and marital wish manifest in daily activities of labor and bodily practice. Women must veil themselves to men (with the exception of their husbands and children); they must speak only when spoken to, never express differences of opinion, and never express personal desire that deviates from clan interest. They must never choose their own marital partners or destiny and must always allow their life direction to be prearranged by clan elders and seniors. They must coendure all spousal and clan hardships and consider childbearing, sexual duties aimed toward the birth of sons and heirs, and domestic duties as their prime responsibility. Until recently, most Hindu women in rural India were illiterate, with child marriages and early pregnancies still being common. Such practices were understood to increase marital clan and spousal control over wives. Most rural households in India are still not equipped with sources of fuel, water, and waste disposal, negatively affecting women’s domestic labor burden and increasing their marital difficulties. A sizeable portion of women’s day is spent in fetching water from caste-specific sources in the village, fetching firewood, and finding safe and dignified ways of relieving themselves without facing accusations of losing their chastity. Formal education is commonly considered to make women self-willed and likely to delay appropriate marital alliances and childbirth, which finally result in their destitution. Many Hindu women therefore gain education by reciting and singing religious texts and songs at home, as a form of imbibing virtues of stri-dharma, as they perform its teachings in their daily activities. The many religious and ethical teachings for women are set to a singsong rhythm, corresponding with their various domestic chores of grinding, powdering, husking, sieving, and so on. Chastity enjoins that an everyday practice of ritual purity occupies women with the tending of household shrines, involving many domestic chores. Maintaining menstrual purity is also an important aspect of women’s chastity. Women remain in seclusion during menstruation and postnatal periods, since menstrual blood is understood as an impure and contaminating substance, considered sensitive to manipulation by those deemed “witches.” Women exposing themselves to public



Ideals of Womanhood

places or temples during menstruation are thought to cause men illnesses and afflictions and expose themselves to “witchcraft” and anger deities. Wives are blamed when their husbands fail in their journey of potential kingship or die. Tradition implicitly demands that widows die with their husbands (self-cremation), and both Satis (souls of women who die with their husbands) and souls of women who die in childbirth are considered Mother Goddesses, especially in western India. Committing sati is, according to tradition, considered a Hindu woman’s ultimate act of stri-dharma, since she follows her husband even in death and afterlife. Satis become personal and important clan Goddesses for women, and they are considered important paragons of womanhood throughout the regions of their shrines. The practice of sati is now illegal in India (the last recorded crime of bride-immolation took place in 1987), and the Indian Parliament banned the glorification and deification of Satis in 1988. Still, the worship of the Sati is very common. Women pray to Satis at their temples and shrines to achieve their feminine ideals of wifehood and motherhood. Thousands of Sati temples dot the rural landscape of western and Central India, and their shrines bear testimony to women who exemplify stri-dharma for Hindu society. Women with marital and childbirth difficulties visit their shrines for wish fulfilment. The most significant feature of human-Goddesses such as the Sati is their ambiguous nature. They are considered simultaneously fierce and benevolent, transiting between these ambivalences depending on individual ritual appeasement by women. Their concurrent human and divine forms allow women to aspire toward divine ideals in their own lives. The story of Rani Sati from Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan is an important example. Rani Sati, who committed sati in the 14th century, is widely accepted as a deity in the region, and her worship came into the limelight when Roop Kanwar, a devotee of Rani Sati, herself committed sati in 1987 near Deorala (Rajasthan). For other Hindu women who are widowed, Hindu religious texts provide strict and explicit injunctions about feminine behavior and conduct. Widows are to live as female ascetics. They are forbidden from wearing colored clothes, ornaments, or cosmetics and are supposed to follow all religious fasts, eat only once a day, and avoid sweets, meat, fish, and eggs. They are supposed to sleep on floors, perform domestic duties and chores, and physically disfigure themselves by shaving their heads. They are forbidden from harboring attachments to personal possessions and inhabit a lower social position than married wives. They are usually stigmatized and suffer social ostracism, since they are considered unlucky and cannot participate in women’s fertility celebrations. Many Hindu widows face destitution and continue to beg at temple towns such as Vrindavan. Indian state and society remain ambivalent about the ideals of womanhood. While practices such as sati are legally banned, religious epics such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, injunctions of the Dharma-shastras, stories from the Puranas, and legends of Mother Goddesses that extoll virtues of stri-dharma are glamourized in public and mass media to reinforce the value of women’s domestic roles as wives and mothers of sons according to tradition. Arranged-marriage alliances for women in urban centers, complete with prebooked deity-ritual honeymoon

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packages, have achieved a new status of glamour in the Indian wedding market, as corporate and industrialist clans arrange business networks through marriages using technologically savvy portals. A recent nongovernmental survey in India that covers more than 40,000 households, representative of all class and social groups (Indian Human Development Survey 2011–2012), conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland, reveals that only a little over 5 percent of urban women accept being married outside their caste, while this number drops in rural areas. The survey also reveals that 20 percent of urban Indians and 30 percent of rural Indians practice untouchability. This hints at the prevalence of social and religious conservatism among Hindus, where a high regard is placed on caste, religious beliefs, and stri-dharma, resulting in the continuation of arranged marriages meant to secure the birth of sons and male heirs for clans and castes. Deepra Dandekar See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Caste; Marriage; Sacred Texts on Women; Sati Further Reading Chakravarti, U. Everyday Lives, Everyday Histories: Beyond the Kings and Brahmanas of “Ancient” India. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006. Dandekar, D. Boundaries and Motherhood: Ritual and Reproduction in Rural Maharashtra. New Delhi: Zubaan Books, 2016. Hawley, J. S., ed. Sati. The Blessing and the Curse: The Burning of Wives in India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Michaels, A. Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its Significance for Ritual Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Rukmini, S. “Just 5% of Indian Marriages Are Inter-Caste: Survey.” The Hindu, November 13, 2014. http://www.thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are​ -intercaste/article6591502.ece.

KALI See Durga and Kali LAKSHMI Lakshmi, also known as Sri Lakshmi, is a popular Goddess in the Hindu pantheon. Lakshmi is associated with fertility, but her role as Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity is more prominent. Although the names Sri and Lakshmi are now used for the same Goddess, it was not the case earlier; they were two different individual Goddesses. In fact, in the early Vedic period, both sri and lakshmi were terms rather than specific divinities. Lakshmi meant a mark, a sign, or a token, and sri referred to material prosperity, physical health and beauty, and ruling power. These meanings have been retained as characteristics of the Goddess. However, it is in Sri Sukta, a part of the fifth book of Rig Veda, that they appear as individual deities, and in the early Upanishads both Sri and Lakshmi merge from being two individual Goddesses into one, Sri Lakshmi.



Lakshmi

There are various myths associated with the origin of Lakshmi. The most popular one has her appear from the churning of the Ocean of Milk. Another myth has her as the daughter of Prajapati; she is also mentioned as the daughter of Brahma in one of the myths, and one has Daksha as her father. Lakshmi is also known as Padma or Kamala (both the words mean “lotus”); this is because of her association with the lotus. She is seated on a lotus, the color of her skin is like a lotus, she wears a lotus garland, and she has a lotus in her hand. The lotus is a symbol of fertility and life and thus the Goddess represents both blossoming and development of life. Lakshmi is also known to be the consort of Vishnu, but she is primarily worshipped individually, without Lord Vishnu. It is believed that Lord Vishnu never does anything without the approval of Sri Lakshmi, so Vaishnavas, the devotees of Lord Vishnu, sometimes approach Vishnu through her. Hindus worship Lakshmi in various festivals throughout the year. Lakshmi’s association with wealth and good fortune is most prominent in Diwali, which is held in late autumn (October–November) across India. Although Diwali is celebrated to honor the return of Rama, Sita, and Laksmana from their 14 years of exile in the forest, Lakshmi has acquired a central place in this celebration (for her association with wealth and prosperity). Men and women clean and repaint their houses to entice the Goddess to visit their house and shower her blessings. Cleaning, decorating the house with lights and/or diyas (oil lamps), and fasting are cardinal to welcoming the Goddess to one’s house. It is firmly believed that Lakshmi would never enter an untidy house. Lamps and lights are used not only to decorate the house but also to drive out darkness, evil spirits, and dark thoughts within human beings. Light symbolically cleanses the house and its inhabitants of all the darkness that might have taken shelter. Once the evil or Alakshmi, the malicious female spirit associated with bad luck who is believed to bring all the misfortune in one’s life and family, is driven out, Lakshmi enters the household and blesses it with wealth and prosperity. On the day of Diwali, merchants and businesses close their previous year’s financial accounts and open new business ledgers with Lakshmi’s blessings. It is the beginning of a new financial year for them. Lord Ganesha, the God of Wealth and Good Luck, is also worshipped along with Lakshmi. The worship starts at dusk with the offering of incense, puffed rice, and flowers. Due to her association with crops and fertility, Goddess Lakshmi is also offered five types of grains: paddy, maize, linseed, mustard seed, and lentils. Lakshmi’s association with fertility and abundant crops is celebrated in Orissa in the Kaumudi-Purnima festival. This is a very femalecentric festival. Women invoke the Goddess on a mound of new grain while telling and retelling the story of how the disappearance of Lakshmi resulted in the disappearance of food and crops and how when she returned, everything was restored. Therefore, she is the primary object of vows and vratas (fasts) undertaken by women to ask for her blessings. The blessings sought depend on the devotee and the festival; however, the most common ones are for marital fidelity, long life, wealth, and prosperity of the husband and the family as a whole.

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Lakshmi is elaborately celebrated in Bengal during and after Durga Puja (September–October). She is worshipped at individual homes as well as in community associations and organizations. People worship Lakshmi at home by purchasing small images of her or in the form of an earthen plate with the seated image of the Goddess painted on it. It is then installed in the house, and the floor is decorated with small footprints using rice flour (symbolizing Lakshmi’s footsteps), starting from the main entrance and leading to every room in the house. The Goddess is worshipped during the night with lights, incense, flowers, and songs. Semontee Mitra See also: Hinduism: Festivals Further Reading Foulston, Lynn, and Stuart Abbott. Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2009. Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

MARRIAGE In Hinduism, marriage is considered to be a solemn union between a man and a woman that has been predetermined in heaven and happens by the grace of God/ Goddess. It is the destiny of every male and female. Once married, the relationship between the husband and wife is considered to last not only for this life but also for the next seven lives. According to Hindu scriptures, one of the important goals of marriage is the attainment of moksha (release from the cycle of birth and death). It is believed that by performing household duties and responsibilities faithfully and devotedly as husband and wife, men and women can attain freedom from all worldly things (also called samsara). The purpose of marriage is thus not limited to living a happy conjugal life but also includes reaching and fulfilling a higher goal. Women play a pivotal role in leading a conjugal life and have a set of roles and responsibilities as a wife and mother. Hindu Marriages

There are two types of marriage that are prevalent in India now: love marriage, which is also known as gandharva marriage, and arranged marriage. In love marriage, the man and woman date, and if they fall in love with each other, they may decide to get married with the blessings of their parents. If the parents disagree about the match, the couple will either go against their parents’ wishes and get married anyway or break up and marry a person of their parents’ choice. The outcome depends on the financial status of their families and on the region they come from; some parts of India have stricter marital regulations than others. In arranged marriages, parents and relatives find a suitable match, and the woman and man are given the opportunity to know and learn about each other; if they like each other and the families also like one another, the couple gets married. However, if the girl does not like her



Marriage

prospective husband, she has the right to stop the matter from going forward, and her wishes are honored. This is something that the Vedas emphasize. The Vedas give equal importance to men and women in terms of courtship and marriage. They provide proper guidelines regarding choosing one’s partner for a successful married life. According to the Vedas, both the bride and groom are free to choose their own partner for marriage, but the minimum age of the bride should be 16. The Vedas also emphasize that the husband and wife should have an equal level of education and a similar nature and perspective on life in order to live a compatible conjugal life. Much emphasis is laid on the exchange of correct information before deciding to get married. Information regarding the bride and groom was exchanged formally through parents and relatives. Sometimes information was also extracted secretly by sending marriage agents in disguise or by enquiring of the neighbors. This was an accepted norm for both parties. This tradition of exchanging information about the couple is still relevant in modern Indian society, but the role of marriage agents has diminished, and information gathering in disguise is not as prominent as it used to be. Parents and family play a significant role in marriages, but there is no evidence in the Vedas that parental or familial consent was necessary when the couple decided to get married. If the groom was not a desirable one, then he had to pay a bride price; similarly, girls with physical defects had to pay a dowry. Dowry System

The tradition of giving and accepting dowry in Hindu society is an old one, but it has changed and has taken a completely new form in modern-day society. In some traditions, the bride is considered to be Goddess Lakshmi and the groom Lord Vishnu. Traditionally, a separate puja was performed during the marriage rites where a set of new clothes and a donation of money was given to the groom as a token known as varadakshina. The quality and the amount of these gifts depended on the wish and the capacity of the bride’s family. The groom was supposed to accept whatever he was given along with the bride. The bride was the primary gift to the groom, as the bride’s father gave his daughter away to his son-in-law during kanyadaan, which literally means giving away of a daughter. However, with passing time, the token gifts began to be associated with family prestige and honor and, thus, have gained significant importance in the marriage ritual as dowry. The purity and solemnity of marriage has to some extent been reduced to a commercial transaction with the bride and groom being treated as pawns. There have been several incidents in India where newly wedded girls have been tortured or even killed because the groom’s parents were not satisfied with the dowry given during marriage. Despite the illegality of the dowry system, gifts are still exchanged between families in many parts of India. Roles and Responsibilities of Married Women

Once a woman is married, she is expected to perform her duties as a wife. She is expected to obey, follow, and support her husband in every possible way, even

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if that entails various sacrifices on her part, including giving up her wishes and desires. She is responsible for the spiritual and material well-being of her family. She is the one who is expected to take care of all the household chores, including cooking, cleaning, and laundry, and she must run the family household within the budget provided by her husband. To take care of the spiritual well-being of the family, married women are expected to participate in the worship of various male and female deities and to perform certain rituals. Rituals such as Karva Chauth, Teej, Lakshmi puja, and Shivratri are some of the most common rituals that married women perform for the well-being of their husband. These rituals are celebrated in different seasons in different parts of India; each of these rituals involves the wife fasting. Karva Chauth is primarily celebrated in the northern and western parts of India, especially Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat. On the day of Karva Chauth, married women fast for health, prosperity, and the long lives of their husbands. They start their fast at sunrise and break it at night after offering water to the moon. Teej celebrates the reunion of Lord Shiva and his wife, Goddess Parvati, who fasted for 108 years (according to scripture) to prove her love, devotion, and dedication to her husband Shiva before he accepted her as his wife. Teej is observed by married women to honor the devotion of Parvati and to seek blessings for their happy married life. Shivratri is another fasting ritual performed by both married and unmarried women. The sole purpose of performing Shivratri is to get a good husband like Lord Shiva (for unmarried girls) and seek blessings for the long life of husbands (for married women). Lakshmi puja is primarily performed for the wealth and prosperity of husbands and the material well-being of families. Married women also play a significant role in conducting rituals during auspicious occasions, including marriages, thread ceremonies, birth rituals, and house-warming rituals. However, the primary and obligatory duty of all married women is to bear children and continue the family line. Once married, women enjoy an increase in their social status, but once they conceive and give birth to a child, they enjoy an even higher status. Now they are mothers, the most respected and revered position in Hindu society, and are often compared to Goddesses. Married women are also expected to wear certain things that signify their marital status. On the day of marriage, the bride must wear 16 adornments (solah shringar) that are understood to lift the bride-to-be into the bliss of married life. These include sindoor, bindi (a round dot on the forehead), bangles, nose ring, earrings, mangalsutra (a specific type of necklace), mangtika (a decorative piece that rests on the forehead), kajal (kohl), mehendi (henna), armlet, haath phool (traditional jewelry worn on hands), hair accessories, waist accessory, payal (anklet), perfume, and bridal dress. However, the most common and the most important symbol of marriage that any married woman is expected to wear throughout her married life is the vermillion or sindoor. Women put it in the central parting of their hair. Sindoor is often accompanied by bindi, which symbolizes the third eye, a finger ring, and a pair of toe rings.



Matriliny

Women and Widowhood

Widowhood was regarded as a punishment for crime that the woman had committed in her previous life. Among some classes, the widow was expected to commit suicide or burn herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. This is no longer the case (see “Sati”). Until the mid-19th century, widows were not allowed to remarry. Widows were required to shave their head and eat only bland vegetarian meals. They were restricted from actively participating in family, community, and religious activities; they could be present in all functions and events, but they were not allowed to have an active role in them. They were also restricted from wearing colored sari and jewelry and indulging in any sort of makeup. Indo-Canadian writer and filmmaker Deepa Mehta’s Oscar-nominated film Water (2005) illustrates the plight of widows in the 1930s in India. While restriction and segregation of widows have significantly decreased in India, mistreatment of widows is still highly problematic, particularly in Orthodox Brahminical Hinduism. Though laws allow for remarriage, it is also generally still frowned upon. Restrictions regarding attire and food do not exist in the majority of India today, and active participation in festivals and other activities is prevalent. The role of women in marriages has significantly changed since the 1990s. As women gained personal empowerment, their wishes and decisions regarding marriage have gained priority. Women in modern India prefer to get married after they get a job. The average age of marriage has risen. The divorce rate has increased significantly. Women are more educated, empowered, financially settled, and independent and are thus challenging age-old traditions and societal stigmas within Indian society. Semontee Mitra See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Caste; Devadasis; Draupadi; Festivals; Fundamentalism; Gurus and Saints; Household Shrines; Ideals of Womanhood; Pilgrimage; Radha and Gopi Girls; Sacred Texts on Women; Sati; Stage-of-Life Rituals; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Dummett, Mark. “Not So Happily Ever After as Indian Divorce Rate Doubles.” BBC News (New Delhi), January 1, 2011. Kumbhare, Arun R. Women of India: Their Status since the Vedic Times. New York: iUniverse, 2009. Roy, Manisha. Bengali Women. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

M AT R I L I N Y In Indian landscapes, many societies and tribes have been predominantly womencentric. For instance, the Khasi tribes of modern Assam—who trace descent from mythical female ancestresses and are now appropriated as part of Hindu culture— follow a matrilineal pattern of society where property rights, ritual ceremonies, and household functions are controlled by women. They worship their primal ancestress and her brother. Women occupy a central position in religious rituals

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and ceremonies owing to the absence of male members at home. In a Khasi family, a young daughter is said to “hold” the religion, and thereby she owns a major share of the household property. If a couple fails to produce a daughter, they will adopt one. The maternal clan is termed motherhood (mahari). Their matrilocal family consists of a mother, her unmarried children, and her married daughters and their husbands. The female who is the head of a family is called kyawbei tynnei (mother of the root) or kangap (honey or the sweet one). Property is passed on from a mother to her daughters, and all earnings are managed by the head woman, though men also hold a share. Their marriage is primarily matrilocal. After marriage, a husband stays in his wife’s house. In the Indian context—as in tribal societies—a strict form of matrilineal households was a predominant part of Nair communities in modern Kerala before modern colonialism termed it as a primitive form of human development. With the passage of time and with modernization, the male members of the community migrated less, and a shift in power from women to men is visible. A close study of living societies such as the Khasi and the Nair reveals matriarchal traits such as matrilocality, matrilineal descent and inheritance, disapproval of paternity, worship of the Mother Goddess, priestesses, sexual freedom, woman headship, and respect for freedom. It is believed that Lord Parasurama populated Kerala with Brahmins (i.e., the Nambudiris) and created the Nair community for their service. On the Nairs he bestowed the marumakkattayam or matrilineal way of family and ownership. The Creator God, it is believed, strictly prohibited the formal marriage of Nair women so that they could satisfy the Nambudiris. The inheritance of the Nairs is dependent on the taravad, the matrilocal joint family. In a taravad, members are chiefly from a common ancestress. Property is jointly held by all members of a taravad, and women could exercise a degree of freedom in choosing partners. Since the Nair community is matrilineal and not matriarchal, the eldest male member, often the maternal uncle, has a say over household issues. In principle, in most such Hindu societies where a degree of female dominance is visible, the maternal uncle plays a crucial role in decision making. Invading Aryans in Indian landscapes created male deities and converted Hindu Goddesses to roles as consorts, handmaids, occasional challengers, and playmates to demigods. The Mother Goddess and her terrestrial counterparts, the powerful mothers, form the core of what is now called Hinduism. The female principle has been an essence of Hindu culture. The patriarchal religions of the invaders and settlers, such as Aryans, Scythians, Muslims, and later the British, was gradually imposed on this feminine matrix. The clarion call of “Hail, Mother!” or “Vande Mataram”—popularized during the Indian nationalist movement of the 19th century, or its religious alternative “Jai Mata Di”—signifies a primordial woman power being idealized in the Hindu nationalist struggle for freedom. When the Indian civilization started flourishing, the first worship was directed to the Mother Goddess. The worship of the serpent (chthonic and earth-creeping), the cow (food), and the bull (fertility) expresses that Hinduism, in its earliest form, is to some extent female centered. The archeological findings at Mahenjodaro and Harappa



Matriliny

and the aspects of Indus Religion—later appropriated as Hinduism—reveal that a female principle forms the ethos of Indian civilization. Devi—the feminine principle—is the creatrix of the universe. Devi is one of the five principal deities in Hinduism; the four remaining deities are Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesh, and Surya. Each God has his consort, but the Goddess is worshipped in her own right. She has various forms, such as Kali, Durga, Parvati, Sati, Maheswari, and so on. Each has her particular approaches and significances. Predominant among them is the status of Kali, a spiritual divinity who is regarded as the mother of mothers and who stands for love, compassion, supremacy in sexual activities, and destruction of evil, as is suggested by the iconography. Her ritual song shows her as “terrible-faced and of fearful aspect.” Kali’s “upper right hand makes the symbol of fearlessness-assurance, and her lower right hand makes a gesture of conferring boons” (Kinsley 1975, 183). Kali has a smiling face, and blood flows from the corners of her mouth, which makes her lips glisten. She stands on Shiva, who lies like a corpse beneath her. In such iconography, Kali wears a garland of the skulls of her bhaktas (devotees) and dances on Shiva’s corpse. While copulating, it is Kali who remains on top, and in iconography the phallus descends from her into Shiva rather than the other way around. With the rise of Tantrism in Hinduism, the Goddess became more popular than at any point since the early medieval period (from the seventh century CE onward). In many Tantric texts, Kali is the supreme deity. In the Nirvana-Tantra, the Gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva are said to arise from her. In the Ramayana, Sita is described as being born in the furrow of Mother Earth. The iconographies of Goddesses on the ruins of the Indus valley and in the 64 Yogini temples are manifestations of the tradition of the femalecentric societies. Gradually, with colonization, modernization, and material progress, patriarchal patterns of society have become the norm. Yet worship of the Goddess continues. Religious preachers such as Ramprasad Sen (1718–1775) and Sri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) approached the Goddess through self-surrender. Indian nationalist leaders like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894), Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), and, later, Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1949), were also influenced by the concept of the Mother Goddess. Through their devotion to the Goddess, they ventured to achieve a symbiotic relation of the male and the female aspects of reality for triumphing over physical, social, and moral boundaries to release India from the bondage of British rule. Akshaya K. Rath See also: Hinduism: Devi; Durga and Kali; Tantra; Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies Further Reading Bachofen, Johann Jakob. Das Mutterrecht. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010. Briffault, Robert. The Mothers. 3 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1934. Crooke, William. Religion and Folklore of North India. Delhi: Liberty Press, 1968. First published 1896 by Pataudi House (Delhi). Goettner Abendroth, Heide. Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

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James, E. O. The Cult of the Mother Goddess: An Archaeological and Documentary Study. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959. Kinsley, David. “Freedom from Death in the Worship of Kali.” Numen 22, no. 3 (1975): 183–207. Namjoshi, Suniti. The Mothers of Maya Diip. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Women’s Press, 1989.

PILGRIMAGE Paying homage to sacred sites through pilgrimage is part of all sects of Hinduism: Vaishnavism, Shaktism, Tantra, and Shaivism. Within the Hindu tradition, pilgrimage is called tirtha-yatra, which means “taking a journey to river fords.” Certain rivers, fords, caves, mountains, and groves are considered to be imbued with sacred powers. These natural sacred sites have long been associated with Goddess in her many and various forms, and women’s rituals around birth, menstruation, pregnancy, sex, life, and death are often performed here. Countless shrines and temples to specific deities attract millions of devotees each year. Some of the most popular pilgrimage sites are places connected to Goddess, and women often make up the majority of pilgrims. Some pilgrimage places are a focal point for Hindus all over South Asia, while others are more local and attract visitors from that area’s inhabitants. Regardless of whether pilgrims travel thousands of miles or a few footsteps, alone or with the masses, these sacred places are repositories of spiritual and religious knowledge and ritual tradition that are open to both women and men. Some pilgrimages are to be taken at a certain time of year—for example, every autumn during the annual nine-night Durga festival in some parts of South Asia, married women will make a pilgrimage back to their home village, town, or city to participate in the festival rituals with their birth family. Other pilgrimages are performed when one has a specific request or vow one wishes to offer in exchange for spiritual and/or worldly benefits. For example, women make pilgrimages to specific locations known for certain powers that will aid them in conceiving a child, finding a husband, healing a loved one from disease, or bringing general protection or wealth to the family. Often pilgrimages are undertaken according to different phases of the lunar cycle, with the main ritual beginning or culminating in a full or new moon. Both the new and full moon have earlier connections to earth-based and fertility rituals and are associated with women’s reproductive and menstrual cycles. There are two main categories of intention in pilgrimage. The first involves a more specific and mundane motive. It usually includes prayers for a blessing, help, success, conception of a child, or protection. It can involve a specific rite of passage, such as a child’s first haircut, menarche, marriage, pregnancy, and birthing rites. Other societal passages from childhood into adulthood or any experience in which one undergoes deep transformation are occasions for metaphorically or physically taking a pilgrimage. The pilgrim takes or makes a vow or vrata to focus her intention and strengthen her commitment toward achieving her desired result. Vows are also expressed during pilgrimage through sacrifices like fasting, monetary offerings, and animal sacrifice.



Pilgrimage

The second category of intention focuses on achieving religious or spiritual merit and alleviating the effects of karma. Some pilgrimages are performed merely to deepen one’s connection and reverence for a deity or to one’s spiritual path. Often darshan is the most important goal for the pilgrim. Darshan is a Hindu term that describes the act of the pilgrim seeing and being seen by the deity and the exchange of energy and power that occurs there. According to the Hindu tradition, to fulfill one’s spiritual destiny, there are various paths the practitioner can follow. These paths have generally been lived out by men, but there are women (sannyasins) who renounce the world after having completed their household duties. There are many pilgrimage sites and festivals householder women participate in throughout their life as well. The practice of pilgrimage follows four dominant ideas within Hindu philosophy that are attributed to attitudes toward life: dharma (work, duty, virtue), artha (material gain, worldly success), kama (love, pleasure, desire), and moksha (liberation). Dharma, artha, and kama all lead one to the final stage of liberation—moksha. Some of the most potent pilgrimage places are the Shakti pithas (seats or altar) sacred to the Divine Mother that are embedded in the Indian landscape. Legends around these sites can be found in the Puranas and Tantras. The stories and number of actual pithas vary, although 52 is the number most commonly mentioned. According to the myths and legends, the pithas indicate the places where parts of the Goddess’s body fell after being dismembered. One of the most powerful sites is in Assam at the Kamakhya temple, where the Goddess’s yoni is said to have fallen. In addition to Assam being a sacred destination all year round, every autumn a special festival called Ambuvaci, celebrating the Goddess’s menses (the water at her shrine turns red every year at this time), attracts millions of yoginis, yogis, and Goddess devotees. Pilgrimage to the River Ganges is one of the most important a Hindu can make. Taking a ritual bath in the Ganges is said to clear away karmas as well as grant both Hindus partake in a ritual bath in the River Ganges. women and men who die near its Personified in sacred texts and art as Goddess Ganga, banks liberation. The entire city the river is an important pilgrimage site. (Aliaksandr of Benares/Varanasi is considered Mazurkevich/Dreamstime.com)

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one of the most important pilgrimage sites in India. The nearby Vindhyachal temple is another popular pilgrimage site connected to the Goddess. It is located where the Vindhya mountains meet the southern shore of the Ganges and is a popular destination for female devotees of the Goddess Vindhyachal (a form of Durga). Certain pilgrimage routes connect different temples and shrines through a route that creates a geometric design or yantra, often a symbol of Goddess. In looking at the history and longevity of worship of specific pilgrimage places and routes, we often find a direct association with the natural landscape and women’s bodies and life rituals. Laura Amazzone See also: Christianity: Pilgrimage; Hinduism: Bhakti; Draupadi; Durga and Kali; Marriage; Renunciation; Saraswati; Shakti; Stage-of-Life Rituals; Tantra; Islam: Pilgrimage; Spirituality: Pilgrimage, Goddess Further Reading Amazzone, Laura. Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power. Baltimore: Hamilton Books, 2010. Bhardwaj, Surinder Mohan. Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India: A Study in Cultural Geography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

PRAKRITI In Hindu religious texts, including the Puranas, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the sutras, all the Goddesses are associated with three significant eternal principles: shakti (energy), prakriti (primary matter or nature), and maya (illusion). This association establishes a relationship between female divinities and their creative powers. The word pra means “beginning,” and krit means “creation, natural, or original.” Thus, prakriti means a natural, original, primordial state in which all creations are found. The opposite of prakriti is vikriti, which means anything that has been modified or altered and is not in its original form. Prakriti thus signifies eternal and original, while vikriti symbolizes modification, an altered state. However, prakriti is also considered mutable and can undergo modifications for the sake of diversification. The concept of prakriti originated from the Samkhya school of Hinduism, one of the oldest schools of Hindu philosophy, whose ideas, concepts, and theories are a significant part of Hindu ideology. According to the Samkhya school of thought, every life originates from two basic principles: purusha (consciousness) and prakriti (primordial matter or nature or unconscious). Purusha is the individual soul, and prakriti is the major element that activates the soul. The word purusha literally means “man or primordial male,” of which prakriti is the female counterpart, creative energy. Purusha would not have existed without prakriti. Prakriti is composed of three major attributes (gunas): sattva (purity and goodness—the illuminating/creative principle), rajas (activity and passion—the energetic/preservative principle), and tamas (darkness and dullness—the destructive principle). These three gunas determine the characteristics of all living souls. For example, an enlightened spiritual man will have more of sattva than rajas or tamas,



Prakriti

while a lazy person will have more of rajas than the other gunas, and a wicked person will have an abundance of tamas. Thus, prakriti is the determining factor of every individual soul or purusha. In addition, some Hindu scriptures have mentioned two aspects of prakriti: sambhuti and ashambhuti. Sambhuti is something that can be manifested, while ashambhuti cannot be manifested. It is also said that the subtle parts of prakriti, including mind, ego, and intelligence, belong to ashambhuti, while the sense and body organs are considered sambhuti. Thus, prakriti is not just the physical world that we see but also our very senses, our thoughts, our memories, our intelligence, and our desires. Thus, purusha is pure consciousness, while prakriti is every manifestation of consciousness, whether conscious or unconscious. It is believed that every individual soul is trapped in this material world because of prakriti and that to attain moksha, liberation, one must escape the bondage represented by prakriti. Therefore, prakriti has negative connotations as well. However, when prakriti is associated with certain Goddesses—including Durga, Parvati, Radha, and Saraswati—it reflects only positivity. For instance, Parvati is often identified as Prakriti while Shiva is Purusha. Parvati as Prakriti represents the basic quality of nature to manifest itself in concrete forms and individual beings. Parvati is also identified as Shakti, and, as a combination of both Prakriti and Shakti, it is believed that Shiva must either set Parvati in motion or at least make her act according to his own wishes and desires. Simultaneously, Shiva is able to express himself and his creation only through and because of Parvati; without her, Shiva would have remained inactive and inert. Or in other words, both Purusha and Prakriti are interdependent and cannot exist without each other. Saraswati’s association with Prakriti is obvious. Saraswati is always depicted as pure and transcendent. Her appearance is white like snow, and she shines like the moon. Her attire and her body are white, signifying purity and transcendence. These associations are in keeping with the sattva guna, which symbolizes purity and creativity. Radha’s association with Prakriti, on the other hand, is different from that of Saraswati. Lord Krishna, Radha’s consort as well as Purusha, stirs Radha to evolve into various forms. Several passages of Brahma Purana compare Radha to clay that Krishna as the potter molds to create different forms and structures. Durga’s association with Prakriti is more complex than that of any other deity. Her association with both Prakriti and Maya sometimes connotes negative overtones. As Prakriti and Maya, Durga is conceived as “the great power that preoccupies individuals with phenomenal existence or as the cosmic force that impels even the gods to unconsciousness and sleep” (Kinsley 1988, 135). However, it becomes complicated when both positive and negative aspects of Prakriti and Maya are infused with Durga, resulting in a positive dimension. Durga is the Creatrix as well as the Created. The emphasis here, when associated with Prakriti, is not the world she created but Durga as the basis of all things. Durga as Prakriti is the physical world as well as the inherent rhythm within the world, shaping the world through its manifestations. Semontee Mitra

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See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Durga and Kali; Radha and Gopi Girls; Sacred Texts on Women; Saraswati; Shakti Further Reading Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pintchman, Tracy. The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

RADHA AND GOPI GIRLS The gopı-s, in Vaishnava (Vishnu-worshipping) Hindu traditions, were the young women of Vrindavan famous for their unconditional devotion (bhakti) to the God Krishna, as described in the Bhagavata Purana (8th–12th centuries; Bryant 2007). Although the gopı-s are nameless and abstract in the Purana, later writers embellished them with names and personalities. The most important became Radha, who appears first in the writings of the 12th-century poet Jayadeva and was notably elaborated by Vidyapati (14th century) and Candidas (15th century). The Purana describes how Krishna, who spent his youth as a cowherd in Vrindavan, played his flute in the forest at night and lured the women away from their husbands and fathers to join him in the rasa lila—the Dance of Divine Love. In Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, Radha pines for the love of Krishna and struggles with her jealousies and discouragement when he leaves her side to engage in dalliances with the other gopı-s. In the end, Krishna returns to Radha as the one nearest his heart. The gopı-s were always used by Vaishnava teachers as models of devotion to God, but Jayadeva’s Radha became especially popular. As a married woman, her liaison with Krishna transgressed traditional morality, but that transgression symbolized absolute devotion prepared to lose even honor and virtue for the sake of union with God. In this way, Radha entered the teachings of the gurus Nimbarka (probably 13th century), Vallabhacharya (1479–1531), Caitanya Mahaprabhu (1486–1534), and Swaminarayan (1781–1830) and inspired many female devotees to spurn social expectations. The poet Mı-ra- Ba-i (16th century), for example, rejected marriage to devote herself to Krishna, claiming to be a reincarnation of Radha’s friend and advisor, the gopı- Lalita. Vaishnava teachers also used the implicit threat of separation involved in an illicit union. In classical Sanskrit literature, fear of separation was held to intensify love; theologically, it became a metaphor for the nondualism taught by the dominant schools. Because the devotee is identical with, but also distinct from, God, there is a pain of separation even in union, and the Vaishnava sages taught that the highest devotion lay not in union but in the fear of separation that follows it, perfectly symbolized by Radha’s position as a married woman meeting her lover clandestinely. As these teachings developed, Krishna’s dalliances with other gopı-s and his eventual return to Radha were taken as a metaphor for the human soul’s wandering and eventual return to God. This reversed Radha and Krishna’s roles—a tendency supported by such poetic conceits as Vidyapati’s claim that the two lovers “are one another” (Dimock and Levertov 1967, 15) and Candidas’s assurance to Radha



Renunciation

that “without your love he [Krishna] could not live a moment” (49). In eastern India especially, it was believed that Radha controlled Krishna with her love (Rosen 2002), and she, as the one who enchants Krishna (who enchants the world), was therefore regarded as the supreme manifestation of Godhead—the position usually held by Krishna himself. Traditional interpretations of the Purana taught that Krishna sported with the gopı-s as reflections of himself, but from the 16th century on, teachers in Manipur, Bengal, and Orissa transferred this concept to Radha, seen as the source from which the other gopı-s emanated. The Gaudiya Vaishnava sect identified Radha as the Shakti of Krishna—the essential energy without which he would be powerless—a conception still reflected in the folk dances of Manipur, in which both Radha and Krishna are sometimes represented by the same female dancer. In this tradition, Radha and Krishna comprise the supreme manifestation of divinity only when taken together, and veneration is often toward both in the form of a single God/Goddess called RadhaKrishna. Because the Gaudiya sect forms the lineage of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, this is the understanding of Radha most common outside India. Though Radha’s relationship with Krishna remains the focus of most religious ritual related to her, she is now commonly accepted as a deity in her own right, and her relationships with the other gopı-s are the focus of many important modern customs as well, such as the vowed friendships, or sakhi, undertaken by women in parts of northern India. Race MoChridhe See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Gurus and Saints; Marriage; Sacred Texts on Women; Shakti Further Reading Bryant, E. F. Krishna: A Sourcebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Dimock, E. C. Jr., and D. Levertov. In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Rosen, S. The Hidden Glory of India. Los Angeles: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 2002. Schweig, G. M. Dance of Divine Love: The Rasa Lila of Krishna from the Bhagavata Purana, India’s Classic Sacred Love Story. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

R E N U N C I AT I O N Hindu renunciation refers to a broad set of practices most often categorized under the term asceticism. These practices, regardless of the practitioner’s gender, may include various modes of fasting, celibacy, and the renunciation of home life—a reference to common forms of domestic companionship, shelter, access to money, and all manner of other comforts. Both males and females must undergo a symbolic death under the tutelage of a guru to mark this renunciation; however, female renouncers require permission from family members first. They also travel less frequently than their male counterparts and tend to live permanently in religious institutions. Otherwise, breathing and body control exercises, limited diets (either by eating one meal per day, eating only at a certain time, or restricting certain foods

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by color, source, etc.), pilgrimage, and spiritual learning are expected of both men and women. Interestingly, despite the similarities in practice, female renouncers are referred to as “mother” by both the community and fellow ascetics, while male renouncers do not share a comparable title. In contrast to the many studies of Christian female renouncers, scholars of Hinduism have only recently begun to address Hindu female renunciation. A number of factors account for this disinterest. First, female renouncers are a relatively small group with only a minimal presence in religious texts. Second, ambivalent attitudes toward these women among Hindus results in indifference to them and even the denial of their very existence, making their study particularly difficult. And third, female renunciation often includes different types of practices than male renunciation, which scholars have had difficulty recognizing and categorizing. As a result of these factors, while female renouncers certainly exist, they are generally viewed as anomalous rather than typical of Hindu religious practice (Khandelwal 2004). Accounts of female renunciation in core religious texts are uneven at best. The Upanishads, which reveal the growing popularity of renunciation between the sixth and third centuries BCE, provide evidence that a small percentage of women and girls practiced renunciation during this period (Denton 2004, 2). Yet, they are also inconsistent as to whether it was appropriate for women to become renouncers (Khandelwal 2004). The Dharmashastras, on the other hand, a diverse body of sacred law books, present a much clearer mandate for women. With some exceptions, women are considered ineligible for renunciation (Olivelle 1984) because of their ties to household duty. While there is clear textual evidence that female renouncers existed, scholars have had difficulty in locating and studying these women. Both Clementine-Ojha and Denton, for example, note similar experiences in which locals denied the very existence of female renouncers. Both suggest that part of the problem is rooted in categorization—primarily the fact that there is not a single word or title that refers to female renouncers as well as the fact that should these women be seen in public, they are often mistaken for widows (Denton 2004). The former issue speaks to the fact that renunciation takes on many different practices that in turn are associated with different terms: sannyasini, yogini, and brahmacharini are just a few. The latter highlights the fact that many (though not all) female renouncers exhibit similar external traits of widows, including white robes, shaved heads, and no bangles. Ultimately, the denial of the existence of these women also speaks to orthodox emphasis placed on traditional identification of women with the household and the idea that female spiritual pursuits should be rooted in family life. Female renunciation is clearly constrained by powerful social and cultural institutions. Whereas male renouncers may wander naked in isolation, women are compelled to wear robes (usually in white or saffron) and either travel in groups or reside in ashrams that support female monasticism. This is due to concerns for the women’s safety as well as expectations of modesty. There is no such concern for male renouncers. Khandelwal provides various examples of how women, because of these constraints, operate in the world differently than their male counterparts. In the case of brahmcharinis (devoted female students), for example, they are



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expected to share their spiritual knowledge with the community, in contrast to brahmacharyas (devoted male students) who retain their knowledge for personal spiritual development (Khandelwal 2001). In general, then, female renouncers have greater interactions in the world as a result, yet ironically they are much less visible to the interested scholar. T. Nicole Goulet See also: Hinduism: Gurus and Saints; Pilgrimage; Sacred Texts on Women; Stage-of​ -Life Rituals; Vedic Hinduism; Yoginis Further Reading Clementin-Ojha, Catherine. “Outside the Norms: Women Ascetics in Hindu Society.” Economic and Political Weekly 23, no. 18 (1988): WS34–WS36. Denton, Lynn Teskey. Female Ascetics in Hinduism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Khandelwal, Meena. “Sexual Fluids, Emotions, Morality: Notes on the Gendering of Brahmacharya.” In Celibacy, Culture, and Society: Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence, edited by Elisa Janine Sobo and Sandra Bell, 157–79. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Khandelwal, Meena. Women in Ochre Robes: Gendering Hindu Renunciation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Olivelle, Patrick. “Renouncer and Renunciation in the Dharmasastras.” In Studies in Dharmasastra, edited by R. W. Lariviere, 81–152. Calcutta: Firma, 1984.

SACRED TEXTS ON WOMEN Hindu sacred texts contain an abundance of female figures both as deities and as mortal women. The number of male and female deities is almost equal, and they are worshipped with equal devotion and reverence by Hindu men and women, along with numerous strong and powerful female characters. But when drawing a parallel between divine females and earthly females in the texts, women are perceived paradoxically. They are seen as Goddesses who are powerful and creatrixes of all creations as well as destroyers and bringers of misfortune. The sacred scriptures portray important female figures, both divine beings and earthly women, in different and evolving ways, through the Vedic, classical, medieval, and modern ages. Medieval and modern eras have witnessed minor changes in the mode of worship; however, belief, practice, and centrality of Goddess worship in Hindu tradition have gained more importance in the modern age than in any previous era. In Hindu tradition, most of the Goddesses are associated with a male consort. Similarly, mortal women are rarely imagined as single, independent, and without a male partner. Goddesses in Hindu tradition are typically linked to a male figure as mother, wife, daughter, or even sister, which “suggests that her very identity rests on her relationship with males, with rare exceptions” (Bose 2010, 14). However, the concept of Hindu Goddesses is neither stagnant nor static; from the Vedic age to modern times, much thought and imagination have been put into the evolution and formation of Goddesses who are considered role models for earthly women.

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The Vedic Age and the Devine Feminine: Vedas and Brahmanas

The oldest sacred texts in Hinduism are the Vedas. In the Vedic age, while Goddesses were important, they did not play a central role and were cast at the periphery of the divine world (Bose 2010). The sages and philosophers whose thoughts constitute the sacred texts conceptualized Hindu Goddesses with characteristics, functions, and attributes that they considered to contain the essence of womanhood, which included not only the life-giving and creative powers of women but also the fierce, malicious, dangerous, and destructive ones, which, if not controlled, might destroy a family or even society. However, the Vedas emphasized mostly the positive, benevolent, and life-giving traits of the Goddesses. Some of the main Goddesses of the Vedic age were Usas, Prithvi, Aditi, Saraswati, and Vac. The Vedic Age and the Earthly Feminine: Vedas and Upanishads

In addition to the Goddesses, the Vedas portray earthly women in a high social position. According to Rig Veda, women should be leading or ruling a kingdom and should have equal rights to ancestral properties. Atharva Veda emphasizes women’s intelligence and scholarly abilities and prescribes that they should be a part of the legislative body of the kingdom. When married, women should have equal rights and duties within the family. Yajur Veda even mentions that scholarly women purify the lives of ordinary people with their intellect and efficiently manage society with their knowledge and actions (see Kumbhare 2009). Women enjoyed the highest level of respect and freedom as well as protection and safety. Although men as husbands and fathers dominated the society, women played an important role as they were the ones who gave birth and maintained family life. Their primary role was that of wife and mother. They were also educated and well versed and took part in various scholarly discussions and debates. It was also necessary for women as wives to participate in sacrificial rituals along with their husbands: “a ritual without a wife is not a ritual” (Taittiriya Brahmana 2.2.2.6; see also Satapatha Brahmana 1.3.1.12). Widow remarriage was well accepted in the society and was considered a norm. Women were encouraged to pursue spiritual knowledge and wisdom, and there were women sages and rishis who revealed Vedic knowledge. Upanishads mention several scholarly women. While most of the teachers and the students were men, many females, such as Gargi, Maitreyi, Lopamudra, Apala, Ghosa, Aditi, Jabali, and Uma Himavati, were well known for their knowledge and wisdom. These included brahmavadinis who devoted their lives to the study of sacred texts, propounded the Vedas, and wrote Vedic hymns, as well as some who engaged in philosophical debates and discussions and provided guidance and counsel to men and women alike. Women of the Kshatriya (warrior) caste were trained in martial arts and arms and weaponry use and could choose to live freely as single women even after marriage. Contrarily, in some Upanishads, fathers and husbands are portrayed with immense control over women, and women are treated as objects and property. In Chandogya Upanisad, for example, Janasruti, a wise and rich father, gives away his daughter to Raikva, who was wiser and more knowledgeable than Janasruti,



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to acquire Raikva’s knowledge. The status of women declined after India was invaded by different cultures and ethnicities in the later Vedic period. Women were reduced from a position of high respect to objects of sexual pleasure, enjoyment, and   exploitation. More emphasis was laid on women’s dependence on men. They were also restricted from studying the Vedas, and the attainment of Vedic knowledge became exclusive to men. The Classical Age and the Divine Feminine: Puranas

In the classical age, female divinity rose to prominence in the Puranas. These new Goddesses played a huge role in determining gender roles for Hindu women. Though the Goddesses were rendered powerful, they were also depicted as perfect wives and mothers. Goddesses like Parvati as Sati appeared with idealized wifely attributes. Parvati’s myth celebrates her unflinching and selfless love and dedication for her husband, Lord Shiva. Though she is in no way a weak personality (she is often identified with Durga, who is the epitome of strength, power, and energy), her submission and dedication to her husband are emphasized. The majority of the Goddesses of this era represent various aspects of power or shakti or primal energy. The Great Goddess Durga is the best example of this. In the Puranas, Goddess Durga is depicted as an independent and most powerful divinity in her own right. Durga rose to prominence and acquired significance through different epics and Puranas, eventually becoming Supreme Goddess of the Hindu pantheon with powers to create as well as to annihilate. Nurturer and protector of the universe, Durga the Warrior Goddess is also known as Devi Mahatma and Mahamaya, the most powerful Goddess of the Hindu pantheon. Durga, with all her powers, faced the buffalo-headed demon Mahishasur and killed him on the battleground. As the protectress of the cosmos and destroyer of demons, Durga is often said to transcend the male deities when it comes to maintaining and restoring cosmic harmony and balance. Hindu thought has formulated another Divine Feminine, Goddess Kali, to express the opposing characteristics “from creation through sustenance to annihilation.” Kali embodies only the fury and destructive aspects of Durga. She can be compared to the Vedic Goddess Nirrti, but Kali’s annihilation ability is far more. Kali is strong, ruthlessly violent, independent, and a threat to both men and women (Anderson 2004, 38). Much like Goddess Durga, Goddess Kali is also a product of patriarchal thought; she is a patriarchal warning. Kali was first mentioned in Devimahatmya (sixth century CE). The iconography of Kali is terrifying. She is black in color with a bright red lolling tongue, and she wears a long skull-head garland around her neck. She has three red eyes and four arms carrying weapons and a slain demon head. She has long, dark, unkempt hair. Sometimes she is shown wearing a tiger skin around her waist, but usually she is naked with a girdle of human arms around her waist. Such characteristic features of Kali caught Hindu thinkers in a deep dilemma. On the one hand, her destructive traits were essential to destroy evil; while, on the other hand, she was given extreme power that was normally only enjoyed by men. This inversion of character traits gave rise to an urgent need to control such power and violence to make her a part of Hindu society. The best

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way to do that was to domesticate her, and she was thus portrayed as Lord Shiva’s wife (see Kinsley 1997). The Classical Age and the Earthly Feminine: The Epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata) and Manusmriti

While Goddesses Durga and Kali represent power and energy, the great epics of the classical era, Ramayana and Mahabharata, bring forth Sita and Draupadi as mortal incarnations of Sri/Lakshmi. Sita is distinguished by her tender nature and supreme devotion and loyalty toward her husband Rama in Ramayana. Draupadi is a rebellious character in Mahabharata who is the wife of the Pandavas, the five brothers of the Pandava family. Sita is the idealized version of a perfect wife who is regularly worshipped by Hindus. Her depiction as a mortal being in Ramayana, written by Valmiki, is slightly different from how she was and is revered. She is worshipped as a selfless, submissive, and devoted wife and is seen as a role model for married Hindu women. Valmiki portrayed her as an uncomplaining, unquestioning, and ever-compromising wife of Rama, but this portrait of her is not always meek and submissive; she is also strong and independent in her decision-making skills and one who never accepted injustice against her without protesting. Therefore, on the one hand, she is the victim of male patriarchy and feminine oppression, while on the other hand, she is the epitome of female power and determination.

Hindu Scriptures The following table is a breakdown of the major Hindu scriptures by ages and dates. Periods/Ages

Years in BCE and CE

Sacred Texts

Vedic Age

1500 BCE–500 BCE

Vedas: Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva Brahmanas: Five Brahmanas known as Satapatha Brahmana Upanishads

Classical Age

500 BCE–500 CE

Puranas: Eighteen Maha Puranas (divided into three categories—Shiva, Vishnu, and Brahma) and eighteen Upapuranas Epics: Mahabharata written by Veda Vyas and Ramayana written by Valmiki Bhagavad Gita Laws of Manu/Manusmriti Sutras

Medieval Age

500 CE–1500 CE

No new sacred books; scriptures were not written during these eras.

Modern Age

1500 CE–Present



Sacred Texts on Women

While Sita is seen as a more submissive and docile Hindu wife, Draupadi in Mahabharata is depicted as more openly rebellious and challenging to male patriarchy. She is very beautiful and extremely intelligent. She is married to five Pandava brothers, a reversal of the then societal norm of polygyny. She also does not accept patriarchal domination without protest. She takes issue with powerful men, challenges them, and responds fittingly. Manusmriti or The Laws of Manu is another text of the classical period that provides guidelines to women’s roles, functions, duties, behavior, and status in Hindu society. The authority and significance of this book is debatable and has been challenged by various scholars. Whatever the case, Manusmriti’s description of the role, duties, functions, and status of women is very stringent. For example, according to Manu, a woman must be protected by her father during her childhood, her husband after marriage, and her sons in old age, because she is never fit for independence (The Laws of Manu vol. 25, ch. 9, v. 3). He also mentions that women should be guarded against all evil inclination, no matter how trifling it might be, or else they would bring sorrow to families (v. 5). A woman can gain salvation only by her total devotion and obedience to her husband. These principles, though not literally followed, have made an impact on how women are viewed in Hindu society and the expected norms of female behavior. Medieval Age and Women

The medieval era witnessed a major development of temples across India, specifically in southern India. These temples had a major deity installed in each of them, and those became central to politics as well as religion, as different branches of Hinduism—Vaishnavism (worshippers of Lord Vishnu), Shaivism (worshippers of Lord Shiva), and Shaktism (worshippers of Goddess Durga and Kali)—developed. Texts from this era are mainly commentaries on the existing Hindu scriptures and on the existence of personal divinities. Sanskrit literature developed along with regional vernacular literature, especially Tamil, including literature by poet-saints. One of these was the female poet-saint called Andal or Antal. Andal is one of the 12 Alvar saints of southern India and the only female Alvar (Tamil poet-saints devoted to Lord Vishnu or his avatar Lord Krishna). Their songs speak of longing, ecstasy, and devotion. Thiruppavai and Nachiar Tirumozh are attributed to Andal and are still recited by devotees during the winter festival of Marghazi. In Thiruppavai, a collection of 30 verses, Andal expresses her unconditional love and devotion for Lord Krishna and her yearning to serve Krishna, which would give her happiness in this life and the afterlife. Nachiar Tirumozhi has 143 verses. It reveals Andal’s passionate longing for Krishna and includes erotic imagery of her mystical union with him. Modern Age and the Changing Roles of Divine and Earthly Feminine

The modern age has not seen many changes when considering the Divine Feminine. Goddesses like Durga, Kali, Saraswati, and Lakshmi are still worshipped independently and are some of the primary Goddesses of today’s society. Though worshipped independently, fierce, powerful, and destructive Goddesses like Durga

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and Kali are also revered as wife and mother when their strength is mellowed down so that they fit into the general role of womanhood. This depiction occurs through iconography, various myths, legends, folk tales, and folk songs. Life for mortal women in this period has changed immensely. Women’s role and status in Hindu society is more in line with the Vedic age than the classical era. Not always dependent on their male partners, women are still bound by their household and familial duties. Women are educated, and a large number of women are financially independent. Widow remarriage is accepted in the society, and the divorce rate in India is on the rise. Women enjoyed equal religious rites in the Vedic age, and people of modern India are trying to reintroduce that age-old tradition to Hindu society. This includes a renewal of women’s reading or reciting sacred texts, and many women have taken up priesthood as a profession. No Hindu scripture ever prohibited women from becoming priests, although men dominated the profession. Today, while women are still at the periphery when it comes to participation in religious rituals, a few institutes in India now train women as priests to perform rites and rituals of worship, initiation, and marriage, as well as to conduct ritual sacrifices and funeral rites. Women also learn Sanskrit and verses from religious texts. Women in modern India, postindependence (1947), have not only trained as priests but have also held various high positions in the society, including as prime minister, president, chief minister, ambassador, and other political and business positions. Ironically, at the same time, the society has witnessed dowry deaths, rapes, child marriage, and female feticide. Conclusion

Hindu philosophers have conceptualized Goddesses in such a way that their primal nature is sublimated and channeled into beneficial roles that strengthen and reinforce societal norms; for example, Saraswati is worshipped as Goddess of Knowledge and Learning, Lakshmi as Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity, and Durga as a mother and wife and also a leader and fighter. There is no denying the fact that the portrayal of the Goddesses and other female figures in Hindu scriptures is a formulation of the male patriarchy with strong attempts to describe and envision desired behavior in women with varying capacities. Women, both divine and earthly, have been conceptualized not from a female perspective but from men’s vantage point, which remains at the core of all Hindu scriptures. Semontee Mitra See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Caste; Devi; Draupadi; Durga and Kali; Gurus and Saints; Ideals of Womanhood; Lakshmi; Marriage; Saraswati; Sati; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Anderson, Leona M. “Women in Hindu Tradition.” In Women and Religious Traditions, edited by Leona M. Anderson and Pamela Dickey Young, 1–44. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Bose, Mandakranta. Women in the Hindu Tradition: Rules, Roles and Exceptions. New York: Routledge Hindu Studies Series, 2010.



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Buhler, George, trans. The Laws of Manu. Sacred Books of the East. Vol. 25. Chapter 9. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886. Coburn, Thomas B. Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devimahatmya and a Study of Its Interpretation. Delhi: Sri Satguru, 1992. Foulston, Lynn, and Stuart Abbott, eds. Hindu Goddesses: Beliefs and Practices. Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2009. Ganguli, Kisari Mohan, trans. The Mahabharata. 1883 and 1896. http://www.sacred-texts. com/hin/m01/index.htm. Kinsley, David. Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Kumbhare, Arun R. Women of India: Their Status Since the Vedic Times. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009. Pintchman, Tracy. Women’s Lives, Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

SAINTS See Gurus and Saints S A R A S WAT I The contemporary Saraswati is the Hindu Goddess of Learning and is particularly associated with the arts, music, and spiritual wisdom. As such, she is a favorite among both male and female students and can be found worshipped in libraries and universities as well as at temples and festivals. Prominent in her iconography is a book and a lute or vina, which denote her spiritual and artistic knowledge. She is usually cloaked in white while seated on a white lotus to symbolize her spiritual purity. While she is no domestic divinity, she is often represented as the wife or daughter of Brahma, the Creator God, and is associated with vac (speech) and dhi (inspired thought). According to David Kinsley (2005), Saraswati is first found in the Rig Veda as the embodiment of the Saraswati River. He argues that as a river, she represents Saraswati, Hindu Goddess of learning, wisdom, music, the transition from ignorance to and art. She is shown with a musical instrument an enlightenment manifested in in two of her four hands, and with scriptures and a the fertility, riches, and purity of rosary in her other hands. (Wellcome Collection)

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running water. As Goddess, she was viewed as very powerful and uncontrollable due to her devastating floods. During this time, Saraswati was thought to give followers wealth, vitality, progeny (promise of generations to come), pleasure, fame, and protection in the form of shelter and/or mercy (55–57). As a river, Saraswati was also closely associated with Vedic sacrifice; devotion toward Saraswati was the realization of the practitioner’s piety. Even at this early time, she was closely associated with Vac, a Goddess in the Vedas who was associated with speech (Pintchman 1994). Saraswati’s association with the river diminished over time, as her identification with Vac became more pronounced. As time progressed, Saraswati became increasingly viewed as the embodiment of Vac, a process that becomes evident in the Brahmanas (Vedic texts written after the Vedas). By the Puranas (later collections of legends and mythologies), stories appeared in which Saraswati is either born from Brahma or becomes his wife. It is at this time that she is also increasingly associated with culture (Kinsley 2005). Saraswati Puja (worship) occurs in January or February, ushering in the spring. Practitioners (both men and women) wear yellow clothing, and Saraswati is adorned in yellow to mark the occasion. At this time, yellow marigolds are also offered to her. In addition to her various regional festivals, Saraswati is invoked to bless small children before they start school for the first time. T. Nicole Goulet See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Festivals; Sacred Texts on Women; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Pintchman, Tracy. The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Valdiya, K. S. Saraswati: The River that Disappeared. Hyderabad, India: Universities Press, 2002.

S AT I The practice of sati (also called suttee) continues to be seen as one of the most controversial practices in the history of Hinduism and certainly among the most misogynistic. In this practice, it is expected that a devout Hindu widow commit suicide by immolating herself on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. Incidents of sati in India diminished after it was outlawed in the 20th century, but efforts to eradicate it entirely have failed. The word itself has come to mean a dutiful, virtuous, or good wife. Sati was historically seen as a requirement of a dutiful wife, particularly for women from the upper castes. According to traditional Hindu beliefs, the wife’s primary purpose is to serve her husband. If the husband dies prematurely, this signals that his wife somehow failed in this regard, and a noble suicide would be in order. A widow who performed sati was later admired for her self-sacrifice as a sati-mata, a sort of



Sati

deity or munificent spirit. To honor the sati-mata, shrines were often built where petitioners were allowed to make offerings in exchange for favors. Another perceived positive outcome of sati was the belief that a widow who committed sati would achieve moksha or liberation from the cycle of rebirth for both herself and her husband. There are others who see the purpose of sati as a way to relieve the financial burdens that would be placed on the surviving family of the husband. If the widow possessed sons, the sati might not be necessary. However, if there were no male offspring, the sati was viewed as almost a requirement, since no one would be able to financially support the widow. This has led in some cases to the murder of widows, who were forced onto the funeral pyre of the deceased husband and strapped down to prevent their escape. Sati is referenced in both religious scripture and historical documents. In ancient religious sources, sati is mentioned in the popular story of Shiva and his appropriately named wife, Sati, who was an earlier incarnation of Parvati. There are a few different versions of the story, but Shiva was insulted by Sati’s father, who refused to invite his son-in-law to a banquet. Despite protests from Sati, the father remained steadfast in his initial decision. This refusal caused Sati to burn in anger because her husband was insulted. Since Sati’s sacrifice exemplified the function of a dutiful wife, her name became associated with other acts of perceived wifely virtue, including the self-immolation of widows. Historically, sati is reported to have occurred during the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest of India in the fourth century BCE. It is discussed again in the ninth century CE by several Muslim writers. The reaction of Muslims to sati was not positive. During Mughal rule over India, the sultans would often attempt to dissuade widows from committing sati with promises of financial support. The use of dissuasion was a tactic also adopted by the British during their rule over India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, while the British did permit sati to continue, they imposed restrictions Hindu widow sings a devotional song near a Mayapur on it and attempted to ensure temple in West Bengal, India. While sati is now illegal in India, many widows still experience low social that the widow was not coerced. status and oppressive expectations, such as celibacy, It was not until 1829 that the plain clothing, one meal per day, and shaved or shortBritish passed a law prohibiting cropped hair. (Samrat35/Dreamstime.com)

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sati. Despite the law, sati continued in India for the rest of the colonial era and during the independence period. The practice once again garnered attention in the late 20th century when it took place in the tiny village of Deorala in northwestern India. In 1987, a young woman, Roop Kanwar, committed sati on her husband’s funeral pyre in front of thousands of spectators. The case was significant not only because it made headlines around the world but also because it was believed that Kanwar was forced onto the funeral pyre. The Indian government responded by instituting the Sati (Prevention) Act of 1987. However, despite the strict laws prohibiting this practice, there are reports that sati is still occurring sporadically in the 21st century. John Cappucci See also: Hinduism: Ideals of Womanhood; Marriage; Sacred Texts on Women; Stage-of-Life Rituals; Vedic Hinduism; Sikhism: Sikh Scriptures and Women Further Reading Fisch, Jörg. Immolating Women: A Global History of Widow Burning from Ancient Times to the Present. Translated by Rekha Kamath Rajan. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005. Lester, David. “Sati.” In Suicide and Culture: Understanding the Context, edited by Erminia Colucci and David Lester with Heidi Hjelmeland and B. C. Ben Park, 217–36. Cambridge, MA: Hogrefe, 2013. Mani, Lata. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine. Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman and David Gordon White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

SHAKTI Within Hinduism, Shakti is power, the primordial creative, sustaining, and destructive force of all existence. Although conceived as female in nature, Shakti is not an individual Goddess but rather a dynamic quality that all Goddesses and women (at least within the Shakta Tantric tradition) are said to possess. Unbridled, uncontainable, spontaneous, ecstatic, blissful, and fierce, Shakti is understood as flowing from manifestation to dissolution, as the power to give forth and to withdraw. Shakti is an ancient concept with pre-Vedic and prepatriarchal origins. Archaeological evidence traces Shakti to the Indus Valley Civilization (3500–1700 BCE), but the concept appears in other prehistoric cultures of western and central Asia. In India during the Vedic period, belief in and worship of Shakti’s all-pervading nature was driven underground. Shakti regained importance in classical and medieval Hinduism, where this primordial power is often personified as Devi and held in higher regard than male deities. Such epic texts as the Devi Bhagavata, Devi Purana, Kalika Purana, Markandeya Purana, and the Mahabhagavata Purana accept and worship Shakti as the Supreme Nature of Reality. From earliest times, the concept of shakti is found in fertility theories as well as reverence of the Divine as Mother of Nature and Cosmos. In the Rig Veda



Shakti

(ca. 1700–1100 BCE), the term shakti is not mentioned; however, various manifestations of Goddess in the Goddesses Ratri, Usas, Aditi, Prthivi, and Vac-Saraswati indicate her presence and influence that would later develop into the central figures of Shakti worship (Kali, Durga, Ambika, Uma, Lakshmi, Saraswati) that are worshiped today. These Goddesses express different manifestations of Shakti as a creative, life-giving, and destructive force. They are fields of consciousness related to different realms of existence. They embody the whole and fullness of the cycles. They have become anthropomorphized as a way to deepen our understanding of them through more human characteristics. Philosophical references in the later Shakta Upanishads and Tantras equate Shakti with Brahman. In these texts, one cannot separate the dynamic, allpervading nature of Brahman and Shakti as the fabric underlying all existence. References in the Shakta Upanishads and later Shakta Tantras describe Shakti’s independent, omnipotent nature and view the complementary receptive qualities of the masculine force as Shiva and “but a corpse” without Shakti’s activating power. Shakti is not the consort of Shiva; in the Tantras, they are conjoined and complementary energies of dynamism and action (Shakti) and receptivity and stillness (Shiva). In the epic Ramayana, Shakti does not have the independent status that we find in the later epics; however, she is nevertheless held in high regard. In the Mahabharata, Shakti once again regains the agency and importance that is evident in the prepatriarchal traditions. Here we find her having unconquerable power as Goddess Durga and the Matrikas. She is also referred to as Kalika, Ambika, Bhadrakali, Parvati, Mahadevi, and others. Shakti continues to gain importance in the puranic texts, the earliest of which, the Markandeya Purana (ca. 250–550 CE) with its 13 chapters called the Durga Saptasai and Devi Mahatmya, elaborate the primordial all-pervading power of Devi. Here Shakti is philosophically conceived as pure consciousness, the creator/ creatrix, preserver, and destroyer, the one and the many manifestations of Supreme Divinity. Both immanent and transcendent, illusive and manifest, moving and unmoving, Shakti is conceived as knowledge, will, and action behind all existence. In these texts, we find Goddess as Absolute Reality, and yet she incarnates from time to time to help the Gods to carry out her divine work. She also appears to help her devotees conquer the bonds of human suffering and the limitations of the physical realm to achieve liberation. In the Markandeya Purana, Shakti is identified with Prakriti, the natural sustaining power of existence. She takes on various roles as mother, nurturer, warrior, and lover to experience the lila (play) of her divine consciousness. In the Devi Bhagavat Purana, Shakti is divided into three forms or qualities of existence: sattva (purity), rajas (passion), and tamas (inertia). As Maha Saraswati, Maha Lakshmi, and Maha Kali, she brings the universe from creation to destruction and back to creation again. As Goddess, Shakti’s distinct iconographic forms express her multiple nature. She has both benevolent and pacific as well as wrathful, terrifying qualities. Her benevolent manifestations include Goddesses Uma, Gauri, Parvati, Lakshmi, and

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Saraswati, and her terrifying ones include Chamunda, Kali, Durga, the Mahavidyas, Yoginis, and Matrikas. In the Shakta Tantras, Shakti becomes Parashakti, the supreme reality who before manifesting through the physical world remains in a state of unmanifest repose. In this respect, she is ineffable and indescribable. She is worshiped as Mahamaya or Mahadevi in addition to the numerous epithets that emphasize the myriad facets of her all-pervading nature. The acknowledgment and worship of the nature of reality as female, as the mobilizing energizing primordial force called Shakti, speaks strongly to the inherently autonomous nature of women. This concept of divinity as female ultimately lies in the female nature and the biological reality of the female body, in particular the power of the womb. Today statues, yantras, and other iconic objects of Shakti worship are not only representations of Goddess and her ultimate power but rather are embodiments of her Shakti. Laura Amazzone See also: Buddhism: Female Divinities; Hinduism: Aditi; Devi; Durga and Kali; Lakshmi; Prakriti; Sacred Texts on Women; Saraswati; Vedic Hinduism; Yogini Further Reading Bhattacharyya, Narendra Nath. History of the Shakta Religion. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1996. Mookerjee, Ajit: The Feminine Force. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1988.

S TA G E - O F - L I F E R I T U A L S Hindus perform samskaras (life-cycle rituals) to express their devotion, to remove obstacles, and to bring blessings and good fortune. Samskaras mark the transition of a Hindu from one stage of life into the next and celebrate the achievement of a goal in Hindu life. These rituals purify and prepare the individual’s mind and body to become a full member of Hindu society. The rituals occur at home or at a local temple with relatives in attendance to witness. Each samskara coincides with one of the four ashramas or stages of life that every Hindu should go through to live a righteous life: brahmacharya (celibate student), grihastha (married householder), vanaprastha (forest dweller), and sannyasin (renouncer). Although these stages are largely geared toward men, women also participate in life-cycle rituals, transitioning through parallel stages of life—daughter, wife, mother, and widow. Most life rituals for women are transmitted to each generation through oral folk traditions that alter with time and vary from region to region in India. While there is a great diversity of samskaras due to the lack of a single religious text to standardize their performance and meaning, all samskaras can be divided into six primary types: prenatal, birth, childhood, educational, marriage, and death. All children, male and female, undergo prenatal, birth, and childhood rituals to invite prosperity and protection into their life. These rituals include conception rites, ja-tkarman (birth ceremonies), na-makaran.a (naming ceremony), annapra-s´ana (first solid food), and vidya-rambha (beginning of knowledge). Both mother and



Stage-of-Life Rituals

Hindu family and friends gather for a girl’s annapra- s´ana, the ceremony of a child’s first solid food. Rituals like this celebrate and support the girl or woman in her transition to the next stage of life. (Samrat35/Dreamstime.com)

father participate in these rituals, but the principal actions are done by a male relative such as a maternal uncle, since that individual is responsible for providing for and protecting the child until his or her respective marriage, when both girl and boy transition into adulthood. Although women are not the primary actors in prenatal, birth, childhood, and educational samskaras, their presence and participation is necessary for the accurate execution of the rituals. The first samskara is performed when a married couple decides to have a child. A mantra (verse) from the sacred text of the Upanishads is chanted to help the couple conceive. The birth of a daughter is auspicious, but not as much as a son’s, whose birth settles the debt every Hindu incurs at birth from his or her ancestors. Another prenatal samskara involves the pregnant wife parting her hair. Pregnancy is a joyous but dangerous and polluting time for a woman. To protect herself and her child from evil, a pregnant woman parts her hair to bring long life to her child and prosperity to her family. During her pregnancy, she should rest both physically and mentally with her husband caring for her. Pregnancy not only brings a child into the world but also marks the woman’s new, higher status as a mother in Hindu society. Parts of the ja-tkarman (birth ceremonies) prepare her for this new role. A few days before the child is born, the pregnant woman moves into a room in the house where the child will be delivered. This room is sanctified to protect the mother-to-be and her child from evil spirits. She is joined in this room by women who will care for her before, during, and

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after the delivery of the child. Many of these women are mothers themselves who share their experiences of giving birth to calm and guide the mother-to-be in her own delivery. During this time, these women also offer advice and explain the new expectations of the woman as a mother. Upanayana (initiation) ceremony starts the gender division in samskaras. For girls, the upanayana occurs at the time of their first menstruation. This ritual varies by region but usually includes the girl being restricted to a room away from the rest of her family’s household to preserve the purity of the home. Other women may visit her in this room. When she leaves the room, she takes a ritual bath and receives a feast. Her mother then takes her to a temple and the houses of older women to perform arati (offering of light), which signals her transition from girl to woman. Upon completing this upanayana, a woman may take on the sacred threads and be educated in the Vedas, but such a path was less common since it prevented women from being married. Marriage (viva-ha) is the most important samskara. Without marriage there are no children, a major goal for a Hindu. In marriage, both man and woman enter into the grihastha (married householder) stage. For the woman, marriage is a period of major change in her life. As she transitions from daughter to the higher status of wife, she becomes part of her husband’s family, which often requires her to move to his village and leave her family and friends. While the marriage ceremony includes many rituals, the most important for the bride occurs before that. Known as the mr.da-haran.a, sangeet, or matikor, this all-women ceremony is a night full of music and dancing where older women educate the bride-to-be about sex and other expectations of being a wife. The ceremony also includes rituals to bless the new couple with fertility, including smearing the bride with turmeric paste. The final samskara is the antyes.t.i (last sacrifice), which includes the s´ra-ddha (final rites). The body of the deceased is bathed and anointed before being wrapped in a shroud and taken to the cremation grounds. In the past, widows sometimes self-immolated on the funeral pyre of their deceased husband, a practice known as sati. By 1861, the practice was illegal, but it still occurs on occasion in India today. In general, widows do not remarry. Antyes.t.i is also performed by the individual him or herself if he or she opts to not pursue a conventional Hindu life and instead becomes a sannyasin (Hindu renouncer). Rupa Pillai See also: Hinduism: Caste; Marriage; Renunciation; Sati; Vedic Hinduism Further Reading Duvvury, Vasumathi K. Play, Symbolism, and Ritual: A Study of Tamil Brahmin Women’s Rites of Passage. American University Studies. Series XI, Anthropology/Sociology. Vol. 41. New York: P. Lang, 1991. Leslie, Julia. Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991. Pandey, Rajbali. Hindu Samska-ras; Socio-religious Study of the Hindu Sacraments. 2nd rev. ed. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1969.



Tantra

TA N T R A In the Tantra tradition, women are revered as the manifestation of the supreme power and worshiped as Shakti (the Supreme Feminine/the Mother Goddess). The philosophy of Tantra is based on worship of Shiva (the Divine Masculine) and Shakti. Shiva and Shakti are absolute and indivisible in Tantra. In various Tantric treatises, Shakti has been variously represented as the Creative Principle, Mahamaya (Creatrix of Illusion), Devi (Goddess), and Dashamahavidya (source of 10 great knowledges of Tantra), to name a few. She is worshiped by Tantrics to attain paravidya (otherworldly knowledge). In Yogini-hrdya Tantra, Shakti has been described as the womb, as she is considered to be the cause of all creation. Tantra primarily focuses on the realization of the supreme self through Tantric yoga or sadhana. Abhinava Gupta (2008) emphasizes in his Sri Tantraloka that to attain the siddhi (attainment) of the Shiva-state, Shakti is to be worshiped in her various forms. To understand the role of women in Tantric rituals, one must first understand the feminine aspect of the universe. In Tantra, the feminine power that is inherent in all human beings has been represented in the form of kundalini (the energy field of the astral body) and considered as the gateway to the cosmic consciousness. Kundalini Yoga is the most significant and scientifically developed part of the Tantra rituals. It has been described as the latent feminine energy coiled like a serpent at the base of the spinal cord, which when awakened through yoga and other means travels through seven chakras—Muladhara, Svadhishthana, Manipura, Anahata, Vishuddhi, Ajna, and finally Sahasrara (union of Shiva and Shakti), which is the seat of supraconsciousness. The process through which a disciple awakens his or her kundalini and gets initiated is called saktipata (spiritual energy bestowed through mantras and touch), and it is noteworthy that this awakening and fruition (the unity of the masculine and the feminine principles) can only be attained through the medium of the feminine. The role of women in Tantric rituals is a highly contested and debated issue. Women Tantrics in India have always been outnumbered by male Tantrics. In fact, most Tantric texts also describe the rituals and the resultant experience from male perspectives. However, according to the Tantrasara, a qualified woman can become a guru (a religious teacher who imparts philosophical and ritualistic knowledge) and is vested with the power to initiate her disciples. In some Tantric sects, female teachers are deemed to bear more spiritual power than their male counterparts. Despite being a source of ancient spiritual science and the emphasis it lays on the role played by women in spiritual enlightenment, Tantra is often misunderstood as a cult of esoteric sexual practices. A grossly misunderstood part of esoteric Tantric rituals is the role of sexual practices, referred to as latasadhana or maithu-na sadhana (copulation with a woman). It is to be noted that in Tantric texts, sexual union is represented symbolically. It is categorically described as a spiritual process not for seeking pleasure but for attaining steadiness of mind by eradicating the sexual instincts completely. Female adepts are called bhairavis and yoginis. There is no caste barrier in Tantric rituals, and women from any caste can participate in the rituals.

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Moreover, in Tantra, ordinary women are considered as the true manifestations of Shakti. Some rituals associated with the worship of young women are still prevalent in India. For instance, situated in the northeastern region of India is a famous Tantric temple called Kamakhya Devi Temple, also known as the Temple of the Menstruating Goddess. In this temple, young women from all castes are worshiped as manifestations of the Mother Goddess. Also, contrary to the usual practice of forbidding menstruating women from entering temples, this temple allows menstruating women to enter the temple premises and offer prayers and worship to the Goddess. There is another famous 10th-century Tantric temple at Hirapur district in Orissa called the Temple of 64 Yoginis. The temple has 64 statues that are placed in a circle and represent the different aspects of the Goddess Durga. Another such temple is in Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh). The popularity of these temples and local belief reflect the importance given to the feminine power in Hindu tradition. One has to understand that there has been a lot of interpolation in Tantric texts and rituals over time. However, in texts like Vijnana Bhairava, there is a dense philosophical discourse about the feminine and masculine aspects of this universe. Overall, the deeper message of Tantra philosophy is to move toward the unitary realization of the two undivided powers within one’s own body and mind, a union of the masculine and feminine principles, through the essential medium of the feminine. Pawan Kumar See also: Buddhism: Tantra; Hinduism: Devi; Durga and Kali; Gurus and Saints; Sacred Texts on Women; Shakti; Yoginis; Spirituality: Yoga Further Reading Bandyopadhyay, Pranab. The Goddess of Tantra. Calcutta: Punthi Pustak, 1987. Bose, D. N., ed. Tantras: Their Philosophy and Occult Secrets. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 2004. Gupta, Abhinava. Sri Tantraloka: Chapter One. Translated by Gautam Chatterjee. Varanasi, India: Indian Mind, 2008. Saraswati, Swami Satyananda. Kundalini Tantra. New Delhi: Bihar School of Yoga, 2012. Urban, B. Hugh. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Woodroffe, Sir John. Introduction to Tantra Sastra. Reprint ed. Madras, India: Ganesh and Co., 2016. Woodroffe, Sir John. Sakti and Sakta: Essay and Addresses on the Sakta Tantrasastra. Madras, India: Ganesh and Co., 1959.

VEDIC HINDUISM The Vedas, comprising the Samhitas (Rig Veda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda) and their appendages (Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads), usually assigned the dates 1500–500 BCE, form the earliest and most authoritative spiritual corpus for the Hindus. The Vedic age has frequently been referred to as the Golden Age for women



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by scholars of Indian intellectual tradition and champions of women’s rights alike. It was an age in which women’s exceeding intellectual caliber and spiritual strength were recognized and their contributions to familial and societal organization in the continuance of a harmonious society were admired. The Vedic view of women is a holistic one in which male and female are integrally complementary. Vedic literature, in depicting the role of women in family and society, establishes their affinity with the cosmic creative process, thereby identifying them as symbols of birth, sustenance, power, and glory. Chandrakala Padia (2009) points out that Vedic literature speaks of women as kulpalak (family nurturer), dhruva (steadfast), anchor of the whole society, the guiding agent of life, siva, and kalyani as the source of welfare and prosperity in general. Women have been regarded as the presiding deities of prosperity and happiness and as the embodiment of virtues like patience and forbearance, and therefore as the very pivot of the family and society. The corpus of Vedic literature points to three different classifications of women: the transcendent women in the form of Goddesses invoked in Vedic hymns, the extraordinarily gifted women described as female seers of Vedic hymns, and the ordinary women depicted as daughter, wife, mother, and sister. Women were held to be morally pious, spiritually powerful, and creatively potent; they were elevated to the level of the Supreme Creatrix, the spirit of creation generally regarded as feminine. The pantheon in the Samhitas included Goddesses and semidivine apsaras. The five Vedic Goddesses are Prithvi (Mother Earth), Prakriti (the World Mother), Ushas (Goddess of Dawn, the Mother of Creation), Vac or Saraswati (Word/Wisdom/Creativity, inspirer of sweet words, and impeller of noble thoughts), and Aditi (Mother of the Gods, denoting the Infinite Cosmic Power). All these Goddesses have their role as Mothers of Creation in common and have been regarded as the prefigurations of the cumulative Goddess Devi. Embodiments of religious or philosophical knowledge, they represented personified female charm, grace, and freedom. They were generally related to the Gods as mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives. Fee and Leeming (2016) explain how from the earliest Vedic times, the Goddess in relation to the God symbolized cosmic balance: soul and body, unconscious and conscious, spirit and matter, which was mirrored in the ordinary woman being seen in a mutual and equal relationship with her husband. Vedic education was open equally to men and women because both were expected to take part in yajna (Vedic sacrifices). There were two kinds of female students: brahmavadinis were of an ascetic type and were allowed to remain lifelong students of theology and philosophy; sadyovadhus pursued education until a certain age before they were given to marriage and domestic duties. Both kinds of students actively participated in Vedic sacrifices, underwent upanayana (investiture of holy thread), and were involved in music and dance. Many women also distinguished themselves as great philosophers, debaters, and teachers. The number of female poetesses or seers who visualized the Vedic mantras (chants) and authored Rig Veda hymns is around 30. Women were also entrusted with the task of musically rendering hymns for the Sama Veda during rituals. Some brahmavadinis reached great spiritual heights, and their hymns were considered worthy of inclusion in the Rig Veda. Gargi and Maitreyi are two brahmavadinis of

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outstanding scholarship from the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad who could engage the sage Yajnavalkya in high philosophical discourses. Yajnavalkya’s wife Maitreyi chose the gift of self-knowledge over material wealth when her husband decided to renounce the world and divide his property equally between his two wives, thus ignoring all worldly assets in favor of knowledge of the ultimate truth. Gargi Vacaknavi, another competent philosopher, put forth to Yajnavalkya in a court full of male philosophers a series of questions so subtle and esoteric that he refused to discuss them. Both women are considered to be dialecticians par excellence. Padia (2009) cites the examples of Maitreyi, Gargi, Ghosa, Dakshina, Romsa, Lopamudra, and Juhu to assert that women in the Vedic age were well educated, free to exercise their own judgment on vital matters, had sharp intellect, and some even excelled in giving accounts of creation. Birth of a daughter who would grow up to become a learned lady was wished for, and there were rituals recommended for ensuring the birth of a scholarly daughter. The existence of women mystic poets, reciters, and singers of Rig Veda hymns is a testimony to the educational standards and scholarly success of women in the Hindu tradition. Besides being composers of hymns, poets, and dialecticians, some women were also proficient grammarians, while some acquired expertise in the field of vocal music, dance, military training, and other vocations. The Rig Veda mentions Silabhattarika and Vijayanka as distinguished poetesses and brave warrior women like Vadhrimati, Vispala, and Mudgalani, who accompanied their husbands in the battlefield and led them to victory. Women also took an active part in public administration in Vedic times: some hymns in the Rig Veda sing of the courtly appearance of women speaking eloquently in assemblies. Women also engaged in other vocations, like manufacturing bows and arrows, making baskets, weaving cloth, and participating in outdoor agricultural work. In fact, in Vedic society, women even adopted the ascetic mode of life: Patanjali in his Mahabhasya mentions a female wanderer called Sankara. In household affairs, the wife and the mother were considered to be supreme. Women were venerated because they gave birth, fed and sustained, loved, protected, and nurtured. The mother in the household set the model for the concept of the Rig Vedic Goddess as Creatrix and Protector. The Atharva Veda refers to woman/wife as Empress of the House. Vedic man treated his woman with dignity and accorded her full freedom; he could not become a spiritual whole unless he was accompanied by his wife, as both domestic and public rituals emphasized the copresence of husband and wife. According to the Sathapatha Brahmana and Panini, a man became eligible to perform sacrifice only when he had his wife by his side. The right to perform rituals and sacrifices was regarded as the highest privilege in Vedic society. Women were entitled to perform or participate in rituals like vrata (vows and fasts), puja (worship), homa (sacrifices, the fire sacrifice being one example), and even sraddha (memorial rites) in cases where there was no male heir. Jamison’s Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife (1996) is a comprehensive study of the historical interpretations of the ritual rights, access, and authority of women in Vedic and Hindu traditions, wherein she provides evidence for a woman’s independent agency as a ritual actor. The Srauta and Grihya Sutras mention



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how the wife uttered Vedic mantras (prayers) as an equal with the husband in ritual contexts. There are numerous citations in the Vedas and later scriptural literature of women acting as sole performers of sacrifices, either as proxies or in the absence of their husbands. In all, women were participants in the various sacrifices either as pratinidhi (proxies), dharmapatni (partners), or putrika-putra (designated sons). Apart from physically participating in sacrifices, women chanted songs, pounded the sacrificial rice, prepared the sacrificial offerings, kindled the sacred fires, offered oblations, and performed the concluding ceremonies. They could perform harvest sacrifices alone, in addition to performing daily domestic rites and maintaining the sacred fire in the absence of their husbands. Significantly, the terms used for a wife in Vedic literature characterize her status in the Rig Vedic family: she was jaya (sharer of the husband’s affections), jani (mother of children), and patni (copartner in religious duties and rituals). Interestingly, we do not find the word bharya (the dependent one) as a synonym of wife in the Vedic age, thus reinforcing her individuality within matrimony. The feminine was held in high regard in everyday Vedic society, as women contributed to dharma (the order of family, society, and the cosmos; also, religious and social duty), artha (material wealth), and kama (desire/passion, pleasure), the three classical roles of worldly life that inspired the life of the householder in ancient Hindu society. Through their ideal moral behavior, they contributed to dharma; through their role in producing offspring, they contributed to artha; and through their aesthetics, they contributed to kama. If a householder wanted to renounce the world after the successful completion of his worldly existence, he was required to fetch due permission from his wife and could go ahead with the renunciation only after his wife agreed. Marriage in Vedic society was viewed as a sacrament and a willing union of two loving hearts: a wife was her husband’s lifelong companion. Since the husband could not perform any religious rite without her by his side, she was called the dharmapatni (partner in religious and social duty), while the husband was merely referred to as the grhapati (head of the home). The husband and wife were joint owners of the household and its property, while women had absolute ownership over movable property like jewelry, expensive apparel, and so on. Also, a brotherless daughter had the right to inheritance in her paternal home. Since marriage was seen as sacramental, divorce was nonexistent; domestic violence was considered to be repugnant, and a woman indulging in adultery was not abhorred in the Vedic society. Sati (the practice of widows committing self-immolation on the funeral pyre of their husbands) and female infanticide were unknown, and incest was forbidden. While instances of polygamy and polyandry were very few, the Rig Veda abounds in references to levirate (niyoga), enjoined upon women by the social and religious customs to obtain progeny. This indeed sheds positive light on the ideas of conjugal fidelity and women’s physical chastity that existed in the Vedic times. Though there are no instances of widow remarriage, widows were never objects of pity. Women participated with men in social and religious activities and festive gatherings, and veiling/purdah was not observed.

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Even the supposedly fallen women like prostitutes were invited to ceremonial occasions, as they were considered to be preservers of some of the 64 arts, namely music and dance. Women in the Vedic texts appear to be both delicately feminine as well as strong and assertive, upholders of familial and social norms, while some engaged in deep intellectual pursuits. The occasional vilification of the position of Vedic women arises from a misrepresentation and/or misinterpretation of ancient Indian texts. However, the position of women in Hindu society gradually declined after the Vedic age because of numerous factors. A lot of discrimination against women crept into Indian society in the last few centuries, as a result of which women were not allowed to undergo upanayana, perform sacrifices, enter temples and perform worship in the inner sanctum, or become pujaris/purohitas (priests). In contemporary times, however, Hindu women are again moving into the public sphere as religious practitioners, leading to criticism and debates about their legitimacy and roles as priests and sannyasinis (female ascetics). While women continue to observe fasts and can perform worship in their homes, they are forbidden from performing some yajnas/homa (fire sacrifices) and sraddhas (memorial rites) and entering the inner sanctum of some temples, as these are generally regarded as male prerogatives in select societies/communities/regions in India. However, in the southern cities of Hyderabad and Pune, young girls are undergoing upanayana, and married women are performing yajnas, and a lot of women in Maharashtra are undergoing training to become pujaris. While this has generated debates about women’s ritual rights and the efficaciousness of these rituals, such moves have come as huge breakthroughs in securing women’s rights to public and religious places. In the temple of Mother Adhi Parasakthi and several rural Amman temples in Tamil Nadu, one may come across a number of women priests. Abhirami Upasaki, founded in Denmark in the last decade of the 20th century, is the first Tamil temple in Europe to have a priestess. In some temples in India, like Shani Shingnapur and Sabarimala, women were even forbidden from entering the inner sanctum until 2016. However, women forcibly reclaimed the right to enter the sanctum sanctorium of Shani Shingnapur and are waiting for the highest court of law in India to support their entry into Sabarimala Temple. Interestingly, the leaders/supporters of all these movements of change have famously made references to the equal and dignified position of women in the Vedic ages. All such voices of protest, movements of equality/recognition, and acts/rituals of reclamation by women in recent times harken back to the examples of equality for women in domestic, religious, social, and intellectual spheres that abound in Vedic literature and ancient Hindu society. These attempts may not bring back the “Golden Age” for women in Hindu society, but alternatively, they can be seen as movements of a vision for women’s freedom to practice their religion and rituals on a par with men. Komal Agarwal See also: Buddhism: Female Divinities; Hinduism: Aditi; Dance; Devadasis; Ideals of Womanhood; Marriage; Prakriti; Renunciation; Sacred Texts on Women; Sati; Saraswati



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Further Reading Bose, Mandakranta. Women in the Hindu Tradition: Rules, Roles and Exceptions. London: Routledge, 2010. Chandel, Bhuvan, ed. Women in Ancient and Medieval India. Vol 9. Part 2. History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization. Edited by D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2009. Fee, Christopher, and David Leeming. The Goddess: Myths of the Great Mother. London: Reaktion Books, 2016. Jamison, Stephanie W. Sacrificed Wife/Sacrificer’s Wife: Women, Ritual, and Hospitality in Ancient India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Padia, Chandrakala, ed. Women in Dharmasastras: A Phenomenological and Critical Analysis. Jaipur, India: Rawat, 2009. Patton, Laurie L. Jewels of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Tiwari, Shashi. Glimpses of Vedic and Ancient Indian Civilization. Delhi: New Bharatiya Book, 2006. Vats, S., and Shakuntala Mudgal, eds. Women and Society in Ancient India. Faridabad, India: Om, 1999.

YOGINIS There are various categories of the yogini, an important emanation of Goddess and her devotees within the Hindu pantheons. In Yogini Cult and Temples, Vidya Dehejia (1986) describes the yogini as Goddess herself as well as female practitioner, devotee, and attendant of Goddess. Yoginis is a term used to refer to certain types of female practitioners within Tantric circles. They are especially known and worshiped for their powers as divine female figures in circles of 42, 64, and 81 ornamented stone statues in India. In their iconographical depictions and textual descriptions, yoginis appear both wrathful and sensual, ferocious and seductive, furious and compassionate. They hold all sorts of tools and weapons, symbolic of what the practitioner needs on her path—a knife to sever attachments, a bell to clear negativity, a bow and arrow for focus. Their mounts are animals, vegetation, and different potent symbols, such as a pot, flame, corpse, or drum, that lend their powers and mythological significance to the yoginis. Yoginis cannot be pinned to one particular quality, rather their natures are fluid. Each contains divine status as an aspect of Goddess. They express a full-embodied expression of human experience and the cyclical nature of reality. Since ancient times, the yoginis have appeared in embodied and esoteric forms and often have a close association with nature. Many of the qualities of the yoginis can be found with the yakshis, the tree and nature spirits of early Buddhism and Hinduism. Like the yakshis, the yoginis are said to be lavishly adorned, have captivating appearances that can be both terrifying and mesmerizing, and offer fertility, growth, longevity, abundance, and material and spiritual well-being (Shaw 2009). The yakshis and yoginis appear both as accomplished female practitioners and in more supernatural and esoteric forms. The 42, 64, and 81 yogini circles we find in both the medieval temple iconography as well as lists in Tantric and Puranic

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texts comprise groups of Goddesses based on multiples of the numbers eight and nine. The Asta (eight) Matrikas and the Nava (nine) Durgas have a different plant or tree associated with each of them and share similar powers with the yakshis. They also have a relationship with the yoginis. The Asta Matrikas and Nava Durgas are included in some of the circles of 64 and 81 yoginis in the temples today. In their temple and textual manifestations, the yoginis have individual and collective powers, and together they also represent aspects of Devi. Yoginis can be attendants and devotees of Goddess. The yogini is sometimes perceived as a sorceress or a witch. Legends tell of her abilities to turn humans into animals. Other tales tell of flying women or women who suddenly vanish in the night. This category of yogini always meets in circles to perform their rituals, which include transgressive acts that are said to give them supernatural powers or siddhis (Dehejia 1986, 12–14). There are also eight yoginis of astrology. Each is associated with one of the nine grahas, or planets. At a human’s birth, the stellar positions of these planets give specific details about the fate of the individual (Dehejia 1986, 48). Another grouping of yoginis resides in and presides over our chakras. Their names are Dakini, Rakini, Lakini, Kakini, Sakini, Hakini, and Yakini. They work with the subtle energies that travel through the ida, pingala, and s.ushumna channels. They are involved in an energetic process of awakening kundalini (Dehejia 1986, 48). There are only about 14 known temples to the yoginis throughout South Asia; however, there are other sites where worship of the yogini is still practiced, such as at the Kamakhya temple in Assam and in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. All the known yogini temples are circular, except for two that are rectangular. One common characteristic of all yogini temples is that they are hypaethral or without a roof. Another is their location at remote places, on hilltops or hard-to-reach natural sites. The yogini sculptures found in these temples are known for their beauty, power, and compelling allure. At Rihikyan, they all stand in the dancing posture with one knee bent and the other leg slightly raised and bent as if ready to step out and dance. At Lokari, the 81 yoginis have animal heads. Their diversity of expression, from terrifying to peaceful, animal to human heads, and different stances is evident in other temples (e.g., Hirapur in Orissa). The yogini temples in India were built between the 9th and 16th century, and their worship seems to have flourished among the royalty during that time (Dehejia 1986; Dupuis 2008). Rites were performed to gain territory, subdue one’s enemies, and expand dynasties, as well as for all militaristic adventures. Yoginis were believed to bring fame and invincibility, strength, and courage. In addition, the yoginis have always been associated with all rites of sexual pleasure and love. Contrary to social and domestic expectations around women in South Asia since the Laws of Manu came into effect in the second century, the yoginis’ temples and rituals are one domain where the human female has power, agency, autonomy, and choice around her sexuality. Worshiping the yoginis in human form has always been important to the rituals. Music, dance, sexuality, and the arts are the yoginis’ domain. There many different lineages (Siddha, Nath, Kaula, Kapalika, Shakta, Sri Vidya, etc.) where the yoginis of these various categories are central to the practices. The



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lineages that honor these groupings of Goddesses have their origins in preorthodox, tribal, and indigenous practices of the forest peoples on the South Asian subcontinent. Most often the term yoginis within these lineages is used to refer to female adepts who transmit the Tantric teachings through ritual practices. There are rituals and sadhanas (practices) for all life experiences, rites of passage, transitions, and liminal states, such as birth, menstruation, sex, illness, and death, as well as to gain worldly and spiritual powers. The yoginis’ rites focus on achieving union with the Divine within and experiencing moksha, liberation from karmic cycles. Achieving spiritual liberation requires transforming mental and emotional barriers through working with different fields of consciousness, which are understood as expressions of Goddess’s different aspects, functions, and moods that express both her cosmic and earthly nature. Yogini practitioners of these various lineages are transmitters of the absolute into the relative; they assist in bringing the formless into form. Laura Amazzone See also: Buddhism: Female Divinities; Prajnaparamita; Sacred Texts on Women; Tantra; Hinduism: Devi; Durga and Kali; Pilgrimage; Renunciation; Sacred Texts on Women; Shakti; Stage-of-Life Rituals; Tantra Further Reading Dehejia, Vidya. Yogini Cult and Temples. New Delhi: National Museum, 1986. Dupuis, Stella. The Yogini Temples of India: In Pursuit of a Mystery, Travel Notes. Varanasi, India: Pilgrims, 2008. Shaw, Miranda. “Magical Lovers, Sisters, and Mothers: Yakshini Sadhana in Tantric Buddhism.” In Breaking Boundaries with the Goddess: New Directions in the Study of Shaktism, edited by Cynthia Ann Humes and Rachel Fell McDermott, 265–96. New Delhi: Manohar, 2009.

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Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola, ed. She Is Everywhere!: An Anthology of Writings in Womanist​ -Feminist Spirituality. Vol. 1. New York: iUniverse, 2005. Bitel, Lisa M., and Felice Lifshitz, eds. Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Blackstone, Kathryn R. Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1998. Blum, Harrison, ed. Dancing with Dharma: Essays on Movement and Dance in Western Buddhism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. Braude, Ann. Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Brooton, Bernadette J. Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. Broyde, Michael J., and Michael Ausubel, eds. Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Bruhns, Karen Olsen, and Karen E. Stothert. Women in Ancient America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Castillo, Ana. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997. Chandel, Bhuvan, ed. Women in Ancient and Medieval India. Vol 9. Part 2. History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization. Edited by D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2009. Chen, Fan Pen Li. Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Christ, Carol P. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Routledge, 1998. Chung, Hyun Kyung. The Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990. Clark, Elizabeth A. Women in the Early Church. Wilmington, NC: M. Glazier, 1983. Clarke, Peter B. A Bibliography of Japanese New Religious Movements with Annotations and an Introduction to Japanese New Religions at Home and Abroad. Richmond, UK: Japan Library, 1999. Collett, Alice. Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Collier-Thomas, Bettye. Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess. Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Cuffel, Alexandra, and Brian M. Britt. Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dalmia, Vasudha. Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Dame, Enid, Rivlin Lilly, and Henry Wenkart, eds. Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Oxford: Jason Aronson, 1998. Davies, Carole Boyce. Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture. 3 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008. De Groot, Joanna, and Sue Morgan. Sex, Gender, and the Sacred: Reconfiguring Religion in Gender History. Gender and History Special Issue Book Series. Oxford: Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2014.



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DeNapoli, Antoinette E. Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan. Religion, Culture, and History Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Vicki Noble, eds. Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries. Amherst, NY: Teneo, 2015. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Victor H. Mair. Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010. Dexter, Miriam Robbins. “The Assimilation of Pre-Indo-European Goddesses into Indo-European Society.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 8, no. 1/2 (1980): 19–29. Dillon, Matthew. Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002. Donaldson, Laura E., and Kwok Pui-lan, eds. Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge, 2002. Douglass-Chin, Richard J. Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth​-​ Century African American Evangelists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Ehrman, Bart, and Zlatko Pleše. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988. Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. Elior, Rachel, ed. Men and Women: Gender, Judaism, and Democracy. Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2004. Engelmajer, Pascale. Women in Pali Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Paths in Mutual Dependence. New York: Routledge, 2015. Faulkner, Mary. Women’s Spirituality: Power and Grace. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2011. Faure, Bernard. The Read Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Findly, Ellison Banks. Women’s Buddhism, Buddhism’s Women: Tradition, Revision, Renewal. Boston: Wisdom, 2000. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 2000. Frankel, Ellen. The Five Books of Miriam. New York: Putnam, 1996. Geary, Patrick. Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide. Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. Goode, Starr. Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power. n.p.: Inner Traditions, 2016. Greenspahn, Frederick E., ed. Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Griffith, R. Marie, and Barbara Dianne Savage. Lived Religions: Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

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Malone, Mary T. Women and Christianity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Marcos, Sylvia. Women and Indigenous Religions. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Marler, Joan. “Fierce Goddesses, Great Mothers, and Yoginis: The Archaeomythology of Devotion.” ReVision 25, no. 1 (2002): 2. Marshall, Sherrin, ed. Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. McLaughlin, Eleanor, and Rosemary Ruether, eds. Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Medine, Carolyn M. Jones, Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe, and Hans D. Seibel. Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Murcott, Susan. First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 2006. Murray, Jacqueline. “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages.” In Handbook for Medieval Sexuality, edited by Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage, 191–222. New York: Garland, 1996. Nadell, Pamela. Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1995. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Nelson, Sarah Milledge. Shamanism and the Origin of States: Spirit, Power and Gender in East Asia. New York: Routledge, 2008. Nelson, Sarah Milledge. Shamans, Queens, and Figurines: The Development of Gender Archaeology. New York: Routledge, 2016 Novick, Rabbi Leah. On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism’s Divine Feminine. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008. Okuda, Akiko, and Haruko Okano, eds. Women and Religion in Japan. Translated by Alison Watts. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. Olajubu, Oyeronke. Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. Fierce Feminine Divinities of Eurasia and Latin America: Baba Yaga, Kali, Pombagira, and Santa Muerte. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Olupona, Jacob K., and Terry Rey, eds. Orisa Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Parca, M., and A. Tzanetou. Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Paul, Diana Y., and Frances Wilson. Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Maha-ya-na Tradition. Berkeley: Asian Humanities, 1979. Pechilis, Karen. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990. Pope-Levison, Priscilla, and John R. Levison. Sex, Gender, and Christianity. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Pope-Levison, Priscilla. Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

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Powers, Marla N. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Prell, Riv-Ellen. Women Remaking Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Rabinovitch, Shelley T. S. The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2011. Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth, eds. Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide. Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2012. Rosenlee, Li-Siang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Rouse, Carolyn Moxley. Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies. Berkeley: University of California, 2004. Rubin, Miri. Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon, 1983. Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sawyer, Deborah F. Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries. London: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Schmitt, Miriam, and Linda Kulzer, eds. Medieval Women Monastics: Wisdom’s Wellsprings. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Schultz, C. Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Schumacher, Mark. “Kannon Notebook.” A to Z Photo Dictionary of Japanese Buddhist Statuary: Gods, Goddesses, Shinto Kami, Creatures and Demons. n.p.: Onmark Productions, 2016. http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/kannon.shtml. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Gender, and Kyriarchal Power. Cambridge, MA: Feminist Studies in Religion Books, 2016. Sharma, Arvind, ed. Today’s Woman in World Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Sharma, Arvind, and Katherine K. Young, eds. Her Voice, Her Faith. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003. Sharma, S. K. Women and Islam. New Delhi: Vishavabharti, 2011. Shaw, Miranda, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Sours, Michael W. “The Maid of Heaven, the Image of Sophia, and the Logos: Personification of the Spirit of God in Scripture and Sacred Literature.” Journal of Bahá’í Studies 4, no. 1 (Mar.–June 1991). Spretnak, Charlene. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1982. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.



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Stefaniw, Blosson. “Becoming Men, Staying Women: Gender Ambivalence in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Contexts.” Feminist Theology 18 (2010): 341–55. Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. Stol, Marten. Women in the Ancient Near East. Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. Taitz, Emily, Sondra Henry, and Cheryl Tallan. The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E. 1900 C.E. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. Umansky, Ellen M., and Ashton, Dianne, eds. Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1992. Wadud, Amina. Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Warren, Karen. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. A Hypatia Book. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Weaver, Jace. Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. Edited by Jace Weaver. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Wegner, Judith Romney Wegner. Chattel or Person?: The Status of Women in the Mishnah. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wetzel, Sylvia. The Heart of the Lotus; A Buddhist Perspective on Women’s Inner and Outer Liberation. Translated by Jane Anhold. Berlin: BoD, 2015. Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993. York, Michael. Pagan Ethics: Paganism as a World Religion. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer International Publishing, 2016.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Editor

Susan de-Gaia, PhD, is a lecturer in philosophy and religion at Central Michigan University. She earned a doctorate in religion and social ethics from the University of Southern California (USC) School of Religion, a graduate certificate in the study of women and men in society from USC, and a BA in women’s studies from University of California, Santa Barbara. Susan has published on women, religion, and popular culture, and contributes articles to the present work on women in Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism, and Spirituality. She has taught courses in World Religions, Religion and Society, Theories and Methods in Religious Studies, Death and Dying, and Religion and Literature, among others. Her other areas of interest are environmental ethics, women and religion/social ethics in America, and film studies. Contributors

Lady Jane Acquah is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include Muslim leadership in Ghana and gender in the Muslim world. Penina Adelman, MA, MSW, is a writer and social worker. She is coauthor of The JGirl’s Guide for Bat Mitzvah Girls (Jewish Lights, 2005) and other books on Jewish women’s spirituality and biblical women. Presently, she is a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Komal Agarwal, PhD, teaches English literature at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi. She received her doctorate from the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research areas include gender studies, classical Indian literature and aesthetics, the Mahabharata and its retellings, and folk and popular cultures in India. Tamara Agha-Jaffar has a PhD in English literature. She served as a professor of English, as a dean, and as the vice president for academic affairs before retiring in 2013. She has published four books on women and mythology. Her latest novel is Unsung Odysseys (Amazon Kindle 2017). Amanda Wrenn Allen, PhD, currently serves as an assistant professor of history at Brewton-Parker College in Mount Vernon, Georgia. In 2014, she earned her PhD

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About the Editor and Contributors

in British history from Louisiana State University. She also holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Vanderbilt University and a BA from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. Laura Amazzone, MA, is the author of Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power (Hamilton 2012). She has published numerous articles within the fields of Hinduism, Tantra, and women’s spirituality. Laura teaches in the Yoga Philosophy program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is also a columnist for the online Sutra Journal. Roy C. Amore, PhD, is a professor of political science at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada. He teaches and publishes in the area of religion and politics. His most recent books include coediting A Concise Introduction to World Religions, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press 2015) and authoring Religion and Politics in the World’s Hot Spots (Sloan 2016). Beata Anton is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her main interests include the native cultures of the Americas, with special focus on the Maya culture. She has published on ancestor veneration and the sacred book of the Quiché Maya, Popol Vuh. She is a graduate of Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. Kenneth Atkinson is a professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. His degrees are from the University of Chicago (MDiv) and Temple University (MA, PhD). He has written I Cried to the Lord (Brill 2003) and A History of the Hasmonean State (Bloomsbury T and T Clark 2016). Nicol Nixon Augusté, PhD, is a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her academic interests include women and theology, rhetoric and composition, and Native American studies. She has published in journals and has authored a book, Rome’s Female Saints: A Poetic Pilgrimage to the Eternal City (WestBowPress 2017). Emily Bailey, PhD, is an assistant professor of Christian traditions and religions in the Americas at Towson University. Her current research is focused on the contributions of 19th-century religious communities to American morality and dietary culture through food practices focused on sanctification. Amy L. Balogh, PhD, is a lecturer in religious and Judaic studies at the University of Denver and visiting lecturer in Judaism at Colorado College. A specialist in Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions, Amy is author of Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East (Fortress/Lexington, 2018). Ruth Barrett is an ordained Dianic high priestess and elder, ritualist, and author of Women’s Rites, Women’s Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation (3rd ed., Tidal Time Publishing, 2018). She is also an award-winning recording artist of original Goddess



About the Editor and Contributors

songs and contributor to the pioneering musical works in the Goddess Spirituality movement. She is a cofounder of Temple of Diana. Rebecca C. Bartel, PhD, is an assistant professor of religious studies at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on Christianity and political economy throughout the Americas. Bartel’s work is deeply ethnographic and has recently appeared in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion and the Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Brigitte H. Bechtold, PhD, is a professor of sociology at Central Michigan University. Her recent publications focus on such topics as the commons and infanticide. She directs the Center for Human and Environmental Rights at Central Michigan University and is the editor of the Michigan Sociological Review. Ruth Margolies Beitler, PhD, is a professor of comparative politics at the United States Military Academy, West Point. She is the author of several books, including, with Angelica Martinez, Women’s Roles in the Middle East and North Africa (Greenwood 2010). Susan Berrin is the editor of Sh’ma Now, a pluralistic monthly journal of contemporary Jewish ideas, and has edited two landmark Jewish anthologies: A Heart of Wisdom (Jewish Lights 1999) and Celebrating the New Moon (Jason Aronson 1977). She is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of Hadassah International Research Institute for Jewish Women at Brandeis University. Monolina Bhattacharyya, PhD, is a Fulbright Fellow at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She has been a junior fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies as well as the Indian Council of Historical Research, and she has taught at McMaster University in Canada. Her interests include the art and popular culture of South Asia. Karin J. Bohleke, PhD, is the director of the Fashion Archives and Museum at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Her research into women’s clothing of the 19th century has resulted in publications on dress in early photography, African American dress, American adaptations and translations of French fashion magazines, lady travelers in Egypt, and pre-Tutankhamun Egyptomania fashions. Chance Bonar is currently a PhD candidate in Religion (New Testament and Early Christianity) at Harvard University. His research interests include the Nag Hammadi corpus, heresiological rhetoric, and the construction of ethnic and gendered identity in the ancient world. Alexandra Méabh Brandon is a PhD candidate in American studies at the College of William and Mary and assistant director of the Boston Theological Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on Islam and gender in Euro-America and Islam and the American presidency.

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Susan Roth Breitzer holds a PhD in history from the University of Iowa, and is an independent scholar. She has also been serving her third term on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. William E. Burns is a historian who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. His many books include An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727 (Manchester 2010) and The Scientific Revolution in Global Perspective (Oxford 2015). He is currently editing a reference book on the history of astrology. Jenny Butler, PhD, is a lecturer in the Study of Religions Department at University College Cork, Ireland, where she teaches on Western esotericism and new religious movements. She has published widely on Irish contemporary Paganism. She holds a PhD in folklore and ethnology and is a specialist in folk religion. Josianne Leah Campbell holds an MA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is an instructor of English at York Technical College. She has enjoyed a long career as a professional educator, and her research and teaching expertise lies in the field of folklore and children’s literature. John Cappucci, PhD, is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Canada, where he has taught an array of courses. In addition, he teaches an online world religions course for Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada. He has published several peer-reviewed articles, encyclopedia entries, and scholarly book reviews. Charles Carroll is a PhD candidate at Brown University. He researches topics related to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion in medieval Europe. His current project looks at understandings of masculinities and femininities in student culture at the University of Paris in the 12th and 13th centuries. Paola Cavaliere is an assistant professor of Japanese studies at Osaka University, School of Human Sciences. She specializes in religion, gender, and society in contemporary Japan with a focus on women’s volunteer activities and faith-based civil society movements. She is the author of Promising Practices: Women Volunteers in Japanese Religious Civil Society (Brill 2015). Carol P. Christ holds a PhD from Yale and is a founding voice in the study of women and religion and author of A Serpentine Path (FAR 2016), She Who Changes (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Rebirth of the Goddess (Routledge 1998), Laughter of Aphrodite (Harper & Row 1987), Diving Deep and Surfacing (Beacon 1995), and, with Judith Plaskow, Goddess and God in the World (Fortress 2016) and the path-breaking anthologies Womanspirit Rising (HarperOne 1992) and Weaving the Visions (HarperOne 1989). She leads Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete (www.goddessariadne.org). Patricia A. Clark, MA, MTS, is a part-time theology professor at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts. Her interests are in the study of religion.



About the Editor and Contributors

Gregory M. Clines is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, and a visiting assistant professor of religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His research interests include Jainism during the late medieval and early modern periods and Sanskrit and vernacular literary production. Marzia Anna Coltri, PhD, is assistant professor in Humanities at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, in the United Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She is the author of Beyond Rastafari: An Historical and Theological Introduction (Peter Lang 2015). Her Laurea Magistrale in Philosophy (in 2004) was received from Università Gabriele d’Annunzio, Chieti, Italy. Selena Crosson, PhD, has research interests including the socioreligious world view of Victorian settler women, interwar feminism and women’s peace movements, and the millenarian feminism of early 20th-century western Baha’i women. She has taught Canadian history and women’s history at the University of Saskatchewan and is currently part-time faculty at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Vivianne Crowley, PhD, is a lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom. She specializes in the psychology of religion and has published extensively on contemporary Paganism and women’s spirituality. Her most recent publication is “Standing Up to Be Counted: Understanding Pagan Responses to the 2011 British Censuses,” Religion 44, no. 3 (2014): 483–501. N. K. Crown, PhD, is a recent graduate from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, specializing in the Reformation and early modern period. His thesis compared 16th-century Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan representations of martyrdom. His interests include death studies, church history, iconoclasm, early modern gender roles, and the study of 16th-century chronicles. Deepra Dandekar, PhD, is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Deepra has worked on gender and Hinduism, religious shrines, religious minorities and migrants in India. She has published on Sufi Islam and the problem of Muslim minorities in Maharashtra. Lukas K. Danner, PhD, is postdoctoral associate at Florida International University, Miami. His interests include Chinese foreign relations, international relations theories, and security studies. He earned an MA in sinology from the University of Munich, Germany, and an MA in international studies and a PhD in international relations from Florida International University. Adam W. Darlage, PhD, is an instructor in the Humanities and Philosophy Department at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. He teaches courses in

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world mythologies and world religions. His research interests include early modern Roman Catholic controversial literature, Anabaptist history and theology, and Christian communalism. Max Dashú is the director of the Suppressed Histories Archives, which she founded in 1970 to research global women’s history and cultural heritages. Its collection contains over 40,000 images and 130 visual talks. She is the author of numerous books, including Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion (Veleda 2017). Miriam Robbins Dexter holds a PhD in Indo-European Studies: comparative Indo-European linguistics, ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and comparative mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written scholarly journal and encyclopedia articles as well as books, including Whence the Goddesses (Teachers College Press 1990), Sacred Display (Cambria 2010; ASWM Sarasvati book award in 2012), and, with Vicki Noble, Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement (Teneo 2015; Susan Koppelman award for best edited feminist anthology, 2016). David Dry, MA, is a history instructor at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and teaches courses in American and world history. He is a member of the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma and previously served as a Fulbright Scholar at the International University of Kyrgyzstan in Bishkek. Lynn Echevarria, PhD, is a professor emerita of Yukon College in Canada. Her research interests include the life history method, process and product; women’s and gender studies; sociology; and the Baha’i Faith. She has published numerous articles and chapters in books and journals on these subjects. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD (h), is president of the Center for Partnership Studies, editor in chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, a pioneer for women’s human rights, and author of influential books, including The Chalice and the Blade (1988), Sacred Pleasure (HarperOne 1996), and The Real Wealth of Nations (Berrett-Koehler 2008). See www.rianeeisler.com. Pascale Engelmajer, PhD, is an associate professor of religious studies at Carroll University in Wisconsin. She wrote Women in Pa-li Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Path in Mutual Dependence (Routledge 2015), which examines women’s spiritual agency, and Buddhism (Hodder and Stoughton 2014), an introduction that provides an understanding of how doctrine informs practice in the contemporary Buddhist world. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles), MA, is a retired adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life program. A Chickasaw shaman, Evans’s native name is Three Eagles. Her recent publications



About the Editor and Contributors

include “Shamanic Vision Quest: Native American Ritual, Depth Psychology, and Renaissance Natural Magic,” NeuroQuantology (June 2016): 309-37. John W. Fadden, PhD, is an adjunct instructor of religious studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. He teaches courses in biblical studies, Judaism, and world religions. Valentina Fedele, PhD, is an assistant professor of Islamic law at University of Calabria. Her main research interests are the sociology of Islam and contemporary history and culture of Magreb. Her latest articles explore contemporary Islamic masculinity, European Islam, and the relationship between art and riots in the Magreb. Mackenzie J. Finley, MA, is a PhD student studying African history at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include women and gender in Yoruba intellectual history, alternative epistemologies, and Africa in global history. Lailatul Fitriyah is a PhD student in the Department of Theology at University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Her research interests include Islamic feminism, Qur’anic hermeneutics, theological anthropology, Islamic peacebuilding theories, and normative theories of international relations. Kristan Ewin Foust, PhD, is a lecturer in history at the University of Texas at Arlington and Dallas. Her dissertation (2017) is titled “Exposing the Spectacular Body: The Wheel, Hanging, Impaling, Placarding, and Crucifixion in the Ancient World.” Maria Gabryszewska is an American politics PhD candidate (ABD) at Florida International University. Her primary research interest is American politics with a focus on gender and politics, Congress, and political communication. She also has an interest in interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches. Carole Ganim, PhD, has taught English literature and composition at Ursuline College in Cleveland, Ohio, as a member of the Ursuline Sisters and at several other colleges and universities. She has published in academic journals and authored two books: Shaping Catholic Parishes (Loyola, 2008) and Being Out of Order (Vandamere, 2013). Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon, PhD, is the rabbi educator at Congregation Beth Jacob in Redwood City, California. Her PhD is in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her rabbinic ordination is from the Academy of Jewish Religion, California. She is the author of numerous articles on Judaism and on science. Starr Goode, MA, teaches literature at Santa Monica College and is the producer and moderator for the cable TV series The Goddess in Art, now available on YouTube.

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Her book, Sheela na gig, The Dark Goddess of Europe (Inner Traditions 2016) won the 2018 Sarasvati Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. T. Nicole Goulet is an assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Religious Studies. Her expertise is in Hinduism in colonial India, with emphasis on race, class, and gender. Kohenet D’vorah J. Grenn, PhD, is the founder of the Lilith Institute and chair of the Women’s Spirituality MA program at Sofia University, Palo Alto, and was the founding priestess/kohenet at Mishkan Shekhinah. She teaches for Napa Valley College. Her book Talking to Goddess (Lilith Institute 2009) anthologized sacred writings of 72 women from 25 traditions. Daniel N. Gullotta is a doctoral student of religious studies (Christianity) at Stanford University. He holds a master’s degree in religion (with a concentration in the history of Christianity) from Yale University Divinity School and a master’s of theological studies (specializing in biblical studies) from Australian Catholic University. Harald Haarmann is the author of more than 50 books, some of which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His preferred fields of study are cultural history, ancient civilizations, archaeomythology, history of religion, ethnic studies, and research on identity. For his work, he received the Prix Logos (France, 1999), the Premio Jean Monnet (Italy, 1999), and the Plato Award (United Kingdom, 2006). Rannveig Haga, PhD, holds a PhD in history of religions from Uppsala University and is a researcher affiliated with Södertörn University College. Her dissertation, “Tradition as Resource: Somali Women Traders Facing the Realities of Civil War,” is a qualitative study involving fieldwork in Hargeisa, Somaliland, and Dubai. Allison Hahn, PhD, is an assistant professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Her research centers on the argumentation strategies of pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia and East Africa. Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is the director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion and the cofounder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is the author of seven books, including The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (Ben Yehuda Press, 2015; with Taya Shere). Marsha Snulligan Haney, PhD, is the recently retired professor of missiology and religions of the world and director of the doctor of ministry program at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a Presbyterian minister and has published extensively on intercultural and religious studies, womanist values and methodologies, and urban missiology.



About the Editor and Contributors

Amanda Haste, PhD, teaches at Aix-Marseille University, France, and is an independent scholar (National Coalition of Independent Scholars) notably of 21st-century convent culture and identity construction. Her research is published in Journal for Religion, Media and Digital Culture, Culture and Religion, and Studies in Church History, among others. Barbara Lois Helms is serving as the first female Muslim chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces. She is also a registered psychotherapist (qualifying). Helms is a graduate of McGill University (MA, Islamic studies) and Athabasca University (MA, counselling psychology) and is currently pursuing a DMin at Toronto School of Theology. Elisabetta Iob, PhD, is a historian currently based at the University of Trieste and is the author of Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan: Resettlement in Punjab, 1947–62 (Routledge, 2017). Elisabetta’s research interests focus on Pakistan’s political and party history and the politics of gender and emotions in South Asia. Laurel Kendall, PhD, is the curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and chair of the Anthropology Division. She is the author of many books and articles about Korean shamans, modernity, consumption, and popular religion in East Asia. She was recently president of the Association for Asian Studies (2016–2017). Gary Kerley, PhD, a retired educator, has published numerous poems, book reviews, and articles. Most recently, he has articles in The Mississippi Encyclopedia, reviews in The Georgia Review and The South Carolina Review, and articles on the American Revolution and the Civil War in the Daily Life Series for ABC-CLIO. Yusri Khaizran, PhD, is a lecturer at Shalem Academic Center at Jerusalem. He specializes in the politico-cultural history of the Fertile Crescent. Khaizran has published articles on political and cultural aspects of the Fertile Crescent as well as a book, The Druze Community and the Lebanese State: Between Resistance and Reconciliation (Routledge, 2014). Pawan Kumar is a doctoral scholar at the Center for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was a visiting research fellow at Trinity College at Dublin under the SPECTRESS project, 2016. He did his graduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Delhi. Kenneth Lee is the professor of Asian religions at California State University at Northridge. His degrees are from Occidental College (AB), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv), and Columbia University (MPhil, PhD). His book, The Prince

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and the Monk: Shotoku Worship in Shinran’s Buddhism (State University of New York Press 2007) traces the evolution of Shotoku worship in Japanese Buddhism. Tyler A. Lehrer is a doctoral student in Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research engages gender and modern Buddhist monastic history in and between Thailand and Sri Lanka. Liang Zhu, MA, is a PhD candidate in the Department of China and Inner Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is interested in the intellectual and cultural history of China, pre-Tang literatures and cultures, and history of religious thought in East Asia. Judit Erika Magyar has been lecturing in modern Japanese history, Western civilization, and global history at universities in Europe and Japan for the past decade. Educated in Hungary, Italy, and Japan, her research interests include the history of the Japanese navy, Russo-Japanese relations, interwar and wartime Japanese magazines, Kirishitan, and Christian history. Susan Stiles Maneck, PhD, is an associate professor at Jackson State University, teaching courses in history and comparative religion. Her degrees are from the University of Arizona (MA, PhD). She has authored numerous articles and a book, The Death of Ahriman (K.R. Cama Oriental Institute 1997), on the history of the Parsis. Barbara Alice Mann, PhD, is a professor of humanities in the Jesup Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo and the author of hundreds of chapters and articles as well as 13 books, including Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath (Oxford, 2016) and Iroquoian Women (Lang, 2000), and was the lead coauthor of Matriarchal Studies: A Bibliography (Oxford, 2015). Joan Marler, PhD, is the founder and executive director of the Institute of Archaeomythology. She is the editor of The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas (HarperCollins 1991), From the Realm of the Ancestors (Knowledge Ideas & Trends 1997), The Danube Script (Institute of Archaeomythology 2008), The Journal of Archaeomythology (2005–present), and other publications. Hannah Mayne is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and in the collaborative program in Jewish studies. Her research focuses on the performance and politics of contemporary Jewish women’s prayer practices in Jerusalem, especially in feminist and ultra-Orthodox communities. Julia McClenon studies Chinese religiosities at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has lived, worked, and studied in China, most recently as a diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service. She welcomes cross-disciplinary exchange and is interested in issues of time and temporality.



About the Editor and Contributors

Beverley McGuire, PhD, is an associate professor of East Asian religions at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research interests include Buddhist perspectives on karma, suffering, and repentance, and her most recent book is Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu (Columbia University Press, 2014). Bernadette McNary-Zak, PhD, is an associate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Adele Valeria Messina, PhD, is a member of the Association for Jewish Studies and of the Research Laboratory in History, Philosophy, and Politics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria. She has published articles, including “L’idéologie raciale aux États-Unis,” Diasporas, Circulations, Migrations, Histoire (2018): 115–129. Semontee Mitra is a PhD candidate of American studies and a lecturer in the School of Humanities at Penn State University, Harrisburg. She specializes in the study of South Asian Indian Americans with a focus on religion, immigration, folk culture, and gender. Her work has appeared in various journals and encyclopedias in the United States and India. Race MoChridhe, MA, is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His research spans Pagan, women’s, and textual studies to examine issues in the history of feminist thought, mid-20th century British lesbian spirituality, and archival representations of the same. More about his work can be found at his website: www.racemochridhe.com. James Harry Morris is a specially appointed research associate at the National Institute of Technology, Fukushima College. He is completing his doctoral research on the history of Christianity in Japan at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He has published on various aspects of Japanese and East Asian religious history. Phyllis Moses is a level three Tara Dhatu teacher and leads a circle of dance in the Puget Sound area of Washington. She also leads the Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara whenever and wherever she is called to share it. Asha Mukherjee, PhD, is a professor in philosophy and director of the Women Studies Centre at Visva Bharati University in Bolpur, West Bengal. Vicki Noble is an artist, healer, writer, teacher, and foremother of the Goddess movement. She cocreated the round Motherpeace Tarot deck (1981). Her books include Motherpeace (HarperSanFrancisco 1983), Shakti Woman (HarperSanFrancisco 1991), and The Double Goddess (Bear & Company 2003). She teaches internationally with books published in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and French.

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Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, PhD, is a professor of Latin American literary and cultural studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her recent books include The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation (U New Mexico 2011), and Fierce Feminine Divinities of Eurasia and Latin America: Baba Yaga, Kali, Pombagira, and Santa Muerte (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Ali A. Olomi is a writer, historian, and PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine where he studies the history of the Middle East with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, religion, and colonialism. Cassandra Painter is a PhD candidate in modern European history at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on lived religion in the modern world, the uses of culture to express identity, and the ways in which faith traditions evolve and adapt over time and space. Rasheda Parveen, PhD, is an assistant professor of English at Vellore Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh, India. Her doctoral work was on religion and sexuality with a focus on minoritarian Indian poets. Julia Pascal, PhD, is a playwright, theater director, and scholar. A graduate of the University of London and the University of York, she is now a research fellow at King’s College in London. Her dramas are published by Oberon Books, and her plays have been performed in Europe and the United States. Stephanie Peek is a PhD candidate and instructor in the Religion Department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her areas of expertise include New Testament studies, specifically the study of the Christian gospels, Greco-Roman culture, noncanonical Christian gospels, and women in early Christianity. Todd LeRoy Perreira is completing his PhD in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated from Harvard University’s Divinity School with an MTS and earned his BA in religious studies at San José State University, where he currently teaches. Rupa Pillai is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation research examines the adaptations of Caribbean Hindu practices in New York City. Farhana Rahman is a Cambridge international scholar and PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in gender, religion, and lived experiences in Muslim societies. She has extensive experience in the gender and development sector, working internationally for various organizations in the Global South.



About the Editor and Contributors

Lauren Raine, MFA, studied sacred mask traditions in Bali. Her Masks of the Goddess creation traveled throughout the United States for over 20 years to communities of dancers, storytellers, and ritualists. She was awarded an Alden Dow Fellowship and was resident artist at Henry Luce Center for the Arts. Her work can be seen at www.masksofthegoddess.com. Akshaya K. Rath, PhD, is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India. He has published extensively on religion and sexuality. He recently published Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant, as editor (Oxford University Press, 2016). Arisika Razak, RN, MPH, is a professor emerita and former chair of the Women’s Spirituality program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a former president of the American Academy of Religion–Western Region and served as cochair of the Womanist–Pan African Section for five years. Julie Remoiville, PhD, is postdoctoral researcher at Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités GSRL (EPHE/CNRS) in Paris and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taiwan. Her research interests include contemporary Chinese religion and gender issues and concern more particularly the traditional practices and cultural beliefs around pregnancy in urban China. Therese Rodin, PhD, is currently a senior lecturer in religious studies at Dalarna University. Her thesis (2014) was titled “The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths.” Rodin specializes in ancient Mesopotamian religion and culture and mainly female divinities and women’s history. Lena Roos, DTheol, is an associate professor of history of religions and codirector for the Forum for Jewish Studies at Uppsala University. Her fields of expertise include medieval Judaism, Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, religion and sexuality, religion and food, and teaching religion. Patricia Rose, PhD, is an independent writer, researcher, and facilitator whose work includes studies of women’s spirituality, earth-centered spirituality, contemporary women’s writings, and spiritual feminist myth and ritual. Her most recent books are Gaia Emerging: Goddess Beliefs and Practices in Australia (Patricia Rose 2011) and Knowing Places: Reflections on the Sacred Book of Nature (Gaia’s Ink 2012). Hannah Sachs is a professional theater director focusing on applied theater work with marginalized communities. She spent 2017 in the Czech Republic teaching and directing on a Fulbright scholarship and is now pursuing graduate work on religion and the arts at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music.

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Rochelle G. Saidel, PhD, is the founder and executive director of Remember the Women Institute. She is the author or editor of six books on various aspects of the Holocaust and is the curator of several related museum exhibits. She has written, presented, and lectured internationally on the Holocaust for nearly 40 years. Mary Ruth Sanders, PhD, is a lecturer in history at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia. Her research focuses on the history of American Christianity and the history of terrorism. She received her PhD from Oklahoma State University in 2015. Sandy Eisenberg Sasso is the director of the Religion, Spirituality and the Arts Initiative at Butler University and Christian Theological Seminary and cofounder of Women4Change Indiana. She was the first woman to be ordained from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1972. She is the author of award-winning books for children and adults. Clara Schoonmaker is a PhD student in the Religion Department at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on the complexities of American religious pluralism and the position of contemporary Pagans in the American religious landscape. Shahida, PhD, is an assistant professor at NIT Kurukshetra, India. She specializes in Sufi studies, comparative religion, and culture. She is the author of The Color Purple: A Study (Prakash 2005), and has many articles and research papers to her credit. Currently, she is working on the 13th-century Sufi Rishi movement of Kashmir and its sociopolitical impact. Miranda Shaw, PhD, is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Her publications on women, gender, and female deities in South Asian and Himalayan Buddhism include Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton University Press, 1994), which has been translated into seven languages. Morgan Shipley, PhD, is an academic specialist in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. His publications include Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America (Lexington 2015), as well as articles in academic journals, including Utopian Studies, Preternature, and The Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Emily B. Simpson is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published scholarly articles, including “Sacred Mother Bodhisattva, Buddha and Cakravartin: Recasting Empress Jingu- as a Buddhist Figure in the Hachiman gudo-kun,” Journal of Religion in Japan (December 2017): 107–27. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies and the Crawford Family Professor at Colby College. She has published



About the Editor and Contributors

extensively in Sikh studies and serves on the editorial board of several journals. Her views have been aired on television and radio across the United States, Europe, and South Asia. Dale Stover, PhD, is a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has published on postcolonial interpretations of Native American traditions, including “Postcolonial Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December 2001): 817–36. Sana Tayyen is currently a lecturer of religion at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University with an emphasis on Islam, Muslims, and comparative theology. Her present work involves women in Islam, comparative research and writing on Ghazali and Aquinas, and interreligious studies. Victoria Team, MD, MPH, DrPH, is a medical anthropologist and a public health researcher with broad interests in women’s health. She currently works in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a managing editor for Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. Adriana Teodorescu, PhD, is interested in death studies, comparative literature, and gender studies. Her article “The Women-Nature Connection as a Key Element in the Social Construction of Western Contemporary Motherhood” was published in Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment (Routledge 2017), ed. Vakoch and Mickey. Aubrey Thamann, PhD, is an independent scholar in the fields of American studies and anthropology whose broad research interests include culture change, death and dying, and fat studies. Her most recent research project was an ethnographic study of funeral directors in Indiana. She received her doctorate from Purdue University in 2016. Amy B. Voorhees earned her PhD in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an independent scholar focusing on Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science tradition. She has received many awards and fellowships, most recently from the New England Regional Fellowship Colloquium. Katherine Clark Walter, PhD, is an associate professor of history at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. She has published on medieval widows, liturgy, and hagiography. Her most recent publication is “Animals on the Edge: Humans and Hybrids in the Pontificals of Later Medieval France,” in Human/Animal, edited by Fabry-Tehranchi and Russakoff (Rodopi 2014, 95–113). Lewis Webb, MPhil, is a PhD candidate in ancient history and classical archaeology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he is investigating elite

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female status competition in mid-Republican Rome. He has published on religion, social status, and gender in the Roman Republic and Empire. Michelle Claire White is a writer, poet, and facilitator who has a deep passion for the revival of Goddess spirituality. Drawing from her undergraduate studies in comparative religion, her focus is on how myth, symbols, and stories can help empower us and reenchant our connections with the natural world. Annette Lyn Williams, PhD, is the chair of the Women’s Spirituality program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her research interests include healing from sexual trauma at the level of the soul and women’s spiritual power and agency within the Yoruba Ifa tradition with specific reference to the primordial feminine authority of àjé. Rachel York-Bridgers, PhD, is a lecturer of English at Western Carolina University in North Carolina and a graduate of University of Toronto’s School of Environment and Education. Her interests include ecological world views, environmental and peace education, and the arts. Yue Du, PhD, is an assistant professor of modern Chinese history at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She has published articles on gender and law in early modern China and on the connection between the imperial cult of filiality and political religion in 20th-century China. She is writing a book on state-sponsored filiality and China’s empire-to-nation transformation.

Comprehensive Index

The volume in which each entry appears is indicated in bold. Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbesses, 1:160–161, 221–222, 231–232, 256, 261, 274 hagiographies of, 1:257 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 1:204–206, 251, 278 Abdi, Hawa, 2:83 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, 1:90 Abena, Nurudafina, 2:361 Abi Bakr, Ayesha bint, 2:68 Abigail (biblical), 2:186 Abortion, 2:155, 162, 174 Buddhism, 1:100–101 Christianity, 1:161–163, 179, 202 Judaism, 2:204 ritual for, 2:229 Sikhism, 2:296 Abortion, legalization of, 1:202 Abrahamic traditions, 1:22, 2:188, 228, 297, 312, 362. See also Christianity; Islam; Judaism Abreu, Rosalia (Efunche Wandondo), 1:4 Abu-Lughod, Lia, 2:55 Abzug, Bella, 2:136 Ackerman, Paula, 2:118 Activism and Buddhism, 1:111–13, 135 Christianity, 1:165, 210, 234 ecofeminism, 2:321–325 environmental, 2:176–177, 193, 218–219, 321–322 feminist, 2:360–361 Islam, 2:55, 60–61, 83–84, 94–95 Judaism, 2:120, 132–136, 159, 193 peacemaking, 2:41, 117, 185–88 Activism (Native American), 2:3–6 Acupuncture, 2:332

Adam (biblical), 1:197–198, 229, 2:169 and Lilith, 2:171–174 in the Qur’an, 2:63–64 See also Eve; Lilith Adams, Carol J., 2:323 Adams, Evangeline, 2:312 Adefunmi, Oba (King) Oseijeman Adelabu I, 1:6 Aditi, 1:315–316, 364, 373, 379 Adler, Celia, 2:190 Adler, Margot, 2:340 Adler, Rachel, 2:146 Adler, Stella, 2:190 Adulthood ceremonies, 1:16–17, 49 Aforodita, 1:55 Africa Christianity in, 1:176–178 Islam in, 2:68–71 matricentric societies in, 2:358–359 monasticism in, 1:254 See also African religions African American Episcopal church, 1:187 African American Methodist movement, 1:164 African American Ecofeminism. See Ecowomanism African American feminism. See Womanism African American women, 1:163–166, 174, 186, 194, 2:360–362 African diaspora, drumming traditions in, 2:361 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, 1:164, 165, 185 African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) church, 1:164, 165

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COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

African religions, 1:1–24 and art in Africa, 1:7–9 and body art, 1:10–11 Candomblé, 1:11–14 and Christianity, 2:355 in diaspora, 1:3–6 and female genital mutilation, 1:14–16 indigenous, 1:3, 8, 171 introduction, 1:1–2 and life-cycle ceremonies, 1:16–17 and Orisha veneration, 1:3, 4, 11, 2:361 precolonial, 2:343 priestesses and oracular women, 1:17–22 Rastafari, 1:22–23 Vodou (Vodoun, Vodun, Voodoo), 1:3, 5 women’s spirituality in 2:358–359 Yoruba, 1:23–25 See also Africa African religions-in-diaspora, 1:3–6 Africana women, 1:3–6, 2:359 Afsaruddin, Asma, 2:55 Afterlife, 2:354 Agatha (saint), 1:256 Ahimsa, 2:105 Ahl al-Kitab community, 2:68 Ahmadiyya Muslim movement, 2:69 Ahmed, Leila, 2:60, 362 Ahmose-Nefertari, 1:19 Aiken, Robert, 1:105 Aimée, Anouk, 2:191 Aisha (Ayesha) bint Abu Bakr, 2:52, 88, 68, 70, 97, 344 Aisha bint Al Shati, 2:55, 70 Aisha of Damascus, 2:100 Aje, 1:24 Akan religious tradition, 1:3 Akka Mahadevi, 1:325–326 Alakshmi, 1:349 Al Batayahiyyah, Fatima, 2:53 Albear, Timotea (Ayaji La Tuan), 1:4 Alcatraz Island, occupation of, 2:361 Al-Din, Nazira Zin, 2:51 Al Fihri, Fatima, 2:53 Al-Ghazali, Zainab, 2:70 Al-Habash, Huda, 2:84 Al-Hibri, Azizah, 2:103 Al-Huda International, 2:103 Ali, Kecia, 2:55

Allen, Paula Gunn, 2:341, 359 Allen, Richard, 1:164 Allen, Terry, 1:196 Alliance of Baptists, 1:224 Allione, Tsultrim, 1:104, 2:341 Al Qarawiyyin university, 2:53, 70 Al-Qubaysi, Munira, 2:75 Al-Qubaysiyat, 2:75 Al-Qushayri, wife of, 2:99 Al Rahaman, Aisha Abd, 2:55 Alseikiene, Marija Birute. See Gimbutas, Marija Al-Sitt Nayfa, 2:51 Al-Sitt Sarah, 2:51 Al-Zahra, Fatima, 2:56 Amadiume, Ifi, 2:342 Amar Das (Guru), 2:303 Amaterasu, 1:75, 80, 2:284, 354 Amaterasu Omikami, 2:269, 270–272, 271, 278 Amazigh of Morocco, 2:84 Ambedkar, B. R., 1:324 Ambika. See Shakti Ambrose (saint), 1:162, 260, 271 Ambuvaci festival, 1:357 Amenirdis I (princess), 1:19 Amen meals, 2:142 Ame-no-Uzume, 1:73, 75 American Baptist Churches USA, 1:224 American denominations American Baptist Churches USA, 1:224 Amish, 1:192, 273 denominationalism and beyond, 2:121–122 Halachah, 2:120 Judaism: 1850 to present, 2:117–122 modern Orthodoxy and the Woman Question, 2:118–120 Reconstruction and gender distinction, 2:121 reform and the limits of equality, 2:118 shifting emphases of the Conservative movement, 2:120–121 American Individual Religious Freedom Act (1978), 2:29 American Jewish Congress, 2:135 American Muslim Women Political Action Committee, 2:78 American Red Cross, 1:174



American Shaking Quakers, 1:186, 199 American Sisters of Charity, 1:174 American Women’s Zionist Organization (Hadassah), 2:135–136 Am Ha Aretz, 2:226 Amin, Qasim, 2:54 Amish, 1:192, 273 Amrita initiation, 2:299–300 An, 1:62 Anabaptists, 1:224, 246, 273, 274, 275, 276. See also Amish; Mennonites Anandamayi Ma, 1:342 Anat, 2:144 Ancestors (Native American), 2:6–8, 22, 30–31. See also Kinship Ancestor veneration, 1:3–4, 23, 2:24, 236, 258, 277, 361. See also Filial Piety Anchoresses, 1:211–212, 277 Ancient Druid Order (ADO), 2:217 Ancient Judaism, 2:122–124 education for women in, 2:130 Ancient religions, 1:27–83 Athena, 1:29–32, 44, 65–66, 237, 2:254, 255 Daily Lives of Greek and Roman Women, 1:48–52 Delphic Oracle, 1:32–33, 67 Diana, 1:33–35, 70, 2:329 Egyptian religion, 1:35–39 Eleusinian Mysteries, 1:39–42 Gaia, 1:31, 42–43, 65–66, 2:222 Gorgon Medusa, 1:43–48 homosexuality, 1:52–53 Hypatia, 1:28, 53–54 Inanna, 1:55–56, 63, 82 introduction, 1:27–29 Judaism, 2:122–124 marriage, ancient Greek and Roman religions, 1:56–58 Mesopotamian religion, 1:58–61 Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess, 1:62–63 ˘ 1:63–65 Ninlil, pre-Greek goddesses in the Greek Pantheon, 1:65–67 priestesses and their staff in ancient Greece, 1:67–68 religious leadership, ancient Roman religions, 1:68–71 Sappho, 1:28, 52, 71–73, 72

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Shamans in East Asia, 1:73–77 Sibyls, 1:77–78 sun goddess, 1:78–80 writers and poets, ancient Mesopotamia, 1:81–83 Anderson, Judith, 2:309 Andinna (ancestral priestesses), 1:21 Androcentrism, 2:169, 193, 296, 315 An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas, 2:217 Angela Merici, 1:174 Angela of Foligno, 1:265 Angelica (Mother), 1:187 Angel therapy, 2:333 Angelus Temple, 1:199 Angha, Sayedeh Nahid, 2:101 Angkor Wat, 1:107–108 Anglican church, 1:180, 246, 248, 273 in Africa, 1:177 and divorce, 1:215 women religious, 1:166–167 See also Episcopalian church Anglican/Episcopalian women religious, 1:166–167 Anglicanism. See Anglican church Anglican religious communities (ARC), 1:167 Anglo-Papists, 1:166 Animal liberation, 2:325 Animal sacrifice, 1:4, 16, 69, 151–152, 322 Animism, 1:80, 2:251–252, 257 and female genital mutilation, 1:15 Ankhesenpepi II, 1:35, 36 Anna (gospel of Luke), 1:269, 271 Anne (mother of Mary), 1:223 Anthropocentrism, 2:20, 313, 314, 315 Anthropology movement, 1:264 Antinomian controversy, 1:185 Antiochian Department of Marriage and Parish Family Ministries of the Antiochian Christian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, 1:187 Anti-Semitism, 2:133, 134, 135. 165, 186, 221 Antonia (Princess of Württemberg), 1:264 Anzaldua, Gloria, 2:360 Aodun Miaoshan, 1:301 Aphrodite, 1:55, 72–73

413

414

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Apocrypha, 1:168–169, 2:122, 173 Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 1:168, 219, 251 Gospel of Philip, 1:168, 219 Gospel of Thomas, 1:168–169, 219 Apollo, 1:77 Archaeomythology, 2:240, 249 Arician sacred grove, 1:33 Arjan (Guru), 2:303 Armstrong, Annie, 1:248 Ár nDraiocht Féin, 2:218 Arquette, Patricia, 2:190 Arquette, Rosanna, 2:190 Art (Judaism), 2:124–128 Art in Africa 1:7–9, 2:358 of ancient Judaism, 2:124–125 depictions of Mary Magdalene, 1:217, 218 depictions of Mary of Nazareth, 1:238 Indian, 2:293–294 Indigenous, 1:74, 2:8, 9–11 Jewish feminist, 2:159 Medieval, 2:348 and women’s spirituality, 2:341, 360–361 prehistoric, 1:74, 2:239, 247–248, 250, 253–255, 257, 260–264, 324, 352, 363 Renaissance, 2:125 sacred, 1:7, 2:239 spirituality in, 2:308–311 See also Sculpture Art, Modern and Contemporary (Christianity), 1:170–173 Art and performance Sikhism, 2:292–295 spirituality, 2:308–311, 310 Artemis, 1:33, 44–45, 65–66 Art in Africa, 1:7–9 Arts (Native American), 2:9–11 Asanti, Iyanifa Ifalola TaShia, 1:6 Ásatrú, 2:227 Ásatrúarfélagið, 2:221 Ásatrú Lore Vanatrú Assembly, 2:221 Asceticism, 1:131, 151, 189, 260–261, 265–266, 347, 361–363, 379–380, 382, 2:99, 285 Jain, 2:105, 107, 108, 109–111, 112 See also Monasticism; Renunciation Ashbridge, Elizabeth, 1:185

Ashcroft, Peggy, 2:191 Asherah, 1:55, 263, 2:142–146, 143, 152–153, 192, 327 Ashrawi, Hanan Mikhail, 2:83 Ashtaprakari Puja, 2:112 Ashtoret (Ashtart; Astarte), 1:55, 2:142, 144 Asiyah, 2:92 Askew, Anne, 1:194, 276 Asma’u, Nana, 2:70 Assad, Audrey, 1:171 Assemblies of God, 1:183, 249 Association of Shinto Shrines, 2:273, 279 Astarabadi, Bibi Khanoom, 2:54 Astarte (Ashtoret; Ashtart), 1:55, 2:144, 320, 329 Asteroids, 2:312 Astral body, 1:377 Astrology, 1:384, 2:312–313, 316 feminist, 2:312 Asuncion “Sunita Serrano,” 1:6 Asungi, AfraShe, 2:361 Athena, 1:29–32, 30, 44, 65–66, 237, 2:254, 255 priestesses of, 1:30–31 Athena of Victory, 1:31 Atum, 1:35 Augustine of Hippo, 1:197–198, 207, 221, 231, 245, 260, 268 Aura readings, 2:316 Aurobindo, Sri, 1:355 Austen, Hallie Iglehart, 2:341 Autumn equinox (Mabon), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Avalokites´vara. See Guan Yin Avvaiyaˉr, 1:316 Awashima Religion, 2:282 Awen, 2:218 Àwon Ìyá Wa (ancestral Mothers), 1:13 Ayaji La Tuan (Timotea Albear), 1:4 Ayambil Oli, 2:109 Ayesha bint Abu Bakr. See Aisha bint Abu Bakr Aztec Cihuateteo, 2:35 Aztec culture and religion, 1:333, 2:12, 15, 21, 22, 26, 34, 223 Azusa Street Revival, 1:185–186 Baalat-Gebal, 1:55 Ba’a lot Teshuva, 2:167



Ba’al Shem Tov (Besht), 2:147 Ba’al Teshuva movement, 2:185 Bab, Siyyid Ali Muhammad al-, 1:93–94 Babalowa, 1:6 Bacall, Lauren, 2:189 Bacchus, 1:69 Bach, Alice, 2:179 Bagby, Rachel, 2:362 Baha’i, 1:85–96 and the divine feminine, 1:87–88 gender roles in, 1:91–93 introduction, 1:85–87 places of worship, 1:85, 86 Tahirih, 1:93–94 and universal education, 1:88–91 Universal House of Justice, 1:85–86, 95, 96 women in Baha’i scriptures, 1:95–96 Baha’i House of Worship, Delhi, 86, 86 Baha’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE), 1:90 Baha’i International Community (BIC), 1:90 Bahá’ú’lláh, 1:85, 86, 88, 94, 95–96 Bahia, 1:13 Bahir, 2:167 Bahiyyih Khanum, 1:94 Baker, Ella, 1:186 Baker, Julien, 1:172 Baker, Richard, 1:124 Balas, Maria, 1:186 Baldwin, Shauna Singh, 2:293 Bale, John, 1:194 Ballet Rambert, 2:191 Ballets Russes, 2:191 Banna tribe, 1:10 Ban Zhao, 1:283, 289 Baptism, 2:12 Baptist Church, 1:163, 178, 183, 224, 246 and divorce, 1:215 German, 1:180 missionary activity, 1:226, 248 Swiss, 1:180 Barbara (saint), 1:256 Barbour, Jeannie, 2:30 Bari Gongju (Pali Kongju), 1:73, 76 Barkin, Ellen, 2:190 Barlas, Asma, 2:59, 60 Bar mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 183, 188 Barnardo, Thomas, 1:195

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Barney, Alice Pike, 1:89 Barton, Clara, 1:174 Basil the Great, 1:162, 245 Basket Dance, 2:10 Basketry, 1:7, 30, 41, 68, 285, 380, 2:9–10, 9, 26, 28, 251 Bat mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 121, 128–129, 183 Beadwork, 1:9, 2:230 Beaivvi nieida, 1:79 Bear cults, 2:252 Béart, Emanuelle, 2:191 Beatification, 1:266 Beatrice of Nazareth, 1:241 Beauty products, 1:191–192 Beckett, “Sister Wendy,” 1:175 Beecher, Catharine, 1:186 Beeching, Vicky, 1:172 Beginning of knowledge rituals, 1:374 Beguines, 1:222, 241, 269 Beltane, 2:232, 232, 233, 236, 329 Benedict of Nursia, 1:232 Benkovic, Johnnette, 1:187 Berber people (Africa), 2:24, 26 Berechiah, Rabbi Aaron, 2:169 Berenice (mother of Herod), 1:271 Berezan, Jennifer, 2:338 Berg, Jónína Kristín, 2:221 Bergner, Elisabeth, 2:191 Berk, Lotte, 2:191 Bernhard, Sandra, 2:190 Bernhardt, Sarah, 2:191 Bernstein, Theresa, 2:126 Berry, Amanda Smith, 1:164 Bes, 1:38 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1:165 Bhadrakali. See Shakti Bhagavad Gita, 1:317, 358, 2:364 Bhakti movement, 1:314, 316–320 Bhakti Yoga, 2:364 Bhangra, 2:302 Bhikkhunis, 1:129–130, 132–133, 134, 135, 151–152, 153 Bibi Bhani, 2:297–298 Bikkhuni movement, 1:123 Bikram yoga, 2:364 Biospheric equality, 2:315–316 Birth, 1:33 life-cycle ceremonies, 1:16 Hindu ceremonies (jaˉtkarman), 1:374

415

416

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Birth control, 1:22, 2:204 prohibitions on, 2:148 Birth control movement, 2:135 Black Artemis of Ephesus, 1:49 Black Doves, 1:18 Black nationalists/nationalism, 1:6, 2:77 Black women, 1:181 Blaney, Ta’Kaiya, 2:5 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 1:103, 2:350 Blessing of a child, 2:12 Blessing way/Blessingway (Navajo), 2:13, 231 Bloom, Claire, 2:190 Blyde, Ludy, 1:160 Boas, Franz, 2:35 Bodhisattvas, 1:97, 101–102, 129, 138, 139, 142, 2:344–345, 361 Jizo, 1:100, 101 Mañjus´ rıˉ, 1:139 Marıˉcıˉ, 1:304 See also Dance of Tara; Deities, Buddhist; Engaged Buddhism; Guan Yin; Mizuko Body art, 1:10–11, 10 Body-modification practices, 1:10 Boegue, Rosine, 1:186 Boehme, Jacob, 1:264, 2:222 Bolen, Jean, 2:361 Boleyn, Anne, 1:194 Bolz-Weber, Nadia, 1:248 Bone, Eleanor, 2:224 Bonewits, Phaedra, 2:218 Book of Mormon, 1:233 Books for women, 1:282–284 Boorstein, Sylvia, 1:104 Bori religion, 1:20 Boucher, Sandy, 1:105 Boxer, Amanda, 2:191 Boyle, Louise Dixon, 1:89 Brach, Tara, 1:104 Bradstreet, Anne, 1:170 Brahma, 1:332, 369 Brahmanas, 1:364 Brahmanism, 1:321–323, 373 and yoga, 2:363 Brahmcharinis, 1:362–363 Brandy, Carolyn, 2:361 Brazil, 1:11, 24 Candomblé in, 1:24 enslaved Africans in, 1:11

Breslov Hasidism, 2:147, 148 Brice, Fanny, 2:189 Bridget (Bridgit) of Sweden, 1:257, 277, 269, 278 Brin Fanny, 2:186 Bristol Women’s Liberation, 2:327 British Circle of the Universal Bond, 2:217 British Druid Order, 2:217 British Society for Psychical Research, 2:351 British Traditional Wicca (BTW), 2:226 Bron, Eleanor, 2:191 Bronze Age burials, 2:244 Bronze casting, 1:9 Brooten, Bernadette, 2:192 Brown, Olympia, 1:186 B’Shevat, 2:139 Budapest, Zsuzsanna, 2:215–216, 225, 229, 235, 327–328, 340 Buddhahood, 1:116, 129, 130, 131, 139, 140, 142, 143, 154 Buddha-nature, 1:154 Buddha(s) Amitabha, 1:102, 126 female, 1:107, 115–116, 140, 143, 2:361 Mahavairocana, 2:278 mothers of, 1:117, 119, 132, 135–136, 137, 152 Nairatmya, 1:116 Sakyamuni, 1:102 Shakyamuni, 1:106, 114, 136 Simhamukha, 1:140 Tara, 1:140, 143 Vajrayogini, 1:116, 140, 143 Buddhism, 1:97–156, 2:276, 355, 357 and abortion, 1:100–101 in China, 1:281, 284 connection to Shinto, 2:278 dance, 1:106–108 Dance of Tara, 1:108–111, 2:336 engaged, 1:111–114 female divinities, 1:114–118 feminine virtues, 1:118–120 funeral practices, 1:120–122 gender roles in, 1:122–125 Himalayan, 1:146 introduction, 1:97–100 in Japan, 1:117–118, 134, 2:284–285, 357



and kirtan, 2:334 laywomen in Theravada Buddhism, 1:127–129 Mahayana, 1:97, 101–102, 103, 106, 114–115, 125, 129–131, 134, 136–137, 138, 2:335, 344 meditation in, 2:335, 336 Newar, 1:116–117, 147 Nichiren, 1:126, 140–142 Nuns, Theravada, 1:132–133 ordination, 1:133–135 Pajapati, 1:135–136 Prajnaparamita, 1:136–138 Pure Land, 1:126 sacred texts on women, 1:138–140 sex scandals associated with, 1:105, 124, 141 Soˉka Gakkai, 1:140–142 soteriological androgyny, 1:131 Soˉto Zen, 1:104, 123, 133, 155–156 Tantric, 1:110, 114, 115–117, 142–144, 304, 2:335, 336, 346 Tara, 1:144–147 tea ceremony, 1:148–149 Tendai, 1:126 Theravada, 1:97, 104, 112, 118–120, 124, 127–128, 130, 134, 138, 139–140, 153, 2:335 Therigatha, 1:149–150 Tibetan, 1:104, 109–110, 117, 138, 153, 2:344 Tientai, 1:126 in the United States, 1:103–105, 108 Vajrayana (Himalayan), 1:97, 107, 129, 130, 140, 142, 2:335 Western, 1:124 women in early Buddhism, 1:150–152 women’s Buddhist networks, 1:152–154 Women’s Division, 1:141 Youth Division, 1:141 Zen, 1:103, 104–105, 148–149, 154–156, 2:335, 361 See also Bodhisattvas; Deities, Buddhist; Lotus Sutra Buddhism in the United States, 1:103–105 Buddhist Churches of America, 1:103 Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, 1:112 Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 1:113

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Buddhists as followers of Sufism, 2:101 Buehler, Bernice, 1:196 Bulkeley, Catherine, 1:160 Burials, 2:243–244 Bronze Age, 2:244 and the funeral industry, 2:330 green funerals, 2:330–331 in Japan, 2:280 Mesolithic, 2:243–244 mounds, 1:16 prehistoric, 2:243–244 Uan Afuda cave, 2:243–244 Upper Paleolithic, 2:243 See also Funeral practices Burka, 2:47, 69, 76, 90 Burma Buddhism in, 1:113, 127, 128, 130, 134, 153 missionaries in, 1:226 Cabrini, Frances Xavier (Maria Francesca Cabrini), 1:186 Caesar, Julius, 1:37, 48 Caesarion, 1:37 Caine, Margaret N., 1:234 Caitanya Mahaprabhu, 1:360 Calvin, John, 1:179, 246, 275 Calvinist churches, 1:178 Cama, Bhikaji Rustomji, 1:339 Cambodia, 1:107–108, 127 Cambridge Buddhist Association, 1:104 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 1:171 Camp, Sokari Douglas, 1:9 Campbell, Billy, 2:331 Campbell, Kimberly, 2:331 Canavarro, Marie deSouza, 1:103 Candidas, 1:360 Candle lighting, 2:207, 207 Candomblé, 1:1, 3, 4, 11–14, 24 Cannon, Katie Geneva, 1:187 Canonization, 1:54, 184, 205, 222, 241, 255–259, 266, 269, 305, 341. See also Saints Canyon de Chelly, 2:33 Cao Wenyi, 1:301 Carlini, Benedetta, 1:207 Carlson, Lisa, 2:331 Carol, Sister, 1:22 Carr, Anne, 1:187

417

418

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Carrington, Leonora, 2:308–309 Carter, Helena Bonham, 2:191 Carvajel, Luisa de, 1:160 Caste, 1:112, 131, 151, 313, 318, 321– 324, 326, 327, 330, 346, 348, 364, 370, 377, 2:297, 298, 299, 345 and Tantric Hinduism, 1:377–378 Castillo, Francisca Josefa de, 1:160 Çatalhöyük culture (Turkey), 1:251. 2:254, 353–354 Catherine of Alexandria, 1:256 Catherine of Siena, 1:241, 257, 257, 277, 278 Catholic Charismatic Revival, 1:186 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Catholicism. See Roman Catholic Church Catholic Worker movement, 1:174, 186 Caur, Arpana, 2:293–294 Cave art, 1:16–17, 66, 334, 2:251, 260, 261, 262, 266, 324, 348, 349. See also Petroglyphs Celebrations. See Festivals and holy days; Life-cycle ceremonies Celestial Masters, 1:308 Celibacy, 1:60, 96, 138, 155, 157, 175– 176, 199, 245, 249, 258, 261, 262, 269, 274, 275, 308, 316, 340, 361, 371, 2:73, 105, 108, 345 Celtic Reconstructionism, 2:227 Ceremonies (Native American), 2:11–14 Ceres, 1:69 Chabad-Lubavich Hasidism, 2:119, 147, 149–150 Chadha, Gurinder, 2:294–295 Chador, 2:47, 54, 76, 90 Chagatai (son of Genghis Khan), 2:38 Chaim, Yosef, 2:128 Chakras, 1:377, 384 Challah, 2:129, 137–138, 141, 206–207 Chamunda, 1:374 Changing Woman, 2:12, 13 Chan Khong, 1:112–113 Chanukah, 2:139, 212 Chaos, 1:42 Chapman, Vera, 2:217 Charismatic Catholicism, 1:182 Charismatic Christianity, 1:182 Charismatic preaching, 1:164, 165

Charity, 1:173–175 Charya Nritya, 1:107, 108 Chast, Roz, 2:127 Chastity, 1:175–176, 346, 2:105, 109, 345 Chastity belt, 1:175 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 1:355 Chayat, Sherry, 1:105 Cheng Yen, 1:112 Chen Jinggu, 1:75 Chicago, Judy, 2:127, 309 Chicanas, 2:360 Child abuse, 1:15 Childbirth. See Birth China abortion in, 1:100 Buddhism in, 1:117, 130, 134, 153, 2:357 Confucianism in, 1:281–282, 294 Hongshan culture, 2:359 missionaries in, 1:226 shamans in, 1:74–75 Chinese medicine, traditional, 1:306–307 Chinese of Indonesia, 2:84 Chochmah (Wisdom), 2:144–145 Chödrön, Pema, 1:104, 123 Chodron, Thubten, 1:104, 112 Christ, Carol P., 2:240, 248, 323, 337, 339 Christensen, Else, 2:221, 225 Christian Coalition, 1:202 Christian egalitarianism, 1:248 Christian Feminism Today, 1:187 Christianity, 1:53–54, 157–279, 2:276 abbesses, 1:160–161 abortion and, 1:161–163 in Africa, 1:176–178 African American, 1:163–166 Anglican/Episcopalian women religious, 1:166–167 Apocrypha, 1:168–169 and charity, 1:173–175 and chastity, 1:175–176 Christine de Pizan, 1:188–189, 278–279 and clothing, 1:189–193 Eastern Orthodox, 1:176 and education, 1:193–197 Ethiopian, 1:22 Ethiopian Orthodox, 1:177 in Europe, 1:178–180 evangelical, 1:182



and “The Fall,” 1:197–199 and female genital mutilation, 1:15 founders of Christian denominations, 1:199–201 fundamentalism, 1:201–204 and homosexuality, 1:206–208 interfaith dialogue post 9/11, 1:208–211 introduction, 1:157–159 in Latin America, 1:180–184 marriage, divorce, and widowhood, 1:213–216 in the Middle Ages, 1:221–223 ministers, 1:223–225 missionaries, 1:225–227 modern and contemporary art, 1:170–173 monasticism and contemporary women, 1:230–231 monasticism and medieval women, 1:231–233 monastic life, 1:227–230 orthodox, 1:242–243 pilgrimage, 1:243–245 and polygamy, 1:245–247 prohibition of, 1:126, 242 Protestant denominations, 1:247–250 relationship and social models in scripture, archeology, and history, 1:250–253 revivalist movements, 1:163 Roman Catholic women religious, 1:253–255 sex and gender, 1:260–262 Sophia, 1:263–265 stigmatics, 1:265–266 in the United States, 1:184–188 and widowhood, 1:215–216, 267–271 women in early Christianity, 1:271–273 women in the Reformation, 1:273–276 women writers in early and medieval Christianity, 1:276–279 See also Anabaptists; Christians; Christian saints; Christian scripture; Hildegard of Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Mary Magdalene; Mary of Nazareth; Mormonism; Mother of God; Mystics; Protestantism; Roman Catholic Church Christianity in Africa, 1:176–178

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Christianity in Europe, 1:178–180 Christianity in Latin America, 1:180–184 colonial Christianity, 1:180–182 Pentecostal and Protestant Christianity, 1:183 Pluralization and Contemporary Latin America, 1:182–183 Christianity in the United States, 1:184–188 Christian Kabbalah, 1:263, 264 Christians Hindu violence against, 1:340 Indian, 1:323 See also Christianity Christian saints, 1:4–5, 222, 241, 255–259, 2:332, 345, 357 Agatha, 1:256 Ambrose, 1:162, 260, 271 Anne, 1:223 Augustine of Hippo, 1:197–198, 207, 221, 231, 245, 260, 268 Barbara, 1:256 Basil the Great, 1:162, 245 Benedict of Nursia, 1:232 Bridget of Sweden, 1:257 Brigit (Brigid) of Ireland, 2:332 Catherine of Alexandria, 1:256 Catherine of Siena, 1:241, 257, 257, 277, 278 Clare of Assis, 1:257 Clement of Alexandria, 1:162 Cyprian of Carthage, 1:271 Cyril of Alexandria, 1:54 Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, 1:186 Elizabeth of Thüringia, 1:257 Elizabeth of the Trinity, 1:241 Euphemia, 1:272–273 Felicitas, 1:271, 272 Frances of Rome, 1:257 Frances Xavier Cabrini, 1:186 Francis of Assisi, 1:265 Francis of Rome, 1:265 Gertrude, 1:265 Jerome, 1:221, 231, 260, 268 John Chrysostom, 2:162 John Paul II, 1:224 Kateri Tekakwitha, 1:184, 258, 259 Katharine Drexel, 1:186 Margaret of Antioch, 1:223

419

420

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Christian saints (Continued) Pauli Murray, 1:187 Perpetua of Carthage, 1:271, 272, 276 Scholastica, 1:160, 232 Teresa of Avila, 1:239, 240, 241, 258 Teresa of Calcutta, 1:259 Thérèse of Lisieux, 1:241 Thomas Aquinas, 1:162 See also Mary Magdalene; Mary of Nazareth Christian Science Publishing Society, 1:200 Christian scripture Apocrypha, 1:168–169 Book of Mormon, 1:233 charity in, 1:173 and the Garden of Eden, 1:197–198 and Jewish law, 1:184 on marriage, 1:212, 213, 245–246 on Mary of Nazareth, 1:235–237 Pastoral Epistles, 1:245 relationship and social models in, 1:250–253 on sexuality, 1:206–207 Song of Solomon, 1:251 two versions of Creation, 1:203, 251 on widows and widowhood, 1:267–268, 270 women in, 1:178 Christians for Biblical Equality, 1:187 Christian theosophy, 1:263 Christian Wisdom Traditions, 1:263 Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1430), 1:188–189, 278–279 Chukchee people, 2:265 Church of Christ, Scientist, 1:186, 199, 200 Church of England, 1:194, 196. See also Anglican church Church of God, 1:249 Church of God in Christ, 1:165 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See Mormonism Church of the Nazarene, 1:249 Cicero, 1:67 Circle of life, 1:331 Circle Sanctuary, 2:331 Circulo Odinista Español, 2:221 Circumcision, 2:136

Civil rights era, 1:165 Clare of Assisi, 1:257 Classical Confucianism, 1:284–285 Cleisthenes, 1:67 Clement of Alexandria, 1:162 Cleopatra VII, 1:35, 37, 38, 51 Clothing, 1:189–193, 2:85, 138, 244 aesthetic aspect of, 2:14–15 and Athena, 1:30, 31 biblical references to, 1:189–190, 191, 192 ceremonial, 1:13, 18, 285, 370, 2:15, 39, 250, 262, 267, 282 embellishment of, 2:14 of Hasidim, 2:149 and head covering, 1:210, 243, 260, 2:45, 69 hemline length, 1:190–191 of Jain aescetics, 2:107, 109–111, 112 Japanese wedding garments, 2:287 monastics, 1:230 mourning, 1:215 Native American, 2:9, 21, 22, 41 from pelts, 2:14 from plant fibers, 2:14 private school uniforms, 1:17 in the Renewal Judaism movement, 2:166 restrictions of, 1:22, 122, 135, 362, 2:76 of Sikh women, 2:291 wedding, 2:21 widows, 1:347, 353, 371 women in trousers, 1:191 See also Coverings; Veiling Clothing (Native American), 2:14–15 Cohen, Katherine M., 2:126 Collins, Joan, 2:190 Coming of age ceremonies, 2:12, 13, 17, 24–25, 27 bar mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 183, 188 bat mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 121, 128–129, 183 See also Life-cycle ceremonies; Rites of passage (Sikh) Committee on Jewish Law (CJL), 2:120–121 Community of Our Lady of Walsingham, 1:230–231



Community of Saint Mary the Virgin, 1:167 Compassion, 1:210, 2:56, 60, 105, 316, 355, 364. See also Bodhisattvas; Dance of Tara; Engaged Buddhism; Guan Yin; Motherhood: Link to compassion; Shekinah; Tara Complementarianism, 1:202, 247–248 Conception rituals, 1:374, 2:229 Concerned Women’s Movement (Indonesia), 2:84 Conference of Liberal Rabbis, 2:194 Confirmation in Judaism, 2:118, 121 Confucianism, 1:281–298, 2:345 books for women, 1:282–284 classical, 1:284–286 Confucian revivalism, 1:286–288 cult of female chastity, 1:289 feminine virtues, 1:290–291 filial piety, 1:291–294 hierarchy in, 1:284–285 introduction, 1:281–282 motherhood, 1:294–296 social context of, 1:281 traditional, 1:287 women’s changing roles, 1:296–298 Confucian revivalism, 1:286–288 Connelly, Jennifer, 2:190 Consecrated Women of East and Central Africa, 1:177 Conservative Judaism, 2:128, 183, 195 Constellations, 2:312 Contraception. See Birth control Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (UN), 2:159 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 2:186 Cook, Florence, 2:351 Cook, Jill, 2:260 Cope, Marianne, 1:258 Coptic church, 1:176 Corda, Murshida Vera, 2:101 Corn Mother, 2:2, 18–19, 34 Cosmic egg, 1:42 Cosmetics, 1:10 Council of Chalcedon, 1:176 Council of Hertford, 1:246

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Counter-Reformation, 1:179–180, 258 Covenant of the Goddess, 2:238 Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, 2:218 Covens, 2:235 feminist, 2:216 women-only, 2:225, 235 Coverings, 2:45–47, 69, 73–74, 89–90 banning of, 2:73–74, 76 and Druzism, 2:50 Coy, Genevieve, 1:89 Crandall, Prudence, 1:185 Crandon, Mina, 2:351 Creation stories, 1:4 Inuit, 2:35 Native American, 2:15–17 Ob-Ugrian, 2:252 Yoruba, 1:23 See also Origin myths Creation stories (Native American), 2:15–17 Creatrix (Creator Goddess), 1:3, 42, 79, 263, 328, 336, 355, 359, 363, 373, 377, 379, 380, 2:2, 222, 230, 265, 309, 359. See also Mother Goddess Crete Bronze Age (Minoan), 2:245–248, 354 prehistoric, 2:240–241 Crete, religion and culture, 2:245–249 “Croning” ritual, 2:229 Cross-dressing, ritual, 1:13 Crouch, Janice, 1:187 Crouch, Paul, 1:187 Crowley, Vivianne, 2:225 Crowther, Patricia, 2:224 Crypto-Jews, 2:201 Cuba, 1:14, 24 Cult of Female Chastity, 1:289 Cult of True Womanhood, 2:119 Cuneiform writing, 1:81 Curanderas, 2:8 Cutts, Linda Ruth, 1:105 Cyclic time, 2:312 Cyprian (saint), 1:271 Cyril of Alexandria, 1:54 Dafora, Asadata, 2:361 Dahia al-Kahena, 1:20

421

422

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Dakota Access Pipeline, 2:6 Dalai Lamas, 1:117, 125 Dalida, 2:191 Dalits, 1:323–324 Daly, Mary, 1:249, 2:305, 337, 339 Dance, 1:21, 22, 106–108, 324–326 Basket Dance, 2:10 and Buddhism, 1:106–108 ecstatic, 1:77, 199, 2:336, 363 Hindu, 1:324–326 music for 1:5–6 Punjabi, 2:301, 301 ritual, 1:1, 2:258, 266, 267, 289 round dances, 2:30 at Shinto shrines, 2:275 spiral dances, 2:311 Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance, 2:361 See also Dance of Tara; Dancers; Ghost Dance Dance of Tara, 1:108–111, 109, 2:336 Dancers, 1:3, 8, 20, 21, 38, 2:191, 361 Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance, 2:361 snake, 1:18 See also Dance Danger Cave, 2:9 Daoism, 1:299–312 in China, 1:281, 284, 288, 299–302 goddesses, 1:303–305 healers, 1:305–307 introduction, 1:299–300 meditation in, 2:335, 336 priestesses, nuns, and ordination, 1:307–310 Quanzhen school, 1:302, 310 revival of, 1:309–310 Wu Wei and the feminine, 1:310–312 Zhengyi school, 1:302, 310 Daoism in China, 1:300–302 Daolu yuan, 1:301 Dark Moon astrology, 2:313 Dasara, Prema, 1:108, 109, 110 Dashain festival (Navaratri/Durga Puja), 1:335, 336, 350 Dashú, Max, 1:1, 2:146, 193, 339 Daughter of the Celestial Emperor (Tiandi), 1:304 Daughters, filial, 1:292–293 Daughters of Charity, 1:173, 232 Daughters of the Moon Tarot, 2:340

Davidman, Lynn, 2:149–150 Davies, Nike, 1:8–9 Davis, Elizabeth Gould, 2:339 Day, Dorothy, 1:174, 186 Daystar Television Network, 1:187 Deacon/deaconess, 1:157, 176, 179, 224, 243, 247, 253, 261, 271, 272 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:123, 199 Deaf, 2:195 Death life-cycle ceremonies for, 1:17 and Sikhism, 2:300–301 See also Burials; Funeral practices Death Goddess, 1:46. See also Hecate Death-lamps, 2:24 D’Eaubonne, Françoise, 2:321 Deborah (biblical), 2:152, 212 Decolonial studies, 2:362 Dedmon, Theresa, 1:171 Deep ecology, 2:313–316, 322 feminist criticism of, 2:315–316 principles of, 2:314–315 Deguchi Nao, 2:276, 285 Deguchi Onisaburoˉ, 2:276 Deities direct communication with, 1:4 third gender, 2:362 See also Goddesses Deities, African, 1:4, 2:26, 361 Agwe, 1:5 Atete, 1:20 Babaluaye, 1:5 Bahia, 1:13 Candomblé, 1:13 Damballah, 1:5 Elegba (Eshu, Eleggua, Exu), 1:4 Erzulie Danto, 1:5 Erzulie Freda, 1:5 Ewa, 1:13 Idemili, 2:25, 26 Iemanjá, 1:13 Lasyrenn (Labalenn), 1:5 Lwa, 1:5 Nanã, 1:13 Obatala (Ochala, Oxala, Obbatala), 1:5 Ochosi (Ochossi, Oxossi), 1:5 Oduduwa, 1:23 Ogun (Oggun, Ogou, Ogum), 1:5 Orishas, 1:4–5, 24, 2:362



Orunmila (Orunla, Ifa), 1:5 Osun (River Goddess) (Oshun, Ochún), 1:4, 23, 24, 2:359 Oxum, 1:13 Oyá (Yansa, Yansan), 1:5, 13, 2:357 Papa Legba, 1:5 Sango (Shango, Xango), 1:5 Serpent Goddess Uadjet, 1:18 Yemoja (River Goddess) (Yemaya, Iemanja), 1:4, 23, 24, 2:362 Vodou, 1:3 Deities, Buddhist Avalokites´vara, 1:117, 130, 144 Celestial Goddesses, 1:106 female Buddhas, 1:107, 115–116, 130 Guan Yin, 1:97, 102, 103, 116–117, 120, 125–126, 129–130, 305, 309, 2:345 Guhyeshvari, 1:116 Hariti, 1:97, 114–115, 116, 2:278 Kannon Bosatsu, 1:116–117 Lakshmi (Sri Lakshmi), 1:114, 332, 333, 337, 348– 350, 351, 366, 367, 368, 373 Marici, 1:115 Nature and Tree Goddesses (yakshinis), 1:114 Palden Lhamo, 1:116 Prajnaparamita, 1:97, 115, 136–138 Prithivi, 1:97, 114 Sitatapatra, 1:115 Tara, 1:97, 102, 108–111, 115, 120, 129, 130, 143, 144–147, 145, 2:344–345 Tashi Tseringma, 1:116 Vajrayogini, 1:116, 143 Vasudhara, 1:115 Deities, Chinese/Confucian Eternal Mother, 1:288 Seul Sha, 2:25 Deities, Daoist Ancestral Goddesses, 1:304–305 Daughter of the Celestial Emperor (Tiandi), 1:304 Goddess of the Morning Clouds (Bixia yuanjun), 1:304 Lady Near the Water’s Edge (Linshui furen), 1:75, 304–305 Mazu, Holy Mother in Heaven (Tianshang shengmu), 1:304–305

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mother of the Dao, 1:303 Mother of the Dipper (Doumu), 1:304 Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannü), 1:304, 308, 2:332 Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), 1:74, 303–304 Xuannü, 2:332 Deities, Egyptian, 2:361 Atum, 1:35 Bes, 1:38 Hathor, 1:39 Isis, 1:37, 237, 2:329, 332 Ma’at, 1:38 Nunet, 1:37–38 Osiris, 1:37 Sekhmet, 2:332 Taweret, 1:38 Wadjet, 2:332 Deities, Gaulish, Sirona, 2:332 Deities, Germanic, Freyja, 2:255 Deities, Greek and Roman Angitia, 2:332 Aphrodite, 1:55, 72–73, 2:320 Apollo, 1:77 Artemis, 1:33, 44–45, 65–66 Athena (Minerva), 1:29–32, 30, 44, 65–66, 237, 2:254, 255 Black Artemis of Ephesus, 1:49 Bona Dea, 1:70 Ceres, 1:69 Chaos, 1:42 Demeter, 1:39–40, 41, 65–66, 2:255, 329 Diana, 1:33–35, 70, 2:329 Dike, 1:66 Epione, 2:332 Eros, 1:42 Feronia, 1:70 Gaia (Earth Goddess), 1:32, 42–43, 65–66 Hades, 1:39–40 Hecate, 1:33, 46, 47, 2:329 Hera, 1:65–66, 237 Hermes, 1:40 Hestia, 1:65–66, 237 Juno, 1:33, 69, 70–71, 2:345 Jupiter, 1:69 Latonia, 1:33 Lucina, 1:33

423

424

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Deities, Greek and Roman (Continued) Luna, 1:33 Magna Mater, 2:345 Mars, 1:69 Minerva, 2:332 Persephone, 1:39–40, 41 pre-Greek goddesses, 1:65–66 Quirinus, 1:69 Sea Gods, 1:42 Themis, 1:65–66 Trivia, 1:33 Uranus, 1:42 Virbius, 1:33 Deities, Hindu, 1:360–361 Aditi, 1:315–316, 373, 379 Ambika, 1:373 Brahma, 1:332, 369 Chamunda, 1:374 Devi (Mahadevi; Great Goddess), 1:326–329, 331–332, 332, 333, 355, 377, 2:255 Divine Mother, 1:357 Draupadi, 1:329–331, 366, 367 Durga (Mahamaya), 1:328, 331–335, 336, 355, 359, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 377, 378, 2:255 Ganesha, 1:316, 349, 355 Gauri, 1:332, 373 household/clan deities, 1:343–344 Irrti, 1:365 Kali, 1:325, 328, 330, 331–335, 337, 339, 341–342, 355, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 2:255 Krishna, 1:325, 341, 342, 359, 360–361 Lakshmi (Sri Lakshmi), 1:114, 332, 333, 337, 348–350, 351, 366, 367, 368, 373 Mahadevi, 1:374 Mahamaya, 1:374, 377 Mahavidyas, 1:374 Matrikas, 1:374 Maya, 1:359 Mother Goddesses, 1:347, 354, 355 native Tibetan, 1:334 Parashakti, 1:374 Parvati, 1:325, 333, 334, 337, 355, 359, 365, 373 Prakriti, 1:379 Prithvi, 1:364, 373, 379

Purusha, 1:359 Radha, 1:325, 359, 360–361 Rama, 1:346 Ramayana, 1:366 Rani Sati, 1:347 Ratri, 1:373 Saraswati, 1:332, 337, 359, 364, 367, 368, 369–370, 373, 374, 2:278 Sati, 1:355, 365 sati-matas, 1:313 Shakti, 1:331, 335, 342, 372–374, 377, 2:364 Shiva, 1:317, 325, 332, 332, 334, 337, 342, 355, 359, 367, 371, 377, 2:364 Sita, 1:346, 366–367 Sitatapatra, 1:366 Surya, 1:355 Tara, 1:334 Uma, 1:334, 373 Usas, 1:364, 373 Ushas, 1:379 Vac, 1:364, 370, 373, 379 Vighneˉs´wara, 1:316 Vishnu, 1:318, 328, 332, 332, 342, 349, 351, 355, 360, 367 Yoginis, 1:374 See also Yoginis Deities, indigenous religions Creator Gods, 2:8 Hawai’ian, 2:360 Sedna (Sea Goddess), 2:7 Deities, Iranian, Anahita, 2:255 Deities, Jain, 2:106–107 Ambika, 2:107 Cakresvari, 2:107 Padmavati, 2:107 Saraswati, 2:106 16 Tantric Goddesses, 2:107 Sri Lakshmi, 2:106 vidyadevis, 2:107 yaksis, 2:107 Deities, Korean, Eopsin (black-snake Goddess), 2:25 Deities, Lithuanian, Laima, 2:255 Deities, Mesopotamian, 1:58 Aforodita, 1:55 An, 1:62 Aphrodite, 1:55 Asherah, 1:55, 2:327



Assur, 1:55 Astarte (Ashtart), 1:55, 2:320, 329 Baalat-Gebal, 1:55 Enki, 1:62, 63, 2:254 Enlil, 1:55, 62, 64 Ereshkigal, 2:254 Eshtar, 1:55 Inanna, 1:55–56, 63, 82 Ishtar, 1:55, 63 Marduk, 1:55, 2:353 Nanna (moon god), 1:81–82 Ninhursagˇa Mother Goddess, 1:62–63, ˘ 263 82, Ninimma, 1:82 Ninlil, 1:63–64 Nisaba, 1:82 Tanit, 1:55 Tiamat, 2:353 Turan, 1:55 Deities, Norse, Eir, 2:332 Deities, of ancient Israel Anat, 2:144 Asherah, 2:143–144, 143, 145, 152–153, 192, 327 Astarte (Ashtoret; Ashtart), 2:144, 329 Baal, 2:144 Binah, 2:145 Chochmah (Wisdom), 2:144–145 Elat, 2:143 Kabbalah, 2:142–143 Lady Wisdom (biblical), 2:153 modern Jewish Goddess references, 2:146 Queen of Heaven, 1:55, 237, 238, 2:144, 152, 153 Shekinah, 2:142–143, 145 Yahweh (YHWH), 2:144, 152, 153 Deities, Pagan Aphrodite, 2:234 Brigid, 2:218, 233 Cernunnos, 2:236 Cerridwen, 2:218 Eostre, 2:233 Flora, 2:233 Frigga, 2:228 Gabija, 2:228 Gaia, 2:222 Great Mother Goddess, 2:229, 230, 233, 234 Hearth Goddesses, 2:228

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Hestia, 2:228 Moon Goddess, 2:223 Persephone, 2:233 Sun God, 2:223 Sun King, 2:233 Vesta, 2:228 Deities, prehistoric Anat, 2:254 Bee Goddess, 2:252 Bird Goddess, 2:252, 267 Divine Ancestral Mother, 2:265 Goddess of Regeneration, 2:252 Great Goddess, 2:252, 254, 255 Hathor, 2:254 Inanna, 2:254, 354 Ishtar, 2:254 Mother Sun, 2:252 Sky God, 2:252 Snake Goddess, 2:267 Deities, Sami, Beiwe, 2:332 Deities, Shinto Amaterasu Omikami (Sun Goddess), 2:270–272, 278, 284 Ame-no-Uzume, 2:271, 278 Benzaiten (Goddess of Language and Arts), 2:278 Izanagi, 2:270, 277, 78–79 Izanami, 2:270, 277, 778–779 Kami, 2:277–278 Kishimojin, 2:278 Koˉtai Jin, 2:276 Tsukihi (Sun and Moon), 2:289 Tsukiyomi (Moon God), 2:270 Uke-mochi (Goddess of Food), 2:270 Deities, Slavic, Z˙ ywie, 2:332 Deities, Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec Aztec Cihuateteo, 2:35 Chalchiuhtlicue, 2:359 Coatlicue, 2:359 Flower Quetzal Goddess, 2:8 Ilamatecuhtli (Goddess of Earth, Milky Way, and Death), 2:15 Ixchel, 2:35, 332 Omecihuatl, 2:359 Ometecuhtli, 2:359 Sacred Mother, 2:359 Serpent Skirt, 2:359 Tonanzin, 2:359 Xochiquetzal, 2:35

425

426

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

De la Cruz, Juana Ines, 1:160 Delphic Oracle, 1:32–33, 67 Demeter, 1:39–40, 41, 65–66 Denison, Ruth, 1:104 Dennings, Kat, 2:190 Deta, Iya, 1:4 Devadasis, 1:106, 326–328 Devi (Mahadevi; Great Goddess), 1:326– 329, 331–332, 332, 333, 355, 377, 2:255 Devi Mahatma. See Durga Devis, 1:355 Devotional song (kirtan), 2:334 Dhamma Dena Desert Vipassana Center, 1:104 Dhammadinna, 1:151 Dhammananda, 1:123, 135 Dharmapala, Anagarika, 103 Dharmashastras, 1:362 Diamond Sangha, 1:105 Diana, 1:33–35, 34, 70 Dianic Wicca (Dianic Witchcraft), 1:27, 34, 2:225, 229, 317, 338, 362 Diaspora (Islam), 2:48–49 Diaspora African, 1:3–6, 2:361 Haitian, 1:3 Jewish, 2:147, 189 Muslim, 2:48–249 Sihk, 2:296 Yoruba, 1:23 Dickinson, Clare Joseph, 1:254 Dickinson, Frances, 1:161 Digambaras, 2:105, 106, 107–108, 109–111, 112, 113 Dike, 1:66 Dinah (biblical), 2:179 Dinizulu, Nana, 2:361 Diodore of Tarsus, 1:271 Dionysian mysteries, 1:39 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 1:48 Disability, 2:296 Displaced persons (DP) camps, 2:162 Divination, 1:1, 12, 13, 24, 68, 2:38, 275, 316–318, 340 in Heathenry, 2:221 16 cowry, 1:12 Yoruba, 2:361 Divine ancestral mother, 2:265

Divine feminine, 1:43, 87–88, 373, 2:338, 343 in the Classical Age, 1:365–366 and divination, 2:318 as Goddess, 2:232 as healing force, 2:331–332 as immanent, 1:43, 319, 373, 2:168, 232, 236, 323, 328 in Judaism, 2:143, 146 in the Modern Age, 1:367–1:368 and Paganism, 2:215, 218, 219, 224, 229 in performing arts, 2:309–310 in prehistoric figures, 2:262 and Reconstructionist Paganism, 2:228 in the Vedic Age, 1:364 Divine Masculine, 2:234, 338 Divine Mother, 1:144, 336, 357, 2:324 Divorce, 1:50, 95, 245, 2:51 and Christianity, 1:214–215 in the Druze religion, 2:51 in Iran, 2:94 and Islam, 2:66, 71, 73, 79–81, 94, 98 in Israel, 2:157, 159 in Japan, 2:280 and Judaism, 2:120, 123, 161, 175–177 See also Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood Diwali, 1:335, 337, 349, 2:106, 113 Dixon, Jeanne, 2:312 Docwra, Anne, 1:194 Doˉgen (Master), 1:123, 154 Doherty, Austin, 1:187 D’Oignies, Marie, 1:241 Dolmen stones, 2:24 Dolni Vestonice, 2:243 Domestic violence, 1:185, 381, 2:62, 161 Dominion theology, 1:162 Downey, Roma, 1:187 Dowry, 1:351, 2:296 Dragon Environmental Network, 2:219 Draupadi, 1:329–331, 366, 367 Draupadi festivals, 1:330 Dreams, 2:28, 29, 101 Dress codes, 1:22. See also Clothing Drexel, Katharine, 1:174, 186, 258 Drisha, 2:184 Druid Order, The, 2:217 Druidry, 2:217–218, 219, 224, 225, 232, 333



Drumming, 1:1, 3, 18, 2:318–320, 319, 361 in Nyabinghi Assemblies, 1:22–23 Taiko, 2:361 Druze religion, 2:49–52 Druze Religious Council, 2:51 Dubas, Marie, 2:191 Duchemin, Almaide, 1:186 Duchesne, Rose Philippine, 1:258 Duggar family, 1:203 Dunham, Katherine, 1:5–6, 2:361 Dupatta, 2:47, 90 Durga, 1:328, 331–335, 336, 355, 359, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 377, 378 Durga and Kali, 1:331–335 Durga Navratri, 1:334 Durga Puja (Navaratri/Dashain), 1:335, 336, 350 Dyer, Mary, 1:185 E., Sheila, 2:318 Earth First! 2:314, 324 Earth Goddess, 1:333, 334. See also Gaia Eastern Orthodox Church, 1:176, 263–264 Eaton, Elizabeth, 1:224, 248 Ecofeminism, 2:306, 315, 321–326 Eco-Paganism, 2:218–220 Ecowomanism, 2:321 Ecstatic worship, 2:361, 363 Eddy, Mary Baker, 1:186, 199, 200 Edelson, Mary Beth, 2:309 Education, in Africa, 1:177, 195 in Asia, 1:195 Baha’i, 1:88–91 Catholic, 1:186 in Christianity, 1:185, 193–197 in convents and nunneries, 1:195, 222, 254–255, 277 divinity schools, 1:196 for girls and women, 1:96, 160, 179, 193–194, 195, 346, 2:50, 51, 296 for girls and women (Confucian), 1:282–284, 285, 290–291, 298 in Islam, 2:52–55 in Judaism, 2:118, 130–132, 147– 148, 161, 162

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

of Muslim women and girls, 2:52–55, 70–71, 75, 102–103 in the Muslim world, 2:131–132 of Native American children, 2:4 university students, 2:131, 133 Eerindinlogun, 1:24 Effendi, Shoghi, 1:95 Efunche Wandondo (Rosalia Abreu), 1:4 Egalitarianism, 1:163, 247–249, 2:93, 120–121, 165, 315–316 Egeria, 1:33 Egypt, priestesses in, 1:18–19 Egyptian religion, 1:35–39 Eight Sabbats, 2:232, 236–237 Eilberg, Amy, 2:121, 195 Eisenstein, Judith Kaplan, 2:128 Ekaku, Hakuin, 1:154–155 Elaw, Zilpha, 1:164 Elders, pagan, 2:226–227 Elder status, 1:17 Eleusinian Mysteries, 1:39–42 Eliezer, Israel ben, 2:147 Elizabeth of the Trinity, 1:241 Elizabeth of Thüringia, 1:257, 269 Embroidery, 1:9 Emesal language, 2:256–257 Emmerick, Anna Katherina, 1:265 Endogamy, 1:321, 322, 323 Engaged Buddhism, 1:111–114 Enheduana, 1:55, 60, 81–82 ˘ 1:62, 63, 2:254 Enki, Enlil, 1:155, 62, 64 Ennoˉkyoˉ, 2:275, 276 Enuma Elish, 2:353 Environmental movement, 2:321–322 Eostre (spring equinox), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Episcopalian church, 1:165, 187, 224, 246, 248 in Latin America, 1:183 women religious, 1:166–167 See also Anglican church Erebus, 1:42 Eristi-Aya, 1:60 Eros, 1:42 Erzyan Mastor, 2:226 Esbats, 2:237 Eshtar, 1:55 Eskenazi, Tamara, 2:179

427

428

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Esperanto, 1:89 Essential oils, 2:333 Esther (biblical), 2:122, 139, 186, 188 Eteoboutadai family, 1:67 Eternal Word Television Network, 1:187 Ethical teachings, 1:4 Ethiopia Christianity in, 1:176 as Zion, 1:22 Ethiopian Orthodox church, 1:177 Ethnocentrism, 2:4–5 Eucharistic ministers, 1:179 Eugenius III (pope), 1:204 Euphemia (martyr and saint), 1:272–273 Eurasia, guardian spirits in prehistoric cultures, 2:251–252 Europe Christianity in, 1:178–180 conflict of cultures in, 2:247–251 Islam in, 2:71–74 Judaism in, 2:160–163 Euryale, 1:44 Eusebius of Caesarea, 1:245 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, 1:187 Evangelical Christianity, 1:182 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), 1:224, 248 Evans, Arthur, 2:246–247 Eve and “The Fall,” 1:186, 197–198, 229, 2:169, 344 and Lilith, 2:172 in the Qur’an, 2:63–64 See also Adam; Lilith Evenk communities, 2:259 Ewe peoples, 1:3 Exorcism, 2:285 Exum, J. Cheryl, 2:179 Ezrat Nashim, 2:136 Fabiola, 1:173 Fabrics. See Textiles Face painting, 1:11 Facial piercing, 1:10 Falade, Chief Oloye Fayomi, 1:6 Falah, Hadiya Nasib, 2:51 Falah, Um Nasib Fatima, 2:51 Falashas, 1:15

Fama, Chief, 1:6 Family International, 1:246 Family planning, 1:22. See also Birth control Family purity (taharat mishpachah), 2:204–205 Family Research Council, 1:202 Farkas, Mary, 1:104 Farrar, Janet, 2:225 Fasting, 1:41, 95, 147, 309, 337, 352, 2:12, 19, 42, 48, 69, 73, 105, 107– 108, 109, 113, 138, 140, 336 Fatima, 2:56–57, 68, 344 Fatima al-Fihriyya, 2:70 Fatima bint al-Muthanna, 2:96 Fatimah bint ‘Ali al-Daqaq al-Naysaburiyyah, 2:98 Fatimah of Balkh (Omm Ali), 2:96 Fatimah of Cordova, 2:99 Fatiman, Cécile, 1:5 Fatima of Nishapur, 2:99 Fé, Pura, 2:5 Fedele, Anna, 2:338 Federation of Muslim Women’s Association of Nigeria, 2:70 Feldman, Deborah, 2:149 Feldshuh, Tova, 2:190 Felicitas (martyr), 1:271, 272 Felix, Rachel (Mademoiselle Rachel), 2:191 Female deities, 2:106–107. See also Deities; Goddesses Female divinities, 1:114–118. See also Feminine Divine; Goddesses Female evangelical societies, 1:196 Female feticide, 1:48, 2:296–297 Female figures, 2:341–342 with felines, 2:251, 254–255, 262, 263–264 fish sculptures, 2:264 neolithic, 2:240, 253–256 Sheela na gigs, 2:347–349 Upper Paleolithic, 2:260–264 Female genital mutilation (FGM) (also female genital circumcision; female genital cutting), 1:2, 14–16, 17, 2:57–58, 69–70, 339 Feminine Divine, 1:157, 2:355 in ancient Crete, 2:245 in art, 2:306



festivals devoted to, 1:335 in Hinduism, 1:313 in Neolithic female figures, 2:255 Feminine Energy, 1:377 Feminine Virtues Buddhist, 1:118–120 Confucian, 1:290–291 Shinto, 2:272–273 Feminism, 1:202, 340, 2:58–62, 362 Christian, 1:196, 249–250 eco-, 2:315 in Egypt, 2:54 environmental, 2:315 first wave, 1:185 and gender equality, 1:252–253 Goddess, 2:325, 337 Islamic, 2:51, 59–62 in Israel, 2:159 Jewish, 2:117, 120, 126, 128–129, 132–137, 138, 146, 166, 178, 193, 202 and the Lilith story, 2:173–174 in monastic orders, 1:229 Mormon, 1:235 Muslim, 2:63, 70 Orthodox Jewish, 2:183 second wave, 1:185, 2:305 and Sikhism, 2:293, 295–297 and spirituality, 2:218 See also Ecofeminism Feminist and women’s movements, 2:132–137 Feministas, 2:362 Feminist Holocaust studies, 2:154 Feminist issues in Sikhism, 2:295–297 Feminist studies, 2:321 Feminist theological movement, 1:182–183, 219 Feronia, 1:70 Fertility, 1:8, 23, 30, 38, 47, 51, 56, 2:17, 232, 253 and infertility, 1:50 Festival of the Sacred Tooth, 1:107 Festivals (Hinduism), 1:335–338 Ambuvaci, 1:357 Diwali, 1:335, 337, 349, 2:106, 113 Kali Puja, 1:337 Karva Chauth, 1:352 Kaumudi-Purnima festival, 1:349

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Lakshmi Puja, 1:352 Mahashivaratri, 1:337 Makar Sanranti, 1:338 Navaratri/Durga Puja/Dashain, 1:334, 335, 336, 356 Pongal, 1:336–337 Saraswati Puja (Vasant Panchami), 1:337, 370 Shivratri, 1:352 Teej, 1:352 Vat-Savitri Amavasya, 1:335 See also Festivals and holy days Festivals and holy days, 1:335–338, 2:137–141 Draupadi, 1:330 Durga Navratri, 1:334 Festival of the Sacred Tooth, 1:107 Jain, 2:113 Jewish, 2:137–140, 212 Mae d’agua, 1:24 Native American, 2:11–14 Rosh Hodesh, 2:197–198 Sacred Marriage festival, 1:55 seasonal, 2:231–234 sex-specific celebrations, 2:229–230 Sikh, 2:301–302 Filial piety Confucianism, 1:291–294, 295 Daoism, 1:308–309 Shinto, 2:272, 273–275 Filmmaking, 2:294–295 Final rites. See Funeral practices Finnic peoples, 2:37 Finno-Ugrians, 2:265 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, 1:187 Fioretta of Modena, 2:169 Firestone, Shulamith, 2:340 First Great Awakening, 1:163, 170, 194 First Man, 2:13 First Peoples, 2:6–7. See also Native American religion First solid food rituals, 1:374, 375 First Woman, 2:13 First Zen Institute (NY), 1:104 Fitzpatrick, Elyse, 1:187 Five Point Mission, 1:174 Florida Holocaust Museum, 2:156 Flower Quetzal Goddess, 2:8 Flower remedies, 2:333

429

430

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Focus on the Family, 1:202 Fon peoples, 1:3, 20 Food (Judaism), 2:141–142 for Passover, 2:139–140 and the role of kinship, 2:18 Food preparation, 2:123, 141, 212, 245 amen meals, 2:142 for religious feasts, 2:141 for Sabbath, 2:141 Sikh, 2:302 Foot binding, 1:290, 2:339 Foote, Julia, 1:164, 194 Fortune-telling, 2:340 Foster, Mary Elizabeth Mikahala, 1:103 Founders of Christian denominations, 1:199–201 Founders of new religious movements, 2:275–277 Foursquare church, 1:183, 201, 203, 224, 249 Fox, Kate, 2:350 Fox, Margaret, 2:350, 351 Fox, Selena, 2:331 Frances of Assisi, 1:265 Frances of Rome, 1:257 Francis (pope), 1:162, 224, 253 Frank, Anne, 2:190 Frank, Eva, 2:201 Frank, Jacob, 2:201 Frankel, Ellen, 2:179 Frankist movement, 2:201 Freud, Sigmund, 1:47 Friedan, Betty, 2:136, 340 Frost, Yvonne, 2:225 Frymer-Kensky, Tikvah, 2:146 Fukada Chiyoko, 2:276 Full moon ceremonies, 2:237 Fundamentalism as domination, 1:252, 2:355 Christian, 1:201–204 Hindu, 1:338–340 Islamic, 2:72 Funeral industry, 2:330 Funeral practices, 1:18, 120–122, 376 Buddhist, 1:120–122 Senufo, 1:7 See also Burials Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 2:224 Gaia (collage by Cristina Biaggi), 2:324

Gaia (Earth goddess), 1:31, 42–43, 65–66, 2:222 Gaia hypothesis/theory, 2:218, 309–310 Gainsbourg, Charlotte, 2:191 Galindo, Lauryn, 1:109 Gampo Abbey, 1:104 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (“Mahatma”), 1:318, 355 Ganesha, 1:316, 349, 355 Gardner, Gerald Brosseau, 2:215, 224, 234–235 Gargi, 1:341 Gauri, 1:332, 373 Gaza War, 2:187 Gelede masquerade, 1:7, 13 Geller, Laura, 2:195 Gender equality, 1:90–91, 95, 248–249, 2:136, 185, 273, 315, 334, 346 in Buddhism, 1:112, 141 in China, 1:298 and the hajj, 2:85 and Islam, 2:59, 93–94 in Japan, 1:297–298 in Korea, 1:298 scriptural and historic models of, 1:250–253 and Sikhism, 2:296–297 in Zen Buddhism, 1:156 Gender fluidity, 1:13, 23, 262, 2:25, 26, 26, 221, 275–276. See also Transgender persons Gender ideology, 2:134 Gender jihad, 2:94–95 Gender norms, 1:339 Hasidic, 2:149 Gender prejudices, 2:296 Gender relations, in Islam, 2:69 Gender roles in the Baha’i faith, 1:91–93 in Buddhism, 1:122–125 in Confucianism, 1:284–285 in Hasidism, 2:147 in Kabbalah, 2:169 Native American, 2:359 Gender studies, 2:185 Gender transitions, 2:259 Generativity, 1:8 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 1:170 German Baptist churches, 1:180 Gert, Valeska, 2:191



Gertrude (saint), 1:265 Ghosha, 1:341 Ghost Dance, 2:8, 20 Giants, 1:42 Gidda, 2:301–2:302 Giehse, Therese, 2:191 Gifting, 2:25 Gikow, Ruth, 2:127 Gimbutas, Marija, 2:240, 247, 250, 253, 265, 323, 327, 340, 341–342, 343 and the religions of Old Europe, 2:249–251 Glossolalia, 1:186 Gluck, Gemma LaGuardia, 2:156 Gluckl of Hameln, 2:212 Gnosticism, 1:263, 2:49–50 Goba people, 1:20 God feminine aspect of, 1:252–253, 263, 2:344 See also Deities; Goddesses; Yahweh Goddard, Paulette, 2:190 Goddesses (Daoism), 1:303–305 Goddesses (Judaism), 2:142–146 Goddesses in African neolithic sites, 2:358 agrarian, 2:252 Amaterasu Omikami (Sun Goddess), 2:270–272 Ame-no-Uzume, 2:271 ancestral, 1:304–305 of ancient Israel, 2:142–146 Aphrodite, 1:55, 72–73, 2:320 Asian and Pacific Islander, 2:359 Asherah, 1:55, 2:327 Astarte, 1:55, 2:320, 329 Atete, 1:20 Bee Goddess, 2:252 Bird Goddess, 2:252, 254, 267 Black, 2:361 Celestial, 1:106 Crone/Birth Giver, 2:234 Cybele, 2:320 cycladic, 2:254 as dancing partners/consorts of gods, 1:325 Daoist, 1:301, 303–305 Demeter, 1:39–40, 41, 65–66, 2:255, 329 depicted with drums, 2:320

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Diana, 1:33–35, 70, 2:329 Divine Feminine as, 2:232 Divine Mother, 1:357 Earth Goddesses (Gaia), 1:31, 42–43, 65–66, 333, 334, 2:222, 324 Earth Mother Goddess, 2:245 Gaia, 2:324 Flower Quetzal Goddess, 2:8 Goddesses of Crete, 2:240–241 Goddess of Mountains, 2:274 Goddess of Regeneration, 2:252 Goddess of the Morning Clouds, 1:304 Grain Goddess, 2:255 Great Goddess (Uralian), 2:252 Great Mother Goddess, 2:234, 308, 311, 348 Greek, 2:361 Hathor, 2:320 Heathen, 2:222 in the Hebrew Bible, 2:150 Hecate, 2:329 Hindu, 1:313, 363–368 Isis, 1:37, 2:324, 329 Jain, 2:106–107 in Judaism, 2:142–146 and leopards, 2:254–255 Maiden, 2:233, 234 Minerva, 2:332 Minoan Snake Goddess, 2:245, 247 Mother Goddesses, 1:347, 354, 355, 2:331 Mother/Reaper, 2:233 Native American, 2:15–16 Nature and Tree Goddesses, 1:114 Neolithic, 2:253–255 Neolithic European, 2:255 Osun (River Goddess), 1:4, 23, 24, 2:359 Oya, 2:357 pagan, 2:218, 227, 227–228, 230, 232 Pele (Goddess of the Volcano), 2:360 Ping, 2:332 precolonial Mexican, 2:360 pregnant, 2:267 prehistoric, 2:266 rituals honoring, 2:230 Sekhmet, 2:320, 332 Shekinah, 2:354 Snake Goddess, 2:254, 267, 332 Sophia, 2:354

431

432

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Goddesses (Continued) Spider Woman, 2:329 Sun Goddesses, 1:78–79, 2:70–72 Vedic, 1:379 Yemaya, 2:362 Yoruba, 2:359 Z˙ ywie, 2:332 See also Deities; Yoginis Goddess Icon Spirit Banners (Ruyle), 2:310– 311, 310, 328 Goddess movements, 2:146, 340, 346 Neo-pagan, 2:317 Goddess of the Morning Clouds (Bixia yuanjun), 1:304 Goddess pilgrimage, 2:337–338 Goddess spirituality, 2:225, 229, 316, 326–330 and healing, 2:333 Goddess symbols, 2:317 Goddess worship, 2:361 God’s Wife of Amun, 1:19 Goettner-Abendroth, Heide, 2:248, 342 Gold, Miri, 2:196 Goldenberg Judith Plaskow, 2:172 Goldstein, Elyse, 2:179 Gonzalez, Fermina (Ocha Bi), 1:4 Gonzalez, Mama Monserrate (Oba Tero), 1:4 Gopıˉ girls, 1:314, 318, 360–361 Gorgon Medusa, 1:28, 43–48, 2:349 in Western history, 1:46–47 Gormley, Joan Frances, 1:175 Gospel music, 1:172–173 Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 1:168, 219, 251 Gospel of Philip, 1:168, 219 Gospel of Thomas, 1:168–169, 219 Gottlieb, Lynn, 2:146, 193, 195, 196 Göttner-Abendroth, Heide, 2:327 Graham, Isabella, 1:174 Grahn, Judy, 2:339, 341 Grail, The, 1:227 Grant, Jacquelyn, 1:187 Granth Sahib (Guru), 2:298–299, 303, 304 Grave goods, 2:243–244, 251, 258 female figures, 2:253 Great Disappointment, 1:200 Great Goddess (Hindu). See Devi Great Goddess (Uralian), 2:252

Great Mother Goddess, 1:39, 42, 55, 299, 315, 2:311, 324, 345, 348 Native American, 2:15–16, 17 pagan, 2:218, 229, 230, 233, 234, 308, 311, 324, 348 Great Schism, 1:263 Great Wailing ceremony, 1:56 Greece, missionaries in, 1:226 Greek and Roman women, daily lives of, 1:48–52 Green, Eva, 2:191 Green, Paula, 1:113 Greenberg, Blu, 2:120 Green Burial Council, 2:331 Green Corn Ceremony, 2:19 Green funerals, 2:330–331 Green Man, 2:233 Greenpeace, 2:314 Green Sisters, 1:255 Greer, Germaine, 2:340 Grenn, Kohenet D’vorah J., 2:193 Griffin, Susan, 2:339 Griffiths, Marcia, 1:22 Grimké, Sarah, 1:174, 185 Gross, Rita, 1:105 Groves, Sara, 1:171 Guan-eum. See Guan Yin Guan Yin, 1:102, 103, 116–117, 125–126, 129–130, 305, 309, 2:345 Guardian spirits in Eurasian cultures, 2:251–252 Gudea (king), 1:60 Gugenheim, Shoshana, 2:127 Guhyeshvari, 1:116 Gumelnitza peoples, 2:253 Gurpurabs, 2:301 Guru period, 2:297–298 Gurus, 1:340–343, 360, 361 Gurus and saints, 1:340–343 Habdalah, 2:138 Hadassah, 2:135–136 Hades, 1:39–40 Hadewijch, 1:241 Hadith, 2:45, 53, 59, 60, 62–63, 65, 68. 69–70, 88–89, 91–92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 344, 345. See also Qur’an Hadlakat, 2:137



Hafsah bint ‘Umar, 2:52, 88 Hagar, 2:62–63 Hagen, Nina, 2:191 Hagiographies, 1:97, 255–258 Hair designs, 1:7, 8, 9, 10, 16–17 Hair dye, 1:191 Haitian diaspora, 1:3 Haitian Revolution, 1:5 Hajj pilgrimage, 2:63, 69, 84–86 Hakafoth, 2:139 Halachah, 2:115, 120, 121, 149 Halifax, Joan, 1:112 Hallucinogenic plants, 2:258, 259 Hamantaschen, 2:139 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 1:165 Hammer, Jill, 2:146, 179, 193 Handfasting, 2:237 Hannah (biblical), 2:151 Hanon, Geraldine Hatch, 2:312 Hariti, 1:114–115, 116 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1:185 Harrison, Jane, 2:229 Harrist churches, 1:246 Hartman, Zenkei Blanche, 1:105 Hashmi, Farhat, 2:103 Hasidism, 2:147–150, 161, 162, 190 Chabad-Lubavich, 2:119, 147, 149–150 Haskalah, 2:161, 188–189 Hatha Yoga, 2:364, 365 Hathor, 1:39 Hatshepsut, 1:35, 37 Hausa, 1:21 Haut, Rivka, 2:120 Haviland, Laura, 1:185 Havurah, 2:136 Hawn, Goldie, 2:190 Hawwa, 2:63–65 Hayden, Maria B., 2:350 Headscarves, 2:73–74 Head shaving, 1:16–17 Healers, 1:77, 305–307, 2:331–334 Philippine Island, 2:359–360 Healing, 1:12, 21, 2:8, 28, 275, 276 faith, 2:277 folk healing, 2:332 meditative, 2:336 mind body spirit approach, 2:333 self-, 2:230–231

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

spiritual, 2:37 Tenriky, 2:289 using traditional plants and herbs, 1:4 Healing ceremonies, 1:18 Heathenry, 2:220–222, 224, 227, 232 universalist vs. folkish, 2:220–221 Heathens, 2:219 Heavenly Mother, 1:233 Hebrew Bible, 2:120, 150–153, 173, 188, 192, 193 Hebrew Goddess Prayerbook, 2:146 Hecate, 1:33, 1:46, 47, 2:329 Heck, Barbara, 1:186 Helen of Troy, 1:73 Hellenic Reconstructionism, 2:228 Hellenism, 2:227 Henes, Donna, 2:341 Henge of Keltria, 2:217 Hera, 1:65–66, 237 Heraklion Museum, 2:247 Herbal remedies, 2:28 Hermes, 1:40 Herrad of Hohenberg, 1:232 Herrad of Landsberg, 1:277 Hervör, Angie, 2:221 Hesse, Eva, 2:127 Hestia, 1:65–66 Hetepheres I, 1:35–36 Hickey, Marilyn, 1:187 Hieroglyphs, 2:11 Hijab, 1:210, 2:69, 73, 76, 77, 90 banning of, 2:54 in Islam, 2:45–47 restrictions on, 2:46–47 Hilda (Whitby Abbey), 1:160 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 1:204–206, 205, 222, 232, 240, 241, 251, 277, 278 Hill, Julia Butterfly, 2:314 Himiko (shaman-queen), 1:75, 2:281, 283–284 Hinduism, 1:313–385, 2:49–50 Bhakti, 1:316–320 Brahmanic, 1:150–151 caste, 1:321–324 dance, 1:324–326 devadasis, 1:326–328 female gurus, 2:336

433

434

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Hinduism (Continued) festivals, 1:335–338 fundamentalism, 1:338–340 Golden Age of, 1:377–378 gurus and saints, 1:340–343 household shrines, 1:343–345, 346 ideals of womanhood, 1:345–348 introduction, 1:313–315 and kirtan, 2:334 marriage, 1:350–353 matriliny, 1:353–356 meditation, 2:335, 336 pilgrimage, 1:356–358 prakriti, 1:358–360 Radha and Gopi girls, 1:360–361 religious conversion from, 1:324 renunciation, 1:361–363 sacred texts on women, 1:363–369 Samkhya school, 1:357–358 sati (suttee), 1:313, 347, 353, 370–372, 376, 2:339 Shaivism, 1:367 Shaktism, 1:367 stage-of-life rituals (samskaras), 1:331, 374–376, 375 Tantric, 1:377–378, 2:336, 363 Vaishnava, 1:360, 367 Vedic, 1:378–383, 2:363, 364 and yoga, 2:363 yoginis, 1:383–385 See also Deities, Hindu; Karma Hindus, as followers of Sufism, 2:101 Hindu sacred texts, 1:336, 337, 338, 345, 346, 347, 355, 358, 362, 363–368, 370, 372, 373, 375, 377, 378, 382–384 Bhagavad Gita, 1:317, 358, 2:364 Classical Age and the Divine Feminine, 1:365–366 Mahabharata, 1:317, 324, 329–331, 334, 345–347, 366–368, 373 Vedic Age and the Divine Feminine, 1:364 Vedic Age and the Earthly Feminine, 1:364 Hindu saints (sadhu/sadhvi), 1:340–343 Akka Mahadevi, 1:319, 325–326, 342 Anandamayi Ma, 1:342 Andal (Antal), 1:318, 342, 367

Avvaiyaˉr, 1:316 Bhaktha Meera, 1:342 Caitanya, 1:319 Candi Das, 1:319 Gargi, 1:341 Gaurıˉbaˉi, 1:318 Ghosha, 1:341 Gonaˉˉı, 1:318 Is´ai Jñaˉniyaˉr, 1:317 Janaˉbaıˉ, 1:318, 342 Kabıˉr, 1:319 Kaˉraikkaˉl Ammaiyaˉr, 1:316, 317 Kuruˉr Amma, 1:318 Lalles´wari (Lalla Yogıˉswarıˉ; Laˉl Ded), 1:317, 319 Lopamudra, 1:341 Maitreyee, 1:341 Mangaiyarkaras´iyaˉr, 1:317 Mıˉraˉ Baˉi, 1:317, 318, 319, 320, 341, 360 Naˉnak, 1:319 Raˉjaıˉ, 1:318 Sadhvi Auvaiyar Ma, 1:342 Sree Ma (Holy Mother; Ma Sarada; Saradevi), 1:341–342 Tulsidaˉs, 1:319 Vaishnava bhakti, 1:318 Vidyaˉpati, 1:319 Hindutva (Hinduness), 1:338–339 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 2:118 Hock, Khouriya Maggie, 1:187 Hodder, Ian, 2:353 Hoffmann, Melchior, 1:275 Hogan (dwelling, center of the world), 1:13, 31–33 Hogan, Linda, 2:31 Holger, Hilde, 2:191 Holiday celebrations, sex-specific, 2:229–230 Holiness churches, 1:164, 165, 246, 248–249 Holistic health, 2:333 Holmes, Sandra Jishu, 1:113 Holocaust, 2:126–127, 135, 153–157, 162, 189 Holocaust studies, 2:153 Holy Days. See Festivals and holy days Holy Spirit, feminine, 2:218 Homoeroticism, 1:28, 52



Homosexuality, 1:13, 50, 52–53, 95, 172, 2:205, 237, 360, 361. See also Lesbians; LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals; Transgender persons Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity, 1:206–208 Hongshan culture, 2:359 Honjoˉ Chiyoko, 2:277 Honor, 2:65–67, 296 Honor killings, 2:66, 296 Honor the Earth, 2:5–6 Hoodoo, 1:3 hooks, bell, 1:105 Hopkinson, Deborah, 1:105 Hopman, Ellen Evert, 2:217 House for All Sinners and Saints, 1:248 Household/clan deities (Hindu), 1:343–344 Household shrines, 1:343–346 Howe, Julia Ward, 1:174 Howkens/Hoskins, Jane Fenn, 1:185 Hrotsvit (Hroswitha) of Gandersheim, 1:222, 232, 277, 278 Huachocana Cave, 2:9 Hughes, Marion, 1:166 Huldah (biblical), 2:152 Humanism, 1:275 Human rights, 1:15, 2:103 Hume, Sophia, 1:185 Huppert, Isabelle, 2:191 Huris, 1:96 Hurwitz, Sara, 2:195–196 Hussaini, Safiya, 2:71 Hutchins, Julia, 1:185 Hutchinson, Anne Marbury, 1:185 Hutterites, 1:273 Hypatia, 1:28, 53–54 Hyrde, Richard, 1:193–194 Ibo (Igboo) society, 2:23, 25, 359 I Ching, 2:316 Ideal woman, 1:345–348, 2:67–68 Identity gender, 2:203, 259 Jewish, 2:116, 125, 134, 186, 190 Jewish ethnic, 2:141–142 religious, 2:203 Ifa divination, 1:12, 24 Ifa traditions, 1:3, 6

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Igboo (Ibo) society, 2:23, 25, 359 Ikeda, Daisaku, 1:141 Ilamatecuhtli (Goddess of Earth, Milky Way, and Death), 2:15 Iliad (Homer), 1:44 Imbas, 2:218 Imbolc (Oimlec), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Immanence, 2:27, 352 Immigration Jewish, 2:119, 126, 127, 134, 213 Muslim, 2:48–49, 72–73, 76, 77 from Southeast Asia, 1:104 Inanna, 1:55–56, 63, 82 Inca culture, 2:11, 12, 34 Independent Minyan movement, 2:183 India Buddhism in, 1:114–116, 151–152 missionaries in, 1:226 See also Hinduism; Jainism Indigenous cultures, 2:1 Indigenous medicine, 2:28–29 Indigenous religions, 2:1–42 activism (Native American), 2:3–6 African, 1:3, 8, 177 ancestors (Native American), 2:6–8 arts (Native American), 2:9–11 British law outlawing, 1:21 ceremonies (Native American), 2:11–14 clothing (Native American), 2:14–15 creation stories (Native American), 2:15–17 introduction, 2:1–3 kinship (Native American), 2:18–21 marriage and social status (Native American), 2:21–23 matriarchies, 2:23–27 medicine women (Native American), 2:27–29 nature (Native American), 2:30–31 sacred place (Native American), 2:31–33 sacred spirits (Native American), 2:34–36 shamanism in Eurasian cultures, 2:36–39 shamans in Korea, 2:39–41 women warriors (Native American), 2:41–42 See also African Religion Indigenous wisdom, 1:4

435

436

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Infanticide, 1:48, 296–297 Infertility, 1:50. See also Fertility Infibulation, 2:57 Initiation ceremonies, 1:4, 376, 2:12–13 Insight meditation, 1:104 Insight Meditation Community, 1:104 Insight Meditation Society (IMS), 1:104, 2:336 Institute of Consecrated Life, 1:253 Instrumentalists, 1:3, 38, 39. See also Drumming Integrated Energy Therapy, 2:333 InterAmerican church, 1:183 Interfaith dialogue confessional, 1:210 experiential, 1:210 practical, 1:209, 210 relational, 1:210 Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women, 1:208–211 International Association of Sufism, 2:101 International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, 1:186, 199, 201, 203, 224, 249 International Conference on Buddhist Women, 1:153 International Congress on Matriarchal Studies, 2:342 International Jewish Peace Union, 2:186 Inuit tribes, 2:7, 35 Irenaeus of Lyons, 1:245, 271 Irrti, 1:365 Ise Shrine, 2:271, 282, 284 Ishtar, 1:55, 63 Isis, 1:37, 2:324, 329 Islam, 2:43–104 in Africa, 2:68–71 Alawi, 2:75 and Baha’i, 1:85 coverings, 2:45–47 Druze religion, 2:49–52 and education, 2:52–55 in Europe, 2:71–74 Fatima, 2:56–57 and female genital mutilation, 1:15, 2:57–58 female leadership in, 2:344 feminism, 2:58–62 fundamentalist, 2:101

Hagar, 2:62–63 Hawwa, 2:63–65 honor, 2:65–67 Ideal woman, 2:67–68 interfaith dialogue post 9/11, Christian and Muslim women, 1:208–210 introduction, 2:43–45 Ismailism, 2:75 Jewish women living under, 2:200–203 legal schools, 2:80 Maliki, 2:69 marriage and divorce, 2:79–81, 94 Maryam, 2:81–82 in the Middle East, 2:74–75 peacemaking, 2:82–84 pilgrimage, 2:84–86 polygamy, 2:86–88 Prophet’s wives, 2:88–89 purdah, 2:89–91 Qur’an and Hadith, 2:91–92 reform, 2:92–95 saints, Sufi, 2:95–97 Salafi/Wahabis, 2:69 Shafi, 2:69 Shari’a, 2:97–2:99 Shi’a (Shi’ite), 1:85, 2:49–51, 53, 56, 69, 75, 80, 98 Sufi, 2:75, 99–102, 336 Sunni, 2:45, 50, 51, 69, 75, 77, 80, 98, 103 Tijaniyya, 2:69 Twelver, 2:75 in the United States, 2:76–79 Wahhabi-Deobandi, 2:54, 55, 101 Women’s organizations, 2:102–104 women’s role in, 1:210–211 Zaidi, 2:75 See also Festivals and holy days; Muslim diaspora; Muslims Islamic Revolution, 2:54 Islam in Africa, 2:68–71 Islam in Europe, 2:71–74 Islam in the Middle East, 2:74–75 Islam in the United States, 2:76–79 Islamization, 2:72 Ismailism, 2:49–50 Israel, 2:157–160 women and work in, 2:213–214 Iyengar, B. K., 2:364



Iyengar, Geeta, 2:364 Iyengar yoga, 2:364 Jackson, Mahalia, 1:172 Jackson, Nakia, 2:77 Jahanara (daughter of Shah Jahan), 2:100 Jainism, 2:105–114 female deities, 2:106–107 introduction, 2:105–106 Jina, 2:107–108 laywomen, 2:108–109 monastics and nuns, 2:109–112 ritual, 2:112–114 Jamaica, 1:22 James, William, 2:351 Janna Yoga, 2:364 Japan abortion in, 1:101 Buddhism in, 1:117–118, 134, 2:284–285, 357 Confucianism in, 1:281, 284, 294 missionaries in, 1:226 shamans in, 1:75–76 See also Buddhism, Mahayana; Shinto Jaˉti, 1:321, 322, 323 Jayadeva, 1:360 Jephthah’s daughter, 2:151 Jerome (saint), 1:221, 231, 260, 268 Jerusalem Center for Women, 2:83 Jewelry, 1:10 Jewish-Arab relations, 2:135 Jewish diaspora, 2:147, 189 Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, 2:120, 183 Jewish Renewal and Chavurah movement, 2:122 Jewish Renewal movement, 2:166, 183, 195 Jewish scriptures. See Hebrew Bible Jewish Women Peacemaking (JWP), 2:185–186, 187 Jezebel (biblical), 2:151, 152 Jilbab, 2:47 Jina, 2:107–108, 112 Jinguˉ (empress), 2:281, 284 Jixian yuan, 1:301 Jizo Bodhisattvad, 1:100, 1:101 Joanna (New Testament), 1:271 Joan of Arc, 1:241 Johansson, Scarlett, 2:190

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

John Chrysostom, 1:162 John III (pope), 2:320 John of Leiden, 1:246 John Paul II (pope saint), 1:224 Johnsen, Linda, 2:336 Johnson, Sonia, 1:235 Joˉkin, Keizan, 1:123 Jonas, Regina, 2:194 Jones, Kathy, 2:329 Jordan, 2:66 Josei, Toda, 1:140 Josephus, 2:123 Jost, Ursula, 1:275, 276 Joya, Malalai, 2:54 Judaism, 2:115–214 American denominations: 1850 to present, 2:117–122 ancient, 2:122–124, 208 art, 2:124–128 Ashkenazi, 2:130, 139, 160, 161, 200, 212 bar mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 183, 188 bat mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 121, 128–129, 183 Conservative, 2:120–121, 128, 181, 183, 195, 209–210 Chabad–Lubavich Hasidism, 2:119, 147, 149–150 education, 2:130–132 in Ethiopia, 1:15 in Europe, 2:160–163 and female genital mutilation, 1:15 and feminine aspect of God, 2:344 feminist and women’s movements, 2:132–137 festivals and holy days, 2:137–141 food, 2:141–142 goddesses, 2:142–146 Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), 2:115, 130, 147, 157, 203–204, 205, 214 Hasidism, 2:147–150, 161, 162, 190 Holocaust, 2:126–127, 135, 153–157, 162, 189 introduction, 2:115–117 Israel, 2:157–160 Liberal, 2:161 Lilith, 2:171–175 marriage and divorce, 2:120, 123–124, 161, 175–177, 183–184

437

438

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Judaism (Continued) medieval, 2:209 Midrash, 2:177–180 mitzvah, 2:180–182 Mizrahi, 2:200–203 modern and contemporary, 2:182–185 Modern Orthodox, 2:118–120, 128–129, 195 mysticism in, 2:161 Open Orthodox, 2:119–120 Orthodox, 2:128, 131, 137, 139, 140, 158–159, 166, 181, 183, 184, 188, 205, 210 peacemaking, 2:185–188 performance, 2:188–192 priestesses, 2:192–194 Provençal, 2:160 rabbis, 2:194–197 Reconstructionist, 2:121, 195 Reform, 2:118, 128, 161, 162, 188, 209 Rosh Hodesh, 2:197–199 Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE), 2:124, 199–200 Sephardic, 2:139, 160, 161, 200–203, 212, 213 sex and gender, 2:203–206 Shabbat (Sabbath), 2:206–208 synagogue, 2:208–211 women and work, 2:211–214 See also Hebrew Bible; Judaism in the United States; Kabbalah Judaism in Europe, 2:160–163 Judaism in the United States, 2:163–167, 209–210 denominationalism and the Woman Question, 2:164–165 gender and early change, 2:163–164 Gender and Jewish Expansion, 2:164–165 Modern Jewish Feminism and Religious Change, 2:164–165 Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women, JFB), 2:132–134, 161 Judith (biblical), 1:269, 2:122 Juhal, 2:50 Juju, 1:24 Julia (early Christian), 1:271 Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416), 1:211–213, 240–241, 277–278

Jungian psychology, 2:229, 338, 361 Juno, 1:33, 69, 70–71 Jupiter, 1:69 Justin Martyr, 1:245 Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith, 2:88 K’abal Xook, 2:10 Kabbalah, 2:142–143, 147, 167–170, 190, 336 Christian, 1:263, 264 Lurianic, 2:147 Kabbalism, 2:161 Kabilsing, Chatsumarn, 1:112 Kabyle people (Africa), 2:23 Kadake queens, 1:19 Kadison, Luba, 2:189 Kaddish, 2:184, 188 Kala, Iya, 1:4 Ka lawbei Tynrai, 2:24 Kali (Bhadra-Kali, Mahakali, Durga-Kali), 1:313, 325, 328, 330, 331–335, 332, 336, 337, 339, 341–342, 355, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 2:255 Kalika. See Shakti Kali Puja, 1:337 Kamal, Zahira, 2:83 Kamala. See Lakshmi Kama Sutra, 1:144 Kami, 2:269, 277–278, 283 Kaminska, Esther, 2:189 Kaminska, Ida, 2:189 Kamo Shrine, 2:282 Kane, Carol, 2:190 Kannon Bosatsu, 1:116–117, 125. See also Guan Yin Kanwar, Roop, 1:347, 372 Kaplan, Mordecai, 2:121, 128, 209 Kappes, Lillian, 1:89 KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, 2:103 Karlin, Miriam, 2:191 Karma, 1:101, 122, 127, 136, 139, 337, 357, 2:105, 108–109, 110 Karman, Tawakkol, 2:84 Karma Yoga, 2:364 Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, 1:113 Karva Chauth, 1:352 Kasamba, 1:20 Kasi-Pnar people (India), 2:24



Kaumudi-Purnima festival, 1:349 Kaur, Arpita, 2:294 Kaur, Rupi, 2:293 Kaur, Snatam, 2:334 Kayati Kermani, 2:100 Kaza, Stephanie, 1:113 Kelly, Kate, 1:234 Kelman, Naamah, 2:195 Kemaikina, Raisa, 2:226, 228 Kemetic Orthodoxy, 2:226 Kemetism, 2:227 Kempe, Margery, 1:212, 241, 277–278 Kennett, Peggy Jiyu, 1:104 Kennewick man, 2:7 Khadija bin Khuwaylid, 2:67, 70, 88, 99, 344 Khadija bin Khuwaylid, 2:67 Khan, Noor-un-Nisalnayat, 2:101 Khankan, Sherin, 1:211 Khanty peoples, 2:252 Khema, Ayya, 1:104 Khifad, 2:57–58 Khimar, 2:47 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 2:54 Khun Mae Siri Krinchai, 1:128 Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, 2:100 Kiddush, 2:138 Kien, Jenny, 2:146, 192 Kinaaldá (Navajo initiation rite), 2:13 Ki Nanayon, 1:128 Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, 2:217 King, Bernice, 1:187 King, Katie (spirit), 2:351 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1:165 Kinship (Native American), 2:18–21 Kinship and marriage, Shinto, 2:278–281 Kirtan, 2:334–335 Kitamura Sayo, 2:276 Klapper, Melissa R., 2:186 K’lilah, Kohenet D’vora, 2:193 Knapp, Jennifer, 1:172 Kodo Sawaki, 1:133–134 Kohenet, 2:192–193 Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Training Institute, 2:193 Kohl, 1:10 Kola nut divination, 1:24 Kol Nidre prayer, 2:138 Koˉmyoˉ (empress), 1:123 Kongo-based traditions, 1:4

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Korea abortion in, 1:101 Buddhism in, 1:118, 130, 153, 2:357 Confucianism in, 1:281, 284, 294 shamans in, 1:76, 2:38–41, 40 Koyama Mihoko, 2:277 Krasner, Lee, 2:127 Krishna, 1:325, 341, 342, 359, 360–361 Kroeger, Catherine Clark, 1:187 Kuan Yin. See Guan Yin Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 2:331 Kudrow, Lisa, 2:190 Kujou Sadako, 2:286 Kundalini, 1:377, 384, 2:305, 336 Kundalini Yoga, 1:377, 2:364 Kunis, Mila, 2:190 Kurgan theory, 2:342 Kusang (“crying during funeral”), 1:121 Kut, 2:40–41 Kwok Pui-Lan, 2:362 Kykeon, 1:41 Ladies’ Benevolent Societies, 1:174 Ladies Christian Association, 1:187 Ladies of Charity, 1:173 Ladies of the Dao, 1:308 LaDuke, Winona, 2:5–6 Lady Folly (biblical), 2:122–123 Lady Near the Water’s Edge (Linshui furen), 1:305 Lady of Suyapa, 1:182 Lady Skollie (Laura Windvogel), 1:9 Lady Wisdom (biblical), 2:122, 344 Lagaš dynasty, 1:59–60 Lahu people (China), 2:23, 25 Lakshmi (Sri Lakshmi), 1:114, 332, 333, 337, 348–350, 351, 366, 367, 368, 373 Lakshmi Puja, 1:352 Lamb, Joni, 1:187 Lamb, Marcus, 1:187 Lammas (Lughnasadh), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Lange, Elizabeth, 1:186 Laos, 1:27, 77 La Regla de Ocha, 1:3 Lateau, Louise, 1:265 Latin America Christianity in, 1:180–184 enslaved Africans in, 1:3

439

440

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Latinas, 1:181, 2:360 Latonia, 1:33 Laughter therapy, 2:333 Laura, Judith, 2:146, 192 Laurent, Mélanie, 2:191 La Virgen de Chinquinquirá, 1:181 La Virgen de Guadalupe, 1:181–182, 238, 2:26, 359 Lawal, Amina, 2:71 Laywomen, 2:105, 108–109 celibate, 1:179 fasting by, 2:113 Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism, 1:127–129 LDS church. See Mormonism Leadership roles (women) founders, 1:199–201, 2:275–277 ministers, 1:223–225 missionaries, 1:225–227 priestesses, 1:1, 17–22, 27, 49, 2:146, 192–194, 341, 343, 345, 358, 359, 360, 363 rabbis, 2:136, 194–197 shamans and ritualists, 2:282–286 League of Jewish Women (Juˉdischer Fraauenbund, JFB), 2:132–134, 161 Leah (biblical), 2:150, 176 Lebanese Druze community, 2:51 Lebanon War, 2:186 Lee, Christine, 1:187 Lee, Jacinta, 1:194 Lee, Jarena, 1:164, 185 Lee, Mother Ann, 1:171, 186, 199, 249 Legalism, 1:284 Leibowitz, Nechama, 2:166 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 2:190 Leland, Charles G., 2:236 Leoba, 1:160 Leo XIII (pope), 1:162 Lesbians, 1:52 black, 2:361 See also Homosexuality; LGBTQ/ LGBTQIQ individuals Lessing, Doris, 2:102 Levantine Pagans, 2:226 Leviticus Ceremonial Law, 1:22 LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals, 1:6 activist, 1:202 and Heathenry, 2:221

Muslim, 2:62, 362 See also Homosexuality; Lesbians; Transgender persons; Transsexuals Liana, Lili, 2:189 Liberation theologies, 1:182–183, 2:362 Life-cycle ceremonies, 1:16–17, 374–376, 2:12, 23, 24–25, 27, 193 adulthood, 1:17 African, 1:16–17 birth, 1:16, 374 blessing of a child, 2:12 Hindu, 1:331, 374–376 initiation, 1:4, 376, 2:12–13 menarche, 1:331, 376, 2:13 pagan, 2:229–230 womanhood initiation, 1:18 See also Bar mitzvah; Bat mitzvah; Coming of age ceremonies Lilith, 2:169–170, 171–175, 171, 178, 179, 313 artistic portrayals of, 2:171, 173 feminist perspectives, 2:173–174 identity of, 2:171–173 literary and artistic development of the archetype, 2:173 Lilith astrology, 2:313 Lingam, 1:337 Lingguang Shengmu, 1:301 Lipman, Maureen, 2:191 Literacy, 2:131 and Islam, 2:70 Jewish, 2:128 Old European, 2:257 among women, 1:81–82, 89 Litha (summer solstice), 2:225, 232, 233, 236, 239 Little Sisters of the Poor, 1:232 Liturgical languages, 1:4 Liu (Lady, of Qing), 1:283, 289 Livermore, Mary, 1:196 Llyon, Jo Anne, 1:187 London Matriarchy Study Group, 2:327 Long, Asphodel, 2:146, 192, 327 Lopamudra, 1:341 Lotus Sutra, 1:117, 123, 125, 126, 138, 139, 140, 141, 2:278 Lotus Temple, 1:86 Lotz, Anne Graham, 1:187 Lovelock, James, 2:218, 309



Lovinski, Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Champagne, 2:357 Luapula (Bantu group; Africa), 2:24 Lucina, 1:33 Lucomi, 1:3 Lucumi, 2:361 Lughnasadh (Lammas), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Luna, 1:33 Lunar rituals, 2:229 Luria, Isaac, 2:169–170 Lurianic Kabbalah, 2:147 Luther, Martin, 1:178, 179, 246, 273 Lutheran church, 1:178, 180, 186, 246, 273 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1:224, 248 in Latin America, 1:183 Lutheran church of Liberia, 1:246 Lwa deities, 1:5 Lya mi (Society of Powerful Women or the Mothers), 1:23 Lydia (early Christian), 1:271, 272 Maafa (Great Disaster), 1:3, 4 Ma’at, 1:38 Maban (Australian), 2:25 Mabon (autumn equinox), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Machig Labdron, 1:138 Mackey, Mary, 2:340 MacKillop, Mary, 1:259 Macy, Joanne, 1:113 Mae d’agua festivals, 1:24 Magic, 2:15, 19, 222–223, 237, 340 ceremonial (“high”), 2:333 Magneh, 2:47 Mahaˉbala, 2:107–108 Mahabharata, 1:317, 324, 329–331, 334, 345–347, 366–368, 373 Mahadevi, 1:319, 328, 373–374. See also Shakti Mahamaya. See Durga Mahashivaratri, 1:337 Mahavidyas, 1:374 Mahavir Jayanti, 2:113 Mahayana, 1:129–1:131 Maheswari, 1:355 Mahmudnizhad, Mona, 1:89–90

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mai Bhago, 2:297–298 Maid of Heaven (Baha’i), 1:87–88 Maitreyee, 1:341 Makar Sanranti, 1:338 Makeup, 1:10 Makewana (Mother of Children), 1:20 Makki, Hind, 2:61 Malala. See Yousafzai, Malala Malawi, 1:20 Mali, 1:20 Malli, 2:107–108 Mallika (Queen), 1:151–152 Mama Acxo, 2:34 Mama Allpa, 2:34 Mama Coca, 2:34 Mama Cocha, 2:34 Mama Keke, 1:6 Mama Lola, 2:357 Mama Quilla, 2:34, 35 Mama Quinoa, 2:34 Mama Sara, 2:34 Manchuria, 1:76 Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara, 1:108–111, 109, 2:336 Mandell, Jacqueline Schwartz, 1:104 Manifest Destiny, 2:6 Mann, Erika, 2:191 Mann, Franciszka, 2:191 Mann, Horace, 1:195 Mansfield, Patti Gallagher, 1:186 Mansi peoples, 2:252 Manteau, 2:47 Mantras, 2:334 Manusmriti, 1:322, 324, 345, 366–367 Manyano, 1:177 Marc Antony, 1:37, 51 March of Hope, 2:187–188, 187 March to the Knesset, 2:187 Margaret of Antioch, 1:223 Margery Kempe, 1:212, 241, 277–278 Margoyles, Miriam, 2:191 Marguerite of Navarre, 1:275, 276 Margulies, Juliana, 2:190 Margulis, Lynn, 2:309 Maria Kannon, 1:126 Marici, 1:115 Marillac, Louise de, 1:173 Marinatos, Nanno, 2:248 Markova, Alicia (Alice Marks), 2:191

441

442

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Marler, Joan, 2:338 Marley, Rita, 1:22 Maroons, 1:3, 5 Marriage, 1:350–353 in ancient Greece and Rome, 1:50–51 anuloma, 1:322 arranged, 1:347–348, 350–351, 2:21–22, 73, 148 Baha’i, 1:95 child, 1:346. 2:62 and Christianity, 1:212–214, 213–215 civil vs. religious, 2:176 and the dowry system, 1:351, 2:296 in the Druze religion, 2:51 and filial duty, 1:293 forced, 2:66 handfasting, 2:237 in the Hebrew Bible, 2:151 heterosexual, 1:339, 2:147, 205 Hindu, 1:350–353 interfaith, 1:209 intermarriage, 2:116, 183 intervarna, 1:322 and Islam, 2:79–81, 94 in Israel, 2:157, 159 Japanese, 2:272–273 and Judaism, 2:120, 123–124, 175–177, 183–184 love (gandharva), 1:350–351 monogamous, 1:213, 245, 2:205 Native American, 2:21–22 open, 1:246 polyandrous, 1:55, 330, 331 polygamous, 1:193, 213, 233–234, 245–247, 275, 367, 2:59, 62, 86–88, 98 polygynous, 2:79–80, 161, 175 pratiloma, 1:322 ritual, 1:326–327 sacred, 2:168 same-sex, 1:213, 2:79, 205, 237 as samskara, 1:376 in Sephardic Judaism, 2:202 and Shari’a, 2:98 Shinto, 2:278–281 of siblings, 1:35 spirit weddings, 1:289 temporary, 2:80, 98 traditional, 1:202

in Vedic society, 1:381 Wiccan, 2:237 and the “Woman’s Question,” 1:339 for Zen priests, 1:155 See also Weddings Marriage, ancient Greek and Roman religions, 1:56–58 Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood, 1:213–216 Marriage and divorce, 2:79–81, 175–177 Marriage and social status (Native American), 2:21–23 Marriage ceremonies, 1:17 Mars, 1:69 Martha (New Testament), 1:178 Martha (sister of Lazarus), 1:221, 258, 260 Martyrs, 1:222, 264, 271, 275–276 virgin, 1:256 Maryam, 2:81–82, 92. See also Mary of Nazareth Maryam of Bastra, 2:100 Mary Guan Yin, 1:126 Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magdala), 1:168, 186, 216–220, 221, 257, 260, 271 after Christ’s death, 1:216–217 in the Apocrypha, 1:168 confusion with repentant sinner, 1:219–220 in history, 1:219–220 as new Eve, 1:218 in the New Testament, 1:216 in popular imagination, 1:217–218 relics of, 1:244 Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha), 1:178, 218, 221, 258, 260 Mary of Nazareth, 1:186, 235–239, 2:218, 344 appearances of, 1:238 in Christine de Pizan’s writings, 1:188 in Church tradition, 1:235–236 contemporary devotion and apparitions, 1:238 depicted in art, 1:238 devotion to, 1:237–238 Latin American manifestations of, 1:181–182, 238 link to Sophia, 1:263–264 as Mother Goddess, 2:357 as Mother of God, 1:235–236



relics of, 1:243–244 as role model, 1:205, 223, 238 role of, 1:250 transformations of pre-Christian goddesses, 1:237 veneration of, 1:160, 166, 178 See also Mother of God Ma Sarada (Saradadevi), 1:341–342 Masks, 1:8, 21, 44, 46, 2:267, 311 Mata, Nydia, 2:361 Mata Gujari, 2:297–298 Mata Jitoji, 2:299–300 Mata Khivi, 2:297 Maternal Gift Economy, 2:342 Matriarchies, 1:252, 354 2:3, 6, 23–27, 342, 343, 358, 361 egalitarian, 2:246, 247, 248 in Candomblé religion, 1:11–12 in Hongshan culture, 2:359 Hwang, Helen Hye-Sook, 2:359 in Wicca, 1:34 Matriarchs, in Jewish liturgy, 2:184, 209 Matriarchy Research and Reclaim Network, 2:327 Matrikas, 1:374 Matrilinieal societies, 2:359 Matriliny, 1:353–356, 2:22, 183 Matthews, Caitlin, 2:226 Mattson, Ingrid, 2:55 Mat weaving, 1:9 Maurin, Peter, 1:174 Maxwell, Mary, 1:89 Maxwell, May, 1:89 Mayaafi, 2:69 Maya culture, 1:359, 2:12, 22 Mayahuel (Central Mexico), 2:34 Mayanasundari, 2:109 Maymunah bint al-Harith, 2:88 Maznavi, M. Hasna, 1:211 Mazu, Holy Mother in Heaven (Tianshang shengmu), 1:305 McCracken, Sandra, 1:171 McFague, Sallie, 2:323 McFarland, Morgan, 2:225 McKay, Mabel, 2:28 McKenzie, Vashti Murphy, 1:165 McNeil, Brenda Salter, 1:187 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 1:186, 199, 201, 202–203, 224, 249

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mechthild of Magdeburg, 1:278 Medical mission, 1:188 Medicine bag, 2:30 Medicine bundle, 2:28 Medicine dreams, 2:29. See also Dreams Medicine Eagle, Brooke, 2:341 Medicine wheel, 2:30, 31, 32, 33 Medicine women (Native American), 2:27–29, 333 Meditation, 2:333, 335–337 benefits of, 2:335 Buddhist, 2:357 by lay members, 1:128 samatha, 2:335 similarities with other contemplative practices, 2:336 Transcendental Meditation, 2:336 vipassana, 2:335 Medusa, 1:28, 43–48, 45, 2:349 Mellaart, James, 2:247 Memorial Ecosystems, 2:331 Men, functions of in Candomblé, 1:12 MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, 2:200–203 Mencius, 1:284 Mendelsohn, Moses, 2:189 Mendes, Dona Gracia, 2:212 Menelik I, 1:22 Menhirs, 2:24 Mennonites, 1:224, 273 in Latin America, 1:183 Menstrual blood, 2:352 Menstruation rituals, 2:229. See also Women, menstruating Merchant, Carolyn, 2:314, 322 Merman, Ethel, 2:189 Mernissi, Fatima, 2:359 Mesolithic burials, 2:243–244 Mesopotamia, writers and poets in, 1:81–82 Metaformic theory, 2:341 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 1:44 Methodist church, 1:163, 186, 194–195, 199–200, 246 in America, 1:186 in Latin America, 1:183 missionary activity, 1:226 Methodist Church of Southern Africa, 1:177

443

444

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Meyer, Joyce, 1:187 Middle Ages, 1:221–223 Middle East, Islam in, 2:74–75 Midler, Bette, 2:190 Midrash, 2:116, 177–180 Midrash, 2:116 Miko, 2:274, 282, 283, 284, 287 Mikogami, 1:73, 75–76 Milady of Tartara, 2:256–257 Milani, Farzaneh, 2:101 Mili Jide (shaman), 1:73 Millenarianism, 2:276 Miller, William, 1:200 Millerites, 1:200, 2:350 Millet, Kate, 2:340 Mills, Stephanie, 2:314 Minangkabau people (Sumatra), 2:23 Mind body spirit healing, 2:333 Mindfulness, 2:364 Ministers, 1:223–225 Minoan civilization, 1:65, 251–252 Minoan religion, 2:247 Mıˉraˉ Baˉi, 1:341, 360 Mıˉraˉbaˉis, 1:320 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 2:60 Miriam (biblical prophet), 2:139, 140, 152, 178–179 Mishnah, 2:123, 181 Missionaries, 1:225–227 Missionary activity, 1:164 in Africa, 1:177, 254 Baptist Church, 1:248 in the Global South, 1:226 Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, 1:254 Mitchell, Elsie, 1:104 Mitford, Jessica, 2:331 Mitzvah, 2:180–182. See also Bar mitzvah; Bat mitzvah Mixtecx, 2:34 Mizrahi, 2:200–203 Mizuko, 1:100, 100, 101. See also Abortion: Buddhism Moab, women of, 2:151 Modern and contemporary Judaism, 2:182–185 change, response, and the Jewish future, 2:184–185

change and Resistance within the Jewish Movements, 2:182–183 marriage, family, and the life cycle, 2:183–184 matriarchs in Jewish liturgy, 2:184 Modern Orthodox Judaism, 2:118–120, 2:195 Modesty, 1:94, 192, 193, 203, 260, 278, 282, 283, 362, 2:43, 45, 50, 66, 68, 76, 89, 90, 98, 119, 147, 148, 149, 156, 164, 183 Modi, Narendra, 1:340 Moksha, 2:105, 112 Monasticism Anglican, 1:166–167, 229 Augustinian, 1:228 Benedictine, 1:222, 228, 232 Carmelite, 1:228, 230, 254 Cistercian, 1:222 Divine Office (Daily Office), 1:228–229, 230, 231 Dominican, 1:222, 228, 232 female Hindu, 1:362 Franciscan, 1:222, 228, 232 golden age of, 1:232 Green Sisters, 1:255 and missionary work, 1:254 Poor Clares, 1:232 Rule of Life, 1:230 Second Order of Franciscans, 1:232 Monasticism, contemporary women, 1:230–231 Monasticism, medieval women, 1:221–222, 231–233 Monastic life, 1:227–230 Monastics Buddhist, 2:345 Christian, 2:345 Jain, 2:105, 109–111 Monastics and nuns, 2:109–112 Monks Buddhist, 1:122–123, 124, 129, 146, 151, 2:345 Christian, 2:345 Jain, 2:105, 108–111, 113 ordination of, 1:134–136 Mono Craters, 2:17 Monotheism, 2:291, 314, 317



Monroe, Marilyn, 2:189 Montessori, Maria, 1:89 Moody, Susan I., 1:89 Moon, Lottie, 1:248 Moon, Susan, 1:113 Moon Lodge (Native American), 2:341 Moonwheel, 2:341 Moon Woman, 2:35 Moore, Beth, 1:187 Moore, Queen Mother, 1:6 Mor, Barbara, 2:341 Moral Majority, 1:202 Mordvin Pagans, 2:226 More, Margaret, 1:194 Morgan, Fiona, 2:340 Morgan, Robin, 2:340 Mormonism, 1:165, 233–235, 246, 2:350 fundamentalist, 1:246 temple garments, 1:192–193 Morning Star Ceremony, 2:12 Mosheim, Grete, 2:191 Mosques praying spaces for women in, 2:62 women-only, 2:102 Mosuos of Tibet, 2:27 Mother Earth, 1:43, 2:2–5, 7, 8, 15–16, 25, 31, 32–33, 319. See also Gaia (Earth Goddess); Great Mother Mother Goddess, 1:62 as healing force, 2:331 Hindu, 1:315–316, 347, 354, 355 See also Aditi; Creatrix; Deities; Demeter; Devi; Gaia; Great Goddess; Great Mother; Inanna; Ninhursagˆa; Tara Motherhood, 1:23, 24, 92,˘ 98, 119–120, 141, 147, 291–294, 321, 341, 375–376, 2:123 Confucian ideal of, 1:294–296 in the Hebrew Bible, 2:150 Hindu clan, 1:354 and Islam, 2:73 in Israel, 2:157–158 in Japan, 1:295 in Korea, 1:295–296 link to compassion, 1:63, 118, 120, 127–128, 2:82 See also Womb

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mother Nature, 1:43, 2:240. See also Gaia (Earth Goddess) Mother of God, 1:235–239 in Church tradition, 1:236 contemporary devotion and apparitions, 1:238 depicted in art, 1:238, 243 divinity of, 1:252 and Marian devotion, 1:237–238 Mary of Nazareth as, 1:235–236 as Queen of Heaven, 1:237, 238 as role model, 1:238 transformations of pre-Christian goddesses, 1:237 See also Mary of Nazareth Mother of the Adityas, 1:315–1:316 Mother of the Dao, 1:303 Mother of the Dipper (Doumu), 1:304 Mothers Against Silence (MAS), 2:186 Mother Teresa, 1:259 Mountainwater, Shekinah, 2:341 Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, 1:165 Mowatt, Judy, 1:22 Mud-cloth design, 1:8 Mugyo, 1:76 Muhaddithat, 2:53 Muhammad (prophet), 1:15, 85, 2:43, 45, 52, 53, 57–58, 62, 63, 65, 67, 344 companions of, 2:99 daughter of, 2:56, 70, 344 on the hajj, 2:84–85 on marriage and family, 2:79–91 wives of, 2:52, 67, 68, 70, 88–89, 99, 344 See also Hadith Muhumusa (Rwandan queen), 1:21 Mujaji (Rain Queens), 1:19–20 Mujeristas, 2:362 Multiculturalism, 2:73, 317 Mummies of Ûrümchi, 2:37 Mupu Shaode (shaman), 1:73 Murata, Sachiko, 2:101, 102 Murcott, Susan, 1:105 Murray, Margaret, 2:224 Murray, Pauli (saint), 1:187 Muˉrtipuˉjakas, 2:111 Musawah movement, 2:61, 341

445

446

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Museum of Jewish Heritage (NY), 2:155 Music, 1:1 in Confucianism, 1:287 and drumming, 2:318–320, 319 gospel, 1:172–173 kirtan (devotional song), 2:334 ritual 1:8 and spirituality, 2:262, 266, 267 Musicians, 1:3, 38, 39 Musindo, 1:76 Muslim diaspora, 2:48–49 Muslimgirl.com, 2:61 Muslims in Africa, 1:177 African American, 2:77, 78 Ahmadiyya, 2:69 Hindu violence against, 1:340 Indian, 1:323 invasion of Banda Aceh, Sumatra, 2:23 LGBTQ, 2:62 reverts, 2:76–77 See also Islam Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour, 2:78 Muslim Women’s League, 2:103 Muslim Youth Association in South Africa, 2:70 Myanmar Buddhism in, 1:113, 127, 128, 130, 134, 153 missionaries in, 1:226 Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannuˉ), 1:304, 308 Mysticism, 1:265, 266, 2:222, 336, 345 Heathen, 2:221 Islamic (Sufism), 2:99–102 Jewish, 2:145, 161 monastic, 1:232 See also Kabbalah Mystics, 1:239–242, 258, 277, 278 Benedetta Carlini, 1:207 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 1:204–206 Hindu, 1:325–326 Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416), 1:211–212 Margery Kempe, 1:212 nuns as, 1:261 Mystic visions, 1:41

Mythologies African, 1:1 Aztec, 2:8 Buddhist, 1:118, 126 Chinese, 1:78 Daoist, 1:303 Divine Feminine in, 2:309–311, 324, 326, 332, 344, 349 Finno-Ugrian, 2:265 Greek and Roman, 1:30–31, 39, 40, 42–43, 44, 45, 47, 58, 67, 2:259, 339 Hindu, 1:313, 324, 330, 335–336, 345, 349, 353, 357, 365, 368, 370, 383 Jain, 2:109 Jewish, 2:170–171, 173–174, 189 Mayan, 2:8 Mesopotamian, 1:55, 62–63, 64, 65, 2:353 Mexican, 2:308 Neolithic, 2:254, 260 Norse, 2:221 Old European, 1:45, 2:267 pagan, 2:231–232, 234 Saami, 1:80 Sanskrit, 1:321 Shinto, 2:270–271, 277–278, 284 Siberian, 1:79, 2:252 Yoruba, 1:9, 23 Naess, Arne, 2:314 Nahua culture (Sierra Norte de Puebla), 2:7, 343 Najia Belghazi Canter, 2:103 Nakao, Wandy, 1:105 Nakayama Miki, 2:285, 289 Namaskara Sutra, 2:112 Naming ceremonies, 2:12, 195 Sikh, 2:299 Nanak (Guru), 2:291, 297, 303, 304, 334 Nanih Waiya, 2:16–17 Nanna (moon god), 1:81–82 Naomi (biblical), 2:151 Naropa University, 1:113 Nasso, Iya, 1:4 National American Woman Suffrage Association, 2:134 National Association of Volunteer Interfaith Caregivers, 1:112



National Baptist Convention, 1:164 National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, 2:134 National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 2:134, 135, 186 National Daoist Association, 1:310 National Organization for Women (NOW), 1:187 National Spiritualist Association, 2:351 Nation of Islam (NOI), 2:76–77 Native American religion activism, 2:3–6 ancestors, 2:6–8 arts, 2:9–11 ceremonies, 2:11–14 clothing, 2:14–15 creation stories, 2:15–17 kinship, 2:18–21 marriage and social status, 2:21–23 medicine women, 2:27–29 nature, 2:30–31 sacred place, 2:31–33 sacred spirits, 2:34–36 women warriors, 2:41–42 Native American tribes Akimel O’odham, 2:22 Apache, 2:9, 42 Arikara, 2:34 Blackfeet, 2:42 Cherokee, 2:18–19, 34, 42 Cheyenne, 2:42 Chickasaw, 2:16–17, 30–31 Chipewyan, 2:22 Choctaw, 2:16, 34 Chumash, 2:7, 32 Creek, 2:22, 42 Crow, 2:29 Fremont, 2:33 Great Plains, 2:7 Hopi, 2:10, 21, 22 Inuit, 2:7 Iroquois, 2:22, 23, 24, 25, 34, 359 Kashaya Pomo, 2:28 Kaska, 2:42 Kutchin, 2:22 Lakota, 2:19–20, 42 Lakota Sioux, 2:359 Mescalero Apache, 2:12

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mohegan, 2:28 Nahuas (Sierra Norte de Puebla), 2:7, 343 Navajo, 2:12, 13, 35, 231 Nootka, 2:42 Northern Paiute, 2:239 Ojibwa, 2:42 Oneida, 2:42 Paiute, 2:17 Pawnee, 2:12, 34–35 Pomo, 2:10 Pueblo, 2:10, 33 Southern Paiute, 2:33 Standing Rock Sioux, 2:6 Zuni, 2:10, 26 Native faith groups, 2:228 Nature connection with, 2:30 cycles of, 2:30 as Divine, 2:325, 236 women’s link to, 2:324 Nature (Native American), 2:30–31 kinship with, 2:18 Nature Religion (Burma), 1:77 Navaab, 1:94 Navaratri/Durga Puja/Dashain festival, 1:335, 336, 350 Nayar people (India), 2:23 Nazism, 2:134, 135 Nefertiabet, 1:18, 18 Nefertiti, 1:19, 35, 36–37, 36, 38 Nehanda (Shona princess), 1:19 Neo-Confucianism, 1:284, 286, 287, 292, 295, 296–297 Neolithic burials, 2:244 Neolithic female figures, 2:253–256 chronology and geographic extent, 2:253 contextual evidence for, 2:253 forms of, 2:254–255 functions of the Goddesses, 2:254 Proto-Indo-European, 255 Neo-Paganism, 1:34, 2:215, 224, 236 seasonal festivals, 2:231–234 Neo-Platonism, 1:53, 2:49–2:50 Neo-Shamanism, 2:232 Nepal, Buddhism in, 1:116–117, 142, 146–147

447

448

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Nepantleras, 2:362 Network of Thai Bikkhuni Sangha, 1:112 Neumark, Martha, 2:118 Neville, Anne, 1:160 New Age movement, 2:312, 316, 333, 338, 355 Newar Buddhism, 1:116–117, 147 New moon observation, 2:197–198 New World Orisha Spirituality, 1:6 New Year for Trees, 2:139 Nhami Hill sanctuary, 1:20 Nichiren Buddhism, 1:140–142 Nicodemism, 1:275–276 Nigerian Celestial Church of Christ, 1:246 Nike, 1:31 Nimbarka, 1:360 Ninalla (wife of king Gudea), 1:60 9/11 terrorist attacks, 1:209–210, 2:78 Ninhursagˇa Mother Goddess, 1:62–63, 82 ˘ Ninimma, 1:82 Ninlil, 1:63–65, 82 Nin-UN-il (scribe), 1:81 Niqabs, 2:46, 47, 50, 69 Nirvana-Tantra, 1:355 Nisaba, 1:82 Nishan Shaman, 1:76 Nivedita (Sister), 1:339 Noadiah (biblical), 2:152 Noble, Vicki, 2:340 Noh theater, 2:278 Nollywood, 2:26 Nomads Clinic, 1:112 Norse culture, 2:220–221 Novick, Leah, 2:146, 193 Nunet, 1:37–38 Nuns adoption of New Age practices by, 2:357 as “brides of Christ,” 1:175, 232, 240, 2:344 Buddhist, 1:124, 129, 130, 146, 149–150, 151, 152, 153, 2:336 Christian, 1:167, 180, 221–222, 2:345 Daoist, 1:302, 307–310 hagiographies of, 1:257 Jain, 2:105, 108–111, 112, 113 and monastic life, 1:227–229 as mystics, 1:241, 261

ordination of, 1:134–136 as pilgrims, 2:338 and the Reformation, 1:274 Roman Catholic, 1:179, 185, 253–255 as teachers, 1:195, 261 in Thailand, 1:134 Theravada Buddhist, 1:104, 132–133 Tibetan Buddhist, 1:122, 2:341 See also Abbesses Nuns, Theravada, 1:104, 122, 132–133, 2:341 Nupe religious tradition, 1:3 Nusaybah bin Ka’b, 2:67 Nyabinghi Assemblies, 1:22–23 Oba Tero (Mama Monserrate Gonzalez), 1:4 Obeah, 1:3 Obi Dida, 1:24 Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1:186 Oceanus, 1:42 Ocha Bi (Fermina Gonzalez), 1:4 Octavia, 1:51 Oda, Mayumi, 2:361 Odinism, 2:220 Odinist Fellowship, 2:221, 225 Odyssey (Homer), 1:43–44 Oetinger, Friedrich, 1:264 Ofer, Dalia, 2:154 Oils, 1:10 Okonedo, Sophie, 2:191 Olcott, Henry Steele, 1:103 Olga of the Evenk, 1:74 Oli ceremony, 2:113 Oliveto, Karen, 1:187 Olmeda, Maria Luisa, 2:221 Olomo, Chief Oloye Aino, 1:6 Olowu, Princess Elizabeth, 1:9 Olympia, 1:65 Omm Ali (Fatimah of Balkh), 2:96 ˉ motokyoˉ, 2:275, 276, 277, 285 O Oneida Community, 1:246 Oracle bones, 2:38 Oracular women, 1:1, 17–22 at Delphi, 1:32–33 Oral traditions, 1:1, 4, 20, 2:29 Ordain Women, 1:234 Order of WhiteOak, 2:217



Ordination of women Buddhist, 1:23, 29, 112, 132–135 Catholic, 1:186 Christian, 1:165, 196, 223–225 Daoist, 1:307–310 Hindu, 1:368 homosexuals (Judaism), 2:205 Jewish, 2:115–116, 118, 121, 136, 159, 184, 194–196, 209 Mormon, 1:235 Protestant, 1:180, 183, 186–187, 246–250 See also Nuns; Priestesses Origin myths, 1:4 Indian, 1:323 Native American, 2:15–17 Ob-Ugrian, 2:252 Yoruba religion, 1:23 See also Creation stories; Mythologies Orisha-Ifa, 1:6 American, 1:3 Orisha veneration, 1:3, 4, 11, 23 Orisha-Vodou, 1:6 Orloff, Chana, 2:126 Orphic Mysteries, 1:39 Orr, Emma Restall, 2:217 Ortheia, 1:44–1:45 Orthodox Christianity, 1:242–243 in the United States, 1:184 Orthodox Judaism, 2:128, 131, 137, 139, 140, 158–159, 166, 181, 183, 184, 188, 205, 210 Oshunike, Iyanifa, 1:6 Osiris, 1:37 Ostriker, Alicia, 2:146, 179 Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1:81–82, 238, 2:26, 359 Our Lady of the Angels, 1:181 Our Lady of the Bark, 1:181 Ovid (poet), 1:33, 44, 77 Oxala, Sylvia de, 1:12 Oxford movement, 1:166 Oyotonji Village, 1:6 Ozelsel, Michaela, 2:101 Pachamma, 2:34 Padma. See Lakshmi Padma Shri, 2:292

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Pagan Federation, 2:238 Paganism, 2:215–238, 224–226, 325, 346 contemporary, 2:229 Druidry, 2:217–218 Eco-Paganism, 2:218–220 European, 2:229 and healing, 2:333 Heathenry, 2:220–222 introduction, 2:215–217 Levantine, 2:226 magic, 2:222–223 modern/contemporary/Neo-, 2:215, 224–226 Mordovian, 2:228 Mordvin, 2:226 non-Reconstructionist, 2:228 periodicals associated with, 2:225 priestesses and elders, 2:226–227 Reclaiming tradition, 2:311 reconstructionist, 2:227–229 ritual, 2:229–231 seasonal festivals, 2:231–234 See also Wicca Pagan spirituality, 2:222, 316 Painting of houses, 1:8 Pajapati, 1:98, 135–136 Palden Lhamo, 1:116 Palenques, 1:3 Palestine, 2:83, 159 Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 2:186–187, 187 Palladino, Eusapia, 2:351 Palmer, Lili, 2:190, 191 Palmer, Phoebe, 1:174, 185, 249 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 2:190 Pandora’s box, 1:158 Pappenheim, Bertha, 2:132–133, 135 Parashakti, 1:374 Pardes Rimonim, 2:193 Parker, Sarah Jessica, 2:190 Parliament of World Religions, 2:238, 291, 311, 334 Parrish, Essie, 2:28 Parsons, Agnes, 1:89 Parvati, 1:325, 333, 334, 337, 355, 359, 365, 373. See also Shakti Paryushana festival, 2:113 Pa Sini Jobu, 1:20 Passover Seder, 2:140, 179

449

450

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Patai, Raphael, 2:146 Paternalism, 1:286, 274 Pativrata, 1:346, 2:109 Patriarchy, 1:7, 22, 55, 196, 202, 203, 249, 251, 295, 309, 339, 365, 366–367, 368, 2:48, 59, 247–248, 296, 305, 317, 327, 328, 339, 349, 361 in Israel, 2:157 Paula (Roman noblewoman, Christian), 1:173 Paxson, Diana, 2:221, 225 Paxson, Ruth, 1:226 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 1:103 Peace activism, 2:134 in Israel, 2:159 Peacemaking, 2:82–84, 185–188 Peet, Amanda, 2:190 Pele, 2:360 Pentecostal churches, 1:164, 165, 201, 203, 224, 246 in Latin America, 1:182, 183 Pentecostalism, 1:249 Pepper, Beverly, 2:127 Perez, Laura, 2:360 Performance, 2:188–192 Perpetua (martyr), 1:271, 272 Perpetua of Carthage (martyr), 1:271, 272, 276 Persephone, 1:39–40, 41 Perseus, 1:44, 46 Persian-American Educational Society, 1:89 Pesach (Passover), 2:139–140 Peter Abelard, 1:207 Petroglyphs, 1:18, 74, 79, 2:17, 32, 258, 261, 263–264. See also Cave drawings Peyote ceremonies, 2:28 Pharaonic circumcision, 1:14–15 Philippines, 1:77 Philo, 2:124 Phoebe (early Christian), 1:271, 272 Photography, 1:171 Picon, Molly, 2:190 Pictographs, 2:32 Piercing, 1:16 Piercy, Marge, 2:339 Pilgrimage, 1:243–245, 356–358, 2:84–86, 114 hajj, 2:63, 69, 84–86

to the River Ganges, 1:357–358 specific motives for, 1:356, 357 Pilgrimage, goddess, 2:337–338 Pio (Padre), 1:265 Piper, Leonora, 2:351 Pistis Sophia, 1:219 Pius XII (pope), 1:254 Planets, 2:312 Plaskow, Judith, 2:172, 178 Pleiades, 2:24, 32 Plisetskaya, Maya, 2:191 Plum Village monastery, 1:113 Pohl, Lucie, 2:190 Polyandry, 1:55, 330 Polygamy, 1:193, 213, 233–234, 245–247, 275, 367, 2:51, 59, 62, 86–88, 98 in Islam, 2:59 Polygyny, 2:79–80 and Judaism, 2:161, 175 Polytheism, 1:34, 79, 2:23, 224, 225, 227, 344, 345 in Egypt, 1:35 Pompeia, 1:70 Pongal festival, 1:336–337 Pontifex maximus, 1:69 Pontus, 1:42 Poppaea Sabina (wife of Nero), 1:271 Porete, Marguerite, 1:277 Poro society, 1:8 Portman, Natalie, 2:190 Posner, Ruth, 2:191 Possession. See Spirit possession Postcolonial studies, 2:362 Pottery and pottery making, 1:7, 8, 66, 2:9, 11, 30, 31, 35, 243, 245, 246, 247, 266, 267 Powers, Harriet, 1:171 Prajnaparamita, 1:115, 136–138 Prakriti, 1:358–360, 379 Pre-Greek goddesses in the Greek Pantheon, 1:65–67 Prehistoric burials, 2:243–244 Prehistoric religions, 2:239–268 burials, 2:243–244 Crete, religion and culture, 2:245–249 Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the religions of Old Europe), 2:249–251



guardian spirits in Eurasian cultures, 2:251–252 introduction, 2:239–243 Neolithic female figures, 2:253–256 sacred script, 2:256–257 shamanism, 2:257–259 Upper Paleolithic female figures, 2:260–264 women in prehistoric religious practices, 2:265–268 Presbyterian church, 1:186, 209, 224, 246 in Latin America, 1:183 missionary activity, 1:226 Presbyterian Church (USA), 1:224, 248 Presbyterian Church in America, 1:224 Pretty Shield (Crow Nation), 2:29 Priesand, Sally J., 2:118, 121, 194 Priestesses, 1:1, 17–22, 27, 2:146, 192–194, 341, 343, 345, 358, 359, 360, 363 in African religions, 1:1, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 17–22, 163, 2:357 of Athena, 1:30–31, 67 of Bacchus, 1:69 Candomblé, 1:11–12 Christian, 1:183, 187, 210, 261 Daoist, 1:301, 307–310, 310 Druidical, 2:227 in Egypt, 1:18–19, 18, 38, 2:332 Greek, 1:32, 41, 49, 56 healing powers of, 1:12 Hindu, 1:314, 354, 368, 382 of Inanna, 1:55 in Israel, 2:143 Judaism (kohenet), 2:192–194 Mary Magdalene as, 1:218 Mesopotamian, 1:59, 58–61, 81, 82, 2:320 pagan, 2:226–227 psychic abilities of, 1:12 prehistoric, 2:241, 256, 257, 354, 355 queens as, 1:19–21 Roman, 1:49, 56, 68–71 and Shamanism, 1:76 Shinto, 2:269, 271, 281–283, 286–288 of Venus, 1:70 Wiccan, 2:226–227, 235, 331

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Yoruba, 1:23, 24 See also Clergy; Miko; Ministers; Rabbis; Shamans Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination, 1:307–310 Priestesses and Elders, 2:226–227 Priestesses and oracular women, 1:17–22 Priestesses and their staff in ancient Greece, 1:67–68 Priestessing, 2:226 Priesthood, 1:4, 39, 69, 151, 155, 157, 219, 224, 225, 235, 253, 2:199, 206, 360 initiation, 1:4 pagan, 2:224, 226–227, 228, 235 Shinto, 2:288 See also Priestesses Priests, homosexual, 1:13 Primal, Diva, 2:334 Primal Goddess, 1:34 Primus, Pearl, 2:361 Prince of the Lilies, 2:246–247 Prisca (Priscilla; biblical), 1:271, 272 Prison dharma, 1:112 Prison ministry, 1:187–188 Prison reform, 1:112 Pritam, Amrita, 2:292–293 Prithivi, 1:114 Prithvi, 1:364, 379 Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa, 1:209 Project Dana, 1:112 Project on Being with Dying, 1:112 Prophetic painting, 1:171 Prophet’s wives, 2:52, 68, 69, 70, 88–89, 99, 344 Prostitutes and prostitution, 1:38, 51, 185, 382 Protestant denominations, 1:247–250 Protestantism in Africa, 1:176 and the arts, 1:170, 171 in Europe, 1:178 in Latin America, 1:182–183 non-denominational, 1:184 right-wing, 1:162 in South Africa, 1:177 in the United States, 1:184

451

452

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Protestant Reformation, 1:170, 179, 258, 269, 273–276, 2:346 and marriage, 1:246 Protoevangelium of James, 1:236 Prthivi, 1:373 Psychoactive, 1:41 Puberty, 1:16–17 Publicia, 1:70 Puja, 1:146, 152, 370, 380, 2:109, 112–114, 113 Purdah, 2:69, 89–91 Purim, 2:139 Purity/impurity, 1:178, 254, 2:90, 112, 148, 149, 159 menstrual and postnatal, 1:344, 346, 2:148, 152, 163, 200–201, 204, 208, 228, 269, 274 ritual, 1:147, 322, 344, 345, 346, 376, 2:123, 345 sexual, 1:14, 60, 175, 267, 289, 321, 339, 340, 2:58, 65–66, 131 spiritual, 1:117, 123, 342, 359, 369, 2:85, 99, 110, 138, 205 See also Caste; Chastity Purity rings, 1:175 Purusha, 1:359 Pythia of Delphi, 1:27, 32 Qasmuna, 2:201 Quakers, 1:185, 186, 194, 199, 224 Quanzhen school, 1:301, 302, 310 “Queening” ritual, 2:229 Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), 1:303–304 Queen Nanny, 1:5 Queen of Heaven, 1:55, 237, 238, 2:144, 152, 354 Queen of Sheba, 1:22 Queens, as priestesses, 1:19–21 Queer people, 1:6. See also Homosexuality; Lesbians; LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals Quetzalcoatl the Plumed Serpent, 2:7 Quigley, 2:312 Quilombos, 1:3 Quilting, 1:171 Quinceañera, 2:27 Quinta Claudia, 1:70 Quirinus, 1:69

Quiverfull movement, 1:203 Qur’an, 1:15, 2:59, 61 gendered interpretation of, 2:49 on marriage, 2:86–87 nontraditional readings of, 2:48 woman-centered reading of, 2:362 See also Islam Qur’an and Hadith, 2:91–92 Raaj-Dharma, 1:345 Rabbis, 2:194–197. See also Ordination: Jewish Rabia Adawiya, 2:70 Rabiah al-Adawiyah, 2:96 Rabiya, 2:99 Rabiya al-Adawiyya, 2:100 Rachel (biblical), 2:150, 176 Racism, 2:5, 116 and Buddhism, 1:105 Radha, 1:318, 325, 326, 359 Radha and Gopi girls, 1:360–361 Radical women’s spirituality, 2:338–343 Rafea, Aisha R., 2:101 Rafea, Aliaa, 2:101 Raging Medusa (artwork by Cristina Biaggi), 1:45 Rahnavard, Zahra, 2:75 Raine, Lauren, 2:311 Rainer, Luise, 2:191 Raisin Institute, 1:185 Raja Parba, 1:331 Rama, 1:346, 366 Ramadan, 2:48, 73 Ramakrishna, Sri, 1:355 Ramayana, 1:324, 345, 347, 355, 366 Rambert, Marie (Marie Rambaum), 2:191 Randolph, Florence Spearing, 1:165 Rani Sati, 1:347 Raphael, Geela Rayzel, 2:193 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 1:339 Rasmussen, Knud, 2:35 Rassenschande, 2:156 Rastafari, 1:22–23 Ratri, 1:373 Raven, Arlene, 2:309 Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, 2:156 Read, Joel, 1:187



Rebbetzins, 2:147–148 Rebecca (biblical), 2:150 Rebstock, Barbara, 1:275, 276 Reception history, 2:185 Reclaiming Community of San Francisco Bay Area, 2:311, 362 Reclaiming tradition, 2:225, 232 Reconciliation, 2:186 Reconstructionist movement, 2:195, 209 Reconstructionist Paganism, 2:227–229 Reed, Nikki, 2:190 Reform, 2:92–95 Reformation. See Protestant Reformation Reformed church, 1:224, 246, 273 Reform movement (Judaism), 2:118, 128, 161, 162 Regina sacrorum, 1:69, 70 Regla de Ocha, 1:13, 24 in Cuba, 1:14 See also Santeria Reick, Haviva, 2:156 Reiki, 2:333 Reincarnation, 2:24, 25, 105, 237 Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archeology, and History, 1:250–253 Relief Society, 1:234–235 Religious drumming. See Drumming Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), 2:29 Religious leadership, ancient Roman religions, 1:68–71 Roman Republic, 1:69–70 Western Roman Empire, 1:70–71 See also Leadership roles (women) Remember the Women Institute, 2:155 Renunciation, 1:319, 341, 361–363, 2:111 by Hindu women, 1:362 See also Asceticism Reuveni, David, 2:161, 201 Reverts, 2:76–77 Rex Nemorensis, 1:33, 34 Rex sacrorum, 1:69 Reza Shah, Mohammed, 2:54 Richards, Louisa “Lula” Greene, 1:234 Rig Veda, 1:313, 315, 316, 321, 341, 348, 364, 369, 372, 378–381 Rihana, 2:100 Rita of Cassia (saint), 1:265

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Rite-of-passage ceremonies, 1:15 Rites of passage (Sikh) Amrita initiation, 2:299–300 death, 2:300–301 name giving, 2:299 weddings, 2:300 Ritual Jainism, 2:112–114 Paganism, 2:229–231 See also Rituals Ritual and Festival, women’s roles, 2:298–302 Ritual cloth, 1:8 Ritual dance, 1:1, 2:258, 266, 267, 289. See also Dance Ritual music, 1:3. See also Music Rituals, 1:1–2, 2:232 agricultural, 2:246 celebrations, 2:301–302 for female embodiment and empowerment, 2:231 female-specific, 2:230 full moon, 2:237 Guru Granth Sahib, 2:298–299 life-cycle, 1:374–376, 2:229–230 for menstruation (menarche), 1:356, 376, 385, 331, 2:13, 24, 229, 231 pagan, 2:219 rites of passage, 1:356, 2:13, 299–301 sabbat, 2:236–237 self-healing, 2:230–231 shamanistic, 2:259 stage-of-life, 1:2, 375, 375 See also Purity/impurity; Ritual; Ritual and Festival: Women’s roles Ritual singers, 1:3. See also Music Ritual societies, 1:18 Rivers, Joan, 2:190 Robin, Marthe, 1:241 Robinson, Edward, 1:165 Robinson, Ida B., 1:165 Robinson, Lizzie, 1:165 Rock art sites, 2:32 Roman Catholic Church, 1:4, 11, 24 African American women in, 1:165 and the Council of Chalcedon, 1:176 and divorce, 1:214–215 in England, 1:160, 161 in Europe, 1:178, 179

453

454

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Roman Catholic Church (Continued) and the Great Schism, 1:263 Gregorian Reforms, 1:261 in Latin America, 1:181 lay celibates, 1:179 missionary activity, 1:226 and the ordination of women, 1:224, 249 in the United States, 1:184 See also Nuns; Roman Catholic women religious Roman Catholic women religious, 1:225, 253–255 Romanticism, 2:224 Rosacrucianism, 1:263 Rosen, Norma, 2:179 Rosenthal, Rachel, 2:310 Rosh Hashanah, 2:138, 181 Rosh Hodesh (Rosh Chodesh), 2:137, 163–166, 197–199, 212 and birth, 2:198 history, 2:197–198 as a woman’s holiday, 2:198 Round dances, 2:30 Rovina, Hanna, 2:189 Royal Cemetery of Ur, 1:58–59 Rubio, Isabel, 2:221 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 1:187, 249, 251, 2:321 Ruhiyyih Khanum, 1:89 Ruiz, Augustina, 1:207 Rune stones, 2:317 Ruth (biblical), 2:122, 151 Ruyle, Lydia, 2:310–311, 310, 328, 329 Ryder, Winona, 2:190 Quan Yin. See Guan Yin. Saami people, 1:79–80, 2:37 Sabbats, 2:232, 236–237 Sacred Feminine, 2:193, 232 in prehistory, 2:262 Sacred groves, 1:21 Sacred Marriage festival, 1:55 Sacred place (Native American), 2:31–33 Sacred plant items, 2:31 Sacred script, 2:256–257 Sacred spirits (Native American), 2:34–36 Sacred stones, 2:28, 35

Sacred texts on women, 1:363–369 Buddhist, 1:138–140 Sacrifice, 1:1 animal, 1:4, 16, 69, 151–152, 322 blood, 2:12 human, 1:31, 59, 2:12, 15, 244 infant, 1:31 performed by women, 1:380–381 of reindeer, 1:80 Safiyyah bint Huyayy, 2:88 Saint Frances Academy, 1:186 Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School (Saint Joseph College), 1:186 Saints, 1:255–259 American, 1:258 Muslim, 2:70 relics of, 1:243–245 widows as, 1:269 See also Canonization; Christian saints; Hindu saints Saints, Sufi, 2:95–97, 100–101 Sakyadhıˉtaˉ: The International Association of Buddhist Women, 1:104, 153 Saleh, Su’ad, 2:84 Salleh, Ariel Kay, 2:315 Salmonova, Lyda, 2:189 Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE), 2:124, 199–200 Salvation Army, 1:248 Salzberg, Sharon, 1:104, 111 Samhain, 2:232, 234, 236, 329 Sammu-ramat (Queen Mother), 1:61 Samoyed peoples, 2:37 Samskaras, 1:374–376, 375. See also Lifecycle ceremonies Sanchez, Thomas, 1:162 Sanders, Maxine, 2:224–225 Sande society, 1:8 San Francisco Zen Center, 1:105 Sanˇghaittaˉ (daughter of Emperor Asoka), 1:135, 152–153 San people, 1:9 Sanskrit mythology, 1:321 Santeria, 1:3, 4, 6, 13, 24, 2:357, 361 in Cuba, 1:24 See also Regla de Ocha Sappho (of Lesbos), 1:28, 52, 71–73, 72 Sarah (biblical), 2:150 Sarah, Francesa, 2:169



Sarah’s Tent, 2:193 Saraswati, 1:332, 337, 359, 364, 367, 368, 369–370, 373, 374, 2:278 Saraswati Puja (Vasant Panchami), 1:337, 370 Sargut, Cemâlnur, 2:102 Sari Saqati, 2:96 Sasaki, Ruth Fuller Everett, 1:103–104 Sasso, Dennis C., 2:195 Sasso, Sandy Eisenberg, 2:121, 179, 194–195 Sati (Goddess), 1:325, 355, 365 Sati (suttee), 1:313, 347, 353, 370–372, 376, 381, 2:304, 339 Sati-matas, 1:313, 370, 371 Satmar Hasidism, 2:147 Satsujo, 1:155 Sawdah bint Zam’ah, 2:88 Sayings of Mary, 1:219 Sayyidah Nafisah of Cairo, 2:96 Scarification, 1:10, 16 Schaleck, Malva, 2:126 Schapiro, Miriam, 2:127 Schmidt, Klaus, 2:263 Scholastica (saint), 1:160, 232 Schori, Katharine Jefferts, 1:224, 248 Schwartz, Jacqueline (Mandell), 1:104 Scott, Cora L. V., 2:351 Scott, Sister Concordia, 1:171 Scriptures. See Christian scripture; Hebrew Bible; Hindu sacred texts; Sikhism: scriptures and women Scrying, 2:317 Sculpture bronze casting, 1:9 of the Gorgon Medusa, 1:45, 45, 47 Seasonal festivals, 2:231–234 Sea Woman, 2:7 Second Great Awakening, 1:163, 185, 194 Second Vatican Council, 1:178, 179, 230, 249, 254–255 Sectarian Shinto, 2:287 Sefer Yetzirah, 2:167 Sekai Shindoˉkyoˉ, 2:276 Selassie, Haile I, 1:22 Self-Realization fellowship, 2:336 Selu. See Corn Mother Selva Pascuala mural, 2:258 Semple, Robert, 1:201

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Sen, Ramprasad, 1:355 Seneca Falls Convention, 1:185 Senufo funerary activities, 1:7 Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms, 2:200–203 Seton, Elizabeth Ann Bayley, 1:174, 186, 258 Seventh-Day Adventist church, 1:165, 182, 186, 199, 200 Sex and gender in Christianity, 1:260–262 in Judaism, 2:203–206 in Spirituality, 2:343–347 Sexism, 1:229, 2:116, 287, 293, 338 and Buddhism, 1:105 Sexual abuse, 1:22–23, 2:162 by clergy, 1:124, 181, 259 rape, 1:31, 49, 55, 64, 2:4, 66, 71, 155–156, 166, 174 Sexual imagery, 1:9, 143, 2:261, 262, 265. See also Lingam; Sheela na gigs; Vulva; Yoni Sexual satisfaction (women), 2:204 Sexuality, 1:51 and Christianity, 1:206–208 and spirituality, 1:207 Sexual orientation, 1:6, 28. See also Homosexuality; LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals; Transgender persons Seymour, Jane, 2:191 Seymour, William, 1:185 Sha’arawi, Huda, 2:47 Shabbat (Sabbath), 2:137, 145, 206–208, 207 food preparation for, 2:141 Shaivism, 1:317, 319 Shakers, 1:165, 170–171, 199, 246, 249 Shaking Quakers, 1:186, 199 Shakta Tantras, 1:374 Shakti, 1:313, 325, 328, 331, 334, 335, 342, 357, 358, 359, 361, 365, 372–374, 377, 378, 383, 2:305, 364 Shaktism, 1:332, 356, 367 Shallow ecology, 2:322 Shamanism, 2:278 Mesolithic, 2:256–257 prehistoric, 2:257–259 in prehistoric religious practices, 2:257–259

455

456

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Shamanism in Eurasian cultures, 2:36–39 Shamanism in prehistoric religious practices, 2:257–259 Shaman-priestesses, 1:21 Shamans, 1:20, 21, 2:219, 333 blind, 2:285 in China, 1:74–75 in Eurasian cultures, 2:36–39 female, 2:359–360 gender of, 2:258 as “heritage bearers,” 2:40 in Japan, 1:75–76 in Korea, 1:76, 2:38–41, 40 in Manchuria, 1:76 Native American, 2:30–31, 32 Paleolithic, 2:243 responsibilities of, 2:36–37 Sarmatian, 2:259 Shinto, 2:281, 284 in Siberia, 1:79 in Southeast Asia, 1:76–77 women as, 1:73–75 Shamans and ritualists, 2:282–286 Shamans in East Asia, 1:73–77 Shamans in Korea, 2:39–41 Shams-i Finih, 1:94 Shams of Marchena, 2:99 Shange, Ntozake, 2:360–361 Shape-shifting, 2:25, 266 Shapiro, Miriam, 2:309 Shari’a, 2:71, 93, 97–99 and honor killing, 2:66 on marriage, 2:79 Shasta Abbey Zen Monastery, 1:105 Shaw, Miranda, 2:341 Shaykhism. See also Tahirih Sheela na gigs, 2:347–349, 2:348 Shekinah, 2:142, 143, 168–169, 190, 193, 198, 201, 354 in Kabbalistic literature, 2:145 in Rabbinic literature, 2:145 Shelamzion (Salome) Alexandria, 2:124, 199–200 Shemini Atzereth, 2:139 Shere, Holly Taya, 2:146, 193 Sher-Gil, Amrita, 2:293 Sheva, Ellie, 2:226 Shi’a Islam, 1:85, 2:49–50, 51, 53, 56, 69, 75, 80, 98

Shinji shuˉmeikai, 2:277 Shinri jikkoˉ no oshie, 2:277 Shinto, 1:76, 80, 2:269–290, 357 Amaterasu Omikami, 2:270–272 feminine virtues, 2:272–273 filial piety, 2:273–275 founders of new religious movements, 2:275–277 introduction, 2:269–270 Kami, 2:277–278 kinship and marriage, 2:278–281 priestesses, 2:281–282 Sectarian Shinto, 2:287 shamans and ritualists, 2:282–286 State Shinto, 2:287–288 Tenrikyoˉ, 2:288–289 weddings, 2:286–287 Shinto-related movements, 2:275–277 Shinto shrines, 2:269, 271, 273, 279, 282 Kamo shrine, 2:282 Shrine maindens, 2:282, 284, 287 Usa Hachimanguˉ shrine, 2:284 Shirer, Priscilla, 1:184, 187 Shiva, 1:317, 325, 332, 332, 334, 337, 342, 355, 359, 367, 371, 377 Shiva, Vandana, 2:314 Shiva lingams, 1:337 Shiva Rae, 2:363 Shivratri, 1:352 Shoˉtoku (empress), 2:284 Shrines, 1:44, 85, 92, 115–118, 145–146, 152, 205, 223, 238, 243–244, 257, 289, 305, 313, 318, 320, 337, 347, 356–358, 371, 2:246, 253, 273–275, 277–279, 281–283, 284–288, 298, 319, 338 household, 1:38, 336, 343–345, 346 Ise Shrine, 2:271, 282, 284 Kamo Shrine, 2:282 Shinto, 2:269, 271, 273, 279, 282 Usa Hachimanguˉ, 2:284 Women’s, 1:21, 23 Shrine maidens, 2:282, 284, 287 Shudras, 1:321 Siberia, 1:79 Sibylline Oracles, 1:27, 78 Sibyls, 1:77–78 Siddhartha Gautama, 1:139, 2:357. See also Buddha



Siddhi, 1:377, 384, 2:363 Signoret, Simone, 2:191 Sikh diaspora, 2:296 Sikhism, 2:291–304 art and performance, 2:292–295 feminist issues, 2:295–297 guru period, 2:297–298 introduction, 2:291–292 and kirtan, 2:334 ritual and festival, women’s roles, 2:298–302 scriptures and women, 2:303–304 Sikh Rahit Maryada, 2:296 Sikh scriptures and women, 2:303–304 Simmer-Brown, Judith, 1:113 Simos, Miriam (Starhawk), 2:146, 193, 219, 225, 328, 340 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 2:190 Singh, Amrit Kaur, 2:294 Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur, 2:295 Singh, Rabindra Kaur, 2:294 Sister Formation movement, 1:254 Sisters in Islam, 2:60–61 Sisters of Charity, 1:186 Sisters of Jesus Way, 1:167 Sisters of Mercy, 1:232 Sisters of Notre Dame, 1:232 Sisters of Saint Joseph, 1:232, 259 Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1:174, 186 Sisters of the Incarnation, 1:167 Sisters of the Love of God, 1:167 Sita, 1:346, 366–367 Sitatapatra, 1:115, 366 Siuda, Tamara, 2:226 16 cowry divination, 1:12 Sjöö, Monica, 2:306, 327, 328, 341 Slavery and the slave trade, 1:3, 2:77 and Christianity, 1:163, 164–165 and sex, 1:50 slave revolts, 1:3 and women, 1:48 Small Steps (Sarajevo), 2:84 Smith, Emma Hale, 1:234 Smith, Joseph, Jr., 1:233, 246 Smoking, 1:22 Snake dancers, 1:18 Snakes, 1:46, 2:332 Snow, Eliza R., 1:233

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Social Gospel, 2:118 Social justice, 1:171, 187 in monastic orders, 1:229 Social media, 1:187, 2:61 Social organization domination model, 1:252–253 partnership model, 1:251–252 Social rights, and Druzism, 2:50 Societies of Apostolic Life, 1:253 Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, 1:174 Society of Friends, 1:199. See also Quakers Society of Powerful Women or the Mothers (lya mi), 1:23 Soffer, Olga, 2:260 Soˉka Gakkai, 1:140–142 Sokei-an, 1:104 Solomon (biblical king), 1:22 Solomon, Rebecca, 2:125–126 Song of Songs (Hebrew Bible), 2:151, 344, 354 Song Ruoxin, 1:283, 289 Sophia, 1:263–265 as cosmic intelligence, 1:264 as female Creator, 1:263 as Holy Spirit, 1:263 as World Soul, 1:264 Soˉto Zen Buddhism, 1:104, 123, 133, 155–156 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), 1:165, 180, 224, 246–247 missionary activity, 1:227 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1:186 Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1:248 Spaisman, Zypora, 2:189 Sparks, Jordin, 1:187 Spider Woman, 2:33, 35 Spiral Dance, 2:311 Spiritism, 1:4 Spirit possession, 1:1, 3–4, 5, 2:276, 289 Spirit Rock Meditation Center, 1:104 Spirits, guardian, 2:251–252 Spirit selection, 1:21 Spiritualism, 2:350–352 enemies of, 2:351 women as spiritualist mediums, 2:350–351

457

458

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Spiritualist movement, 1:103, 274, 275 Spirituality, 2:305–365 art and performance, 2:308–311 astrology, 2:312–313 deep ecology, 2:313–316 divination, 2:316–318 drumming, 2:318–320 earth-based, 2:250, 361 ecofeminism, 2:321–326 and ecstasy, 2:363 feminist, 2:193, 218, 225 Goddess, 2:225, 326–330 green funerals, 2:330–331 healers, 2:331–334 introduction, 2:305–308 Kirtan, 2:334–335 and liberation struggles, 2:361 meditation, 2:335–337 Pagan, 2:222, 316 partnership vs. domination systems, 2:352–354 pilgrimage, goddess, 2:337–338 radical women’s spirituality, 2:338–343 sex and gender, 2:343–347 Sheela na gigs, 2:347–349 spiritualism, 2:350–352 spirituality and gender in social context, 2:352–356 syncretism, 2:356–358 woman’s, 2:342 women of color, 2:358–363 yoga, 2:363–365 Spirituality and gender in social context, 2:352–356 Spiritual practices, Afro-Cuban, 1:4 Spring equinox (Eostre), 2:232, 2:233, 2:236, 2:329 Sravasti Abbey, 1:104 Sree Ma (Holy Mother; Ma Sarada), 1:341–342 Sri Lanka, Buddhism in, 1:128, 130, 134, 135, 152, 153 Standing Rock Sioux tribe, 2:6 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1:251 Starhawk (Miriam Simos), 2:146, 193, 219, 225, 328, 340 Star patterns, 2:24 State Shinto, 2:271, 282, 287–288 Stein, Edith, 1:241

Stettheimer, Florine, 2:126 Stewart, Maria W., 1:185 Sthanakvasins, 2:112 Sthenno, 1:44 Stickey, Joanna, 2:146 Stigmata, 1:239 Stigmatics, 1:265–266 historical overview, 1:265 interpretations of, 1:265–266 Stone, Merlin, 2:327, 339 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1:174, 185 Strasberg, Susan, 2:190 Strasbourg Melchiorites, 1:275 Streep, Meryl, 2:190 Stregheria, 1:34 Streisand, Barbra, 2:190 Stri-Dharma, 1:345–346, 1:347, 1:348 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1:186 Sudan, kadake queens of, 1:19 Sudanese Women’s Union, 2:70 Sufism, 2:49–50, 99–102 Sufi women, 2:95–97 Sukkoth, 2:138–139 Sulpicia, 1:70 Summer Solstice (Litha), 2:225, 232, 233, 236, 329 Sumo wrestling, 2:274 Sun Buer, 1:301 Sun Dance Ceremony, 2:19–20 Sunday, Billy, 1:203 Sun goddess, 1:78–80 Sunna, 2:57–58 Suppressed Histories Archives, 2:339 Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims, 2:70 Surya, 1:355 Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1, 2:225, 235, 327, 340 Susanna (biblical), 2:122 Suttee. See Sati (suttee) Suu Kyi, Aung San, 1:113 Suzuki, Beatrice Erskine Hanh Lanee, 1:103 Suzuki, D. T., 1:103, 105 Svetambaras, 2:105, 106, 107–111, 112, 113 Swabian Eve, 2:262 Swaminarayan, 1:360 Swiss Baptist churches, 1:180



Sydney, Sylvia, 2:190 Syed, Najeeba, 2:84 Symbiosis, 2:315–316 Synagogue, 2:208–211 Syncretism, 1:4, 11, 305, 2:356–358 and Druzism, 2:49–50 and Hinduism, 1:313 See also Candomblé Syria, missionaries in, 1:226 Szenes, Hannah, 2:156 Szold, Henrietta, 2:135 Taharat mishpachah (family purity), 2:204–205 Tahirih, 1:89, 93–94 Taiko drumming, 2:361. See also Drumming Taisen Deshimaru, 1:133–134 Taiwan Buddhism in, 1:130, 153 Confucianism in, 1:281 temples to Mazu, 1:305 Taliban, 2:54 Talmud, 2:123, 131, 173, 177, 180, 181, 183, 190, 193, 197, 199, 212 Talocan Toteizcalticanantzin, 2:7 Tamid, Shuv, 2:193 Tanit, 1:55 Tantaquidgeon, Gladys, 2:28 Tantra, 1:97, 106, 107, 110, 142–144, 377–378, 2:363–364 Buddhist, 2:336 Hindu, 1:355, 2:336 and the yoginis, 1:385 See also Buddhism, Tantric Tara, 1:102, 115, 129, 130, 144–147, 334 Green, 1:109, 145, 147 representations of, 1:145–146 White, 1:145 Tara Dhatu, 1:108–109 Tara Vrata, 1:147 Tarbiyat School for Girls, 1:89 Tarbotti, Arcangela, 1:229 Tarim mummies, 2:37 Tarot cards, 2:316, 317, 318, 327, 328, 340 Daughters of the Moon, 2:340 Motherpeace, 2:328, 340 Tartaria Tablets, 2:241–242, 241

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Tartarus, 1:42 Tarzi, Soraya (Queen of Afghanistan), 2:54 Tashi Tseringma, 1:116 Tashlik ritual, 2:138 Tattoos, 1:10, 16 Taweret, 1:38 Taylor, Elizabeth, 2:189–190 Tea ceremony, 1:148–149 Teej, 1:352 Teimei (empress), 2:286 Teish, Chief Oloye Luisah, 1:6, 2:341 Tekakwitha, Kateri (saint), 1:184, 258, 259 Temperance movement, 1:196 Temple of Sinawava, 2:33 Temple of the Sacred Tooth, 1:107 Temple wives, 1:155 Temples, Baha’i, 1:85, 86 Temples, 1:6, 12–13, 12, 18–19, 30, 31, 32, 37–39, 44, 45, 49, 55, 56, 58, 60–61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 72, 74, 78, 92, 103, 104, 108, 110, 112, 117–118, 127, 237, 263, 287, 301–302, 304–305, 309–310, 314, 325, 327, 329, 331, 337, 347, 355, 356–358. See also specific temples Tenrikyoˉ, 2:275, 285, 288–289 Tenshoˉ jinguˉkyoˉ, 2:275, 276 Terentia, 1:70 Teresa of Ávila, 1:239, 240, 241, 258 Teresa of Calcutta, 1:259 Termas, 1:110 Terry, Neely, 1:185 Tertia Aemilia, 1:68 Tertullian, 1:245, 271 Teubal, Savina, 2:192, 193 Textiles, 1:8, 30, 143, 296, 2:130, 309 dyeing of, 1:9 production of, 2:9–11, 14, 201 See also Clothing; Weaving Thailand abortion in, 1:101 Buddhism in, 1:118, 124, 127, 128, 134, 135 Thealogy, 1:249 in art and performance, 2:308, 311 in Wicca, 2:35 Thecla, 1:51, 271, 272 “The Fall,” 1:197–199 Themis, 1:65–66

459

460

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Theogony (Hesiod), 1:44 Theology in Bhakti, 1:318 dominion, 1:162 in goddess spirituality, 2:326 Pentecostal, 1:249 and sex and gender, 1:260 in shari‘a, 2:97 Theotokos. See Mary of Nazareth; Mother of God Thérèse of Lisieux, 1:241 Therigatha, 1:149–150 Thich Nhat Hanh, 1:111, 113 Third Order of Saint Francis, 1:269 Thomas Aquinas, 1:162 Thornton, Penny, 2:312 Threefold Law, 2:237 Three Sisters, 2:34 Thurman, Howard, 1:165 Tibet, Buddhism in, 1:134, 142, 146 Tibetan Chiang people (China), 2:24 Tibetan Lamaism, 2:27 Time, cyclic, 2:32 Titanesses, 1:42 Titans, 1:42 Tlaltecuhtli, 1:333, 334 Tohfah, 2:96 Tolkien Society, 2:217 Torah, 1:15, 2:128–129, 131, 137, 139, 148, 167, 178, 180, 198, 209, 210 oral vs. written, 2:177 Torrez, Bernice, 2:28 Traditional medicine, 2:332 Chinese, 1:306–307 Traditional plants and herbs, 1:4 Trances, 1:12. See also Mysticism Trans-Atlantic slave trade. See Slavery and the slave trade Transcendental Meditation, 2:336 Transcendental movement, 1:103 Transgender persons, 2:26, 244 Jewish, 2:203–204 and paganism, 2:228 and Wicca, 2:237 See also Gender fluidity Transsexuals, 1:190 as devadasis, 1:327 and Draupadi festivals, 1:330

Tree of Life, 1:76, 79, 263, 2:145, 168, 222, 336 Tribalists, 2:362 Trinity Broadcasting Network, 1:187 Triple Goddesses, 1:33, 44–45, 47 Trivia, 1:33 Troth, The, 2:221, 226 Truth, Sojourner, 1:164, 164, 185 Tsomo, Karma Lekshe, 1:104 Tsunesaburo, Makiguchi, 1:140 Tubman, Harriet, 1:164 Tucker, Sophie, 2:190 Tunisia, 1:20 Turan, 1:55 Turner, Edith, 2:337 Turner, Victor, 2:337 Tweedie, Irina, 2:101 Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance, 2:361 Tyler, Edwina Lee, 2:361 Uan Afuda cave burials, 2:243–244 Udekaw (shaman), 1:73 Ulanova, Galina, 2:191 Ulford, Isabel, 1:212 Uma, 1:334, 373 Umm Abdallah, 2:100–101 Umm al-Darda, 2:98 Umm Habibah Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan, 2:88 Umm Salamah Hind bint Abi Umayyah, 2:88–89 Umm Zaynab Fatimah bin ‘Abbas al-Baghdadiyah, 2:98 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 2:159 Underhill, Leah, 2:350 Union for Traditional Judaism, 2:121 United Ancient Order of Druids, 2:217 United Church of Christ, 1:250 United Methodist Church, 1:187, 248 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 1:90 United Pentecostal Church, 1:183 United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (Believers), 1:199, 249. See also Shakers United States



Buddhism in, 1:103–105, 108 Catholic communities in, 1:161 Christianity in, 1:184–188 enslaved Africans in, 1:3 Islam in, 2:76–79 Reconstructionist paganism in, 2:228 women and work in, 2:213 Universal House of Justice, 1:85–86, 95, 96 Universalist Church, 1:186 Upanishads, 1:348, 362, 364, 373, 375, 378, 380, 2:364 Upasana Kanda, 1:332 Upaya Prison Project, 1:112 Upaya Zen Center, 1:112 Upper Paleolithic burials, 2:243 Upper Paleolithic female figures, 2:260–264 Uqqal, 2:50 Uralian peoples, 2:251–252, 265 Uranus, 1:42 Urnanše (king), 1:59, 59 Ursulines, 1:174, 185, 232, 254 Uru’inimgina (king), 1:60 Usa Hachimanguˉ Shrine, 2:284 Usas, 1:364, 373 Ushas, 1:379 Utah Territorial Women’s Suffrage Association, 1:234 Vac, 1:364, 370, 373, 379 Vagina, 1:47 Vaishnava Hindu, 1:360 Vajracharyas, 1:107 Vajrayana, 1:116 Valiente, Doreen, 2:215, 224, 235 Vallabhacharya, 1:360 Vancouver Holocaust Center, 2:156 Van Ginneken, Jacques, 1:227 Van Schurman, Anna, 1:194 Varna, 1:321–322, 323 Vasant Panchami (Saraswati Puja), 1:337 Vasudhara, 1:115 Vat-Savitri Amavasya festival, 1:335 Vaughan, Genevieve, 2:342 Vedas, 1:364 Vedbaek Mesolithic cemetery, 2:243 Vedic Hinduism, 1:378–383

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Veganism, 2:325 Vegetarianism, 2:219, 298, 302, 325 Veiling, 2:45–47, 69, 73–76, 296. See also Hijab “Venus” of Laussel, 2:262–263, 352 “Venus” of Lespugue, 2:263 Vernon, Margaret, 1:160 Vestal virgins, 1:49, 69, 70 Veves, 1:5 Vidyadevis, 2:107 Vidyapati, 1:360 Vietnam Buddhism in, 1:118 Confucianism in, 1:281, 284, 294 Vighneˉs´wara, 1:316 Viking Revival, 2:221 Vinaya Pitaka, 1:100 Vincˇa peoples, 2:253, 267 Violence domestic, 1:185, 381, 2:62, 161 honor-related, 2:66–67 sexual, 1:181, 331, 2:155, 156, 162, 230 See also 9/11 Terrorist attacks; Holocaust Vipassana meditation, 1:104 Vipassana movement, 1:104 Virgen de los Desamparados, 1:305 Virginity, 1:48, 95, 176, 214, 221, 251, 254, 257 consecrated, 1:175, 221, 242 of Mary of Nazareth, 1:236 perpetual, 1:221, 236 See also Athena; Pythia; Vestal virgins; Yemoja Virgin Mary. See Mary of Nazareth Virgin of Guadalupe, 1:181–182, 238, 2:26, 359 Vishnu, 1:318, 328, 332, 332, 342, 349, 351, 355, 360, 367 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 1:339 Vision quests, 2:28, 30, 32 Visions, 2:42 Vodou (Vodoun, Vodun, Voodoo), 1:3, 5, 163, 2:356, 361 Vogel, Karen, 2:340 Von Bora, Katharina, 1:274, 274, 276 Vrata, 1:110, 147, 349, 356, 380 Vulva, 1:9, 55, 2:16, 17, 32, 264, 265, 266, 347–349

461

462

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Wadud, Amina, 2:49, 55, 59, 60, 60, 61, 63, 77, 84, 362 Wah! (Wah Devi), 2:334 Walburga, 1:160 Walker, Alice, 2:339–340, 360–361, 360 Wang Chongyang, 1:301 Wang Fengxian, 1:309 Wangjia Hutong Women’s Mosque, 2:102 Ward, Mary, 1:160 Wardley Society, 1:199 Warfare and raiding, 2:41–42 Wax casting, 2:333 Way of Tea, 1:148–149 Weaving, 1:7, 8, 9, 50, 57, 66, 380, 2:10–11, 35, 245, 246, 247, 250–251, 260, 266, 311, 359 Weber, Ilse, 2:156 Weddings Indian, 2:296–2:297 in Muslim communities, 2:80–2:81 Shinto, 2:286–2:287 Sikh, 2:300 See also Marriage Weigel, Helene, 2:191 Wei Huacun, 1:308–309 Weil, Simone, 1:240, 241 Weisberg, Ruth, 2:127 Weiss, Andrea, 2:179 Weisz, Rachel, 2:191 Weitzman, Lenore, 2:154 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 1:174, 185 We’Moon calendar, 2:341 Werbemacher, Channah Rochel, 2:169–170 Wheatley, Phillis, 1:185 Wheel of the Year, 2:232, 326, 329, 341 Whirling Dervishes, 2:336 Whitby Abbey, 1:160 White, Ellen Gould Harmon, 1:186, 199, 199–200 White, James Springer, 1:200 White Buffalo Calf Woman, 2:359 White Buffalo Maiden, 2:2, 19 Whitehead, Isabel, 1:160 White Painted Woman, 2:12 White Sisters, 1:254

Wicca, 2:146, 215–216, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 232, 234–238, 325, 340 beliefs and practices, 2:236–237 contemporary, 2:317 Dianic, 1:27, 34, 2:225, 229, 317, 338, 2:362 divination techniques, 2:317–318 history and background, 2:234–235 Neo-Pagan, 1:34 and pilgrimage, 2:338 status in society, 2:238 women and, 2:235–236 See also Witchcraft and witches Wiccan spirituality, 2:316 Widowhood, 1:215–216, 267–271 and Christianity, 1:215–216, 267–271 and the cult of female chastity, 1:289 Hindu, 1:347, 353, 368, 371, 376 Jewish, 2:150 modern Western, 1:269–270 Vedic, 1:381 See also Sati (suttee) Wife of Valor (Proverbs), 2:212 Willard, Frances, 1:185, 196 Willis, Jan, 1:105 Winans, CeCe, 1:172, 172 Windvogel, Laura (Lady Skollie), 1:9 Winger, Debra, 2:190 Winters, Shelley, 2:190 Winter solstice (Yule), 2:232–233, 236, 329 Winti religious tradition, 1:3 Wise, Louise Waterman, 2:135 Wise, Stephen S., 2:135 Witch burning, 2:339 Witchcraft and witches, 1:24, 346–347, 2:224, 225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 333, 327 Dianic, 1:27, 34, 2:225, 229, 317, 338, 362 Italian American, 1:34 See also Wicca Witchcraft Act (1912), 1:21 Witch trials, 1:258 Wittenmyer, Annie, 1:196 Wole Shoujian, 1:301 Womanhood initiations, 1:18



Womanhouse, 2:127 Womanism, 2:360–361, 362 Woman’s Missionary Union, 1:227 Womb, 1:32, 139, 237, 329, 2:32, 91, 150, 153, 180, 198, 218, 229, 230, 231, 239, 251, 265, 303, 304, 309 of divinity, 1:42, 43, 64, 115, 116, 253, 374, 377, 2:145 of Earth, 1:46, 2:24, 25, 32, 33, 34 Women as abbesses, 1:157, 160–161, 204–206, 221, 257, 261 abuse of, 2:155 as anchoresses, 1:211–212, 277 as Anglican/Episcopalian religious, 1:166–168 in the Apocrypha, 1:168–170 as artists, 1:7, 170–171, 2:125–126 Asian, 2:362 Athenian, 1:57 biblical, 2:139, 152 Brahmin, 1:322 and the caste system, 1:321–324 as children, 1:48–49 Christian, interfaith dialogue post 9/11, 1:208–211 and Christian art, 1:170–173 Christian attitudes toward clothing, 1:189–193 as Christian monastics (contemporary), 1:230–231 as Christian monastics (medieval), 1:157–158, 221–223, 231–233 as Christian monastics (monastic life), 1:227–230 of color, 1:163–166, 174, 186, 2:306, 358–363 Confucian virtues, 1:290–291 Dalits, 1:323–324 as dancers, 2:275, 361 as deacons, 1:243 and deep ecology, 2:313 discrimination against, 1:314 domination of, 2:313 dress codes for, 1:189–193 as druids, 2:217–218 in early Buddhism, 1:150–152, 97

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

in early Christianity, 1:157, 169, 271–273 and ecofeminism, 2:322 education for, 1:88–91, 93–96, 160 and “The Fall,” 1:197–199 feminine virtues of, 1:118–120 as filial daughters, 1:292–293 five classes in Daoism, 1:300 as founders of Christian denominations, 1:199–201 gathering of silk by, 1:285 Greek and Roman, 1:48–51 Hasidic, 2:148 as healers, 1:305–307 and Hindu ideals of womanhood, 1:339–340, 345–348, 364, 366–368 homosexual, 1:52, 206–208, 2:361 Islamic ideal of womanhood, 2:67–68 under Islamic rule, 2:200–202 and Judaism, 2:163, 204, 209 as jurist scholars, 2:97 in the labor force, 2:159 in leadership roles, 1:68–71 leading prayers, 2:49, 60, 61, 62, 77, 78, 102, 208 literacy among, 1:81–82, 89 as magicians, 2:222–223 making vows, 2:151 as manifestations of Shakti, 1:378 marginalization of, 2:91, 123, 287–288 as mediums, 2:152, 275 menstruating, 2:12, 113, 148, 152, 155, 204, 209, 228, 274, 304, 322, 363 mestiza, 2:360 in the middle ages, 1:221–223, 231–233 and military service, 2:158 as ministers, 1:223–225 in Minoan civilization, 1:251–252 as missionaries, 1:225–227 Mormon, 1:233–235 as mourners, 1:38 as musicians, 1:170, 171–172, 204, 205, 2:156 Muslim, 1:208–211 as mystics, 1:239–242, 258, 277, 278 naming of, 1:48 Native American, 1:174, 184, 258, 2:361

463

464

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Women (Continued) in the New Testament, 1:242–243 as nurses, 1:167, 174 Palestinian, 2:83 as peacemakers, 2:82–84 as performers, 2:188–191 political agency of, 1:300–301 powers of, 1:13 as preachers, 1:218 in prehistoric religious practices, 2:262, 265–268 pre-Islamic Arab, 2:359 preparation of silk by, 1:286 as priestesses, 1:49, 2:192–193, 363 as priests’ wives, 1:155 as property, 1:56–57 as prophets, 1:275, 2:152 in public life, 1:49–50 as rabbis, 2:136, 194–196 in the Reformation, 1:273–276 religious roles for, 2:13, 75, 158, 345–346 restrictions on, 2:296 rights of, 1:330, 91–92, 103 role in Buddhist funeral practices, 1:121–122 role of, 2:162 roles and responsibilities in marriage, 1:351–353 Roman, 1:57–58 as Roman Catholic religious, 1:253–255 and sacred script, 2:256–257 as saints, 1:157, 241, 255–259 as scribes, 1:27, 81 seclusion of, 2:69, 90 sexual abuse, 2:155 as shamans, 1:73–77, 2:258–259, 363 and Shinto, 2:274 Sikh, 2:291, 304 Spartan, 1:57 as spiritualist mediums, 2:350–351 and spirituality, 2:229–231, 341 spiritual power of, 1:24, 2:24 as spoils of war, 1:31 as stigmatics, 1:265–266 subjugation of, 1:229, 2:64, 297 subordination of, 1:158, 197–198, 260, 296, 364–365, 2:272–275

subordination of (Vedic), 1:377–378 as teachers, 1:128, 142, 194–195, 243, 272, 364, 2:52–53, 72, 92, 96, 97–98, 133, 201 and textile production, 2:10–11, 14 as theologians, 1:187, 205, 249, 2:146 three classifications, 1:380 voting rights for, 1:196, 234, 2:133– 134, 161 as warriors, 2:41–42 and Wicca, 2:235–236 as widows, 1:50–51, 215–216, 267–271 as writers and poets, 1:81–82, 157, 170, 185, 188–189, 204–205, 222, 232, 276–279, 301, 316–320, 367, 380, 2:31, 100–101, 146, 156, 179, 201, 292–294, 339, 339–341, 360 and yoga, 2:363 See also Motherhood; Ovid (poet); Priestesses; Sappho (of Lesbos); Tahirih Women and Mothers for Peace, 2:159 Women and work, 2:211–214 in ancient Israel, 2:211–212 in the diaspora, 2:212–213 in modern Israel, 2:213–214 in the United States, 2:213 Women Engendering Peace, 2:159 Women for Palestine, 2:83 Women in Baha’i scriptures, 1:95–96 Women in Black (WiB), 2:159, 2:187 Women in early Buddhism, 1:150–152 Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE), 1:271–273 Women in prehistoric religious practices, 2:265–268 Women in the Holocaust (seminar), 2:154 Women in the Reformation, 1:273–276 Women of color, 1:74, 163–166, 186, 2:306, 358–363 Women of Nazareth, 1:227 Women religious in Africa, 1:177 Anglican/Episcopalian, 1:166–167 and chastity, 1:175–176 Christian, 1:176 interfaith organizations, 1:177 Roman Catholic, 1:225, 253–255 Women’s Buddhist networks, 1:152–154



Women’s changing roles, 1:296–298 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 1:185 Women’s circles, 1:153, 2:341 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 2:134, 135, 186 Women’s March, 2:311 Women’s Missionary Union (WMU), 1:248 Women’s Mosque of America, 1:211, 2:102 Women’s movements Jewish, 2:132–136 in the United States, 2:134 Women’s organizations, 2:102–104 Women’s shrines, 1:21, 23 Women’s Spirituality, 2:229. See also Spirituality Women’s Spirituality Program, 2:362 Women’s studies, 1:279, 2:153, 321 Women’s Studies in Religion program (Harvard), 1:196 Women’s suffrage. See Women, voting rights for Women’s temples, 1:123, 135, 145–147, 154 Women’s Union Missionary Society of America, 1:226 Women Surviving Holocaust (meeting), 2:154 Women Wage Peace, 2:187, 187 Women warriors (Native American), 2:41–42 Women writers in early and medieval Christianity, 1:276–279 Wonder Woman, 1:27, 33, 34, 35 Woodcraft movement, 2:217 Woodhull, Victoria, 2:351 Woods, Grace Winona, 1:226 Woosley, Louisa, 1:224 World Council of Churches, 1:246 World Soul, 1:264 World’s Parliament of Religions, 1:103 Worship services, embodied, 1:3 Worth, Irene, 2:190 Wotanism, 2:220 Wounded Knee massacre at, 2:20 occupation and protest, 2:5, 361

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Wovoka, 2:20, 239 Writers (women) Baha’i, 1:92 Christian, 1:188–189, 199–200, 258, 276–279 Confucian, 1:283–284 Ecofeminist, 2:321 Feminist, 1:249, 2:339 Goddess spirituality, 2:327–328, 341 Greek, 1:71–73 Jewish, 2:178, 193 Mesopotamian, 1:81–83 Muslim, 2:55, 77, 100, 101, 102 Pagan, 2:193, 217, 235 Sikh, 2:293 songwriters, 1:171, 2:179, 338 Writers and poets, ancient Mesopotamia, 1:81–83 Wu (dancing women), 2:258 Wurushemu, 1:78, 80 Wu Wei and the Feminine, 1:299, 310–312 Xicanistas, 2:360, 362 Xi Wangmu, 1:74 Xochiquetzal, 2:35 Xu (Empress), 1:283, 289 Xue Tao, 1:301 Yahweh (YHWH), 2:144, 152, 153, 344 Yajurveda, 1:378 Yaksis, 1:383, 384, 2:107 Yakshinis, 1:114 Yamatohime, 2:284 Yemoja, 1:4, 23, 24 Yeshivat Maharat, 2:184, 2:196 Yeshivat Mechon Hadar, 2:122 Yiddish Public Theater (NY), 2:189 Yiguando, 1:126 Yin and yang, 1:285, 288, 292, 294, 299, 300, 303, 311–312 Yoga, 1:116, 143, 2:305, 333, 334, 335, 346, 363–365 Kundalini, 1:377 schools of, 2:364 tantric, 2:354, 363, 383 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 2:365 Yoginis, 1:138, 357, 374, 377, 378, 383–385, 2:363

465

466

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Yom Kippur, 2:138 Yoni, 1:337, 357 Yoruba, 1:163, 2:359 drumming, 2:318 indigenous religions, 1:20–21, 23–25, 2:361, 362 Gelede masquerade, 1:7, 13 Orisha worship, 1:3, 4, 23 spirituality, 1:3 Yoruba diaspora, 1:23 Yoruba Temple (Harlem), 1:6 Young, Brigham, 1:233 Young Buddhist Association of Thailand, 1:128 Young Women organization (Mormon church), 1:234–235 Young Women’s Christian Association, 1:187 Yousafzai, Malala, 2:52, 52, 55, 83 Yule (winter solstice), 2:232–233, 236, 329 Yu Xuanji, 1:301 Zailism, 1:126 Zan Center of Syracuse, 1:105 Zapotecs, 2:34 Zar religion, 1:20

Zaynab bint Jahsh, 2:88 Zaynab bint Khuzaymah, 2:88 Zell, Katharina Schütz, 1:274, 275, 276 Zell, Matthäus, 1:275 Zelophehad, daughters of, 2:150 Zen Buddhism, 1:103, 104–105, 148–149, 154–156, 2:335 iconography of, 2:361 Japanese, 1:154–156 Zen Center of Los Angeles, 1:105 Zen Peacemaker Order, 1:113 Zen Studies Society, 1:105 Zero Hour (sculpture), 1:9 Zevi, Shabbetai, 2:161, 201, 209 Zhengyi school, 1:302, 310 Zion Canyon, 2:33 Zionism, 2:126, 135, 162, 187 Zi Shoushen, 1:301 Zobayda (Princess), 2:96 Zodiac, 2:312 Zohar, 2:167, 169, 171 Zornberg, Aviva, 2:179 Zoroastrian followers of Sufism, 2:101 Zschech, Darlene, 1:171 Zu Shu, 1:301 Zwingli, Huldrych, 1:275

Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions

Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions Faith and Culture across History Volume 2: Indigenous Religions to Spirituality

SUSAN DE-GAIA, EDITOR

Copyright © 2019 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: De-Gaia, Susan J., editor. Title: Encyclopedia of women in world religions : faith and culture across history / Susan de-Gaia, editor. Description: Santa Barbara, California : ABC-CLIO, [2019] | Includes    bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018025824 (print) | LCCN 2018039892 (ebook) | ISBN    9781440848506 (eBook) | ISBN 9781440848490 (set : alk. paper) | ISBN    9781440848513 (volume 1) | ISBN 9781440848520 (volume 2) Subjects:  LCSH: Women and religion—History. Classification: LCC BL458 (ebook) | LCC BL458 .W5835 2019 (print) | DDC    200.82—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025824 ISBN: 978-1-4408-4849-0 (set) 978-1-4408-4851-3 (vol. 1) 978-1-4408-4852-0 (vol. 2) 978-1-4408-4850-6 (ebook) 23 22 21 20 19  1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. ABC-CLIO An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 www.abc-clio.com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

Alphabetical List of Entries

xvii

Acknowledgmentsxxiii Introductionxxv Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

xxxvii

Volume 1: African Religions to Indigenous Religions

1

African Religions

1

Introduction1 African Religions-in-Diaspora

3

Art in Africa

7

Body Art

10

Candomblé11 Female Genital Mutilation

14

Life-Cycle Ceremonies

16

Priestesses and Oracular Women

17

Rastafari22 Yoruba Religion

23

Ancient Religions

27

Introduction27 Athena29 Delphic Oracle

32

Diana33 Egyptian Religion

35

Eleusinian Mysteries

39

vi Contents

Gaia42 Gorgon Medusa

43

Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of

48

Homosexuality52 Hypatia (ca. 351–ca. 415 CE)

53

Inanna55 Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions

56

Mesopotamian Religion

58

Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess 62 ˘ Ninlil63 Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon

65

Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece

67

Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions

68

Sappho (ca. 630–ca. 570 BCE)

71

Shamans in East Asia

73

Sibyls77 Sun Goddess

78

Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia

81

Baha’i85 Introduction85 Divine Feminine

87

Education88 Gender Roles

91

Tahirih93 Women in Baha’i Scriptures

95

Buddhism97 Introduction97 Abortion100



Contents

Bodhisattvas101 Buddhism in the United States

103

Dance106 Dance of Tara

108

Engaged Buddhism

111

Female Divinities

114

Feminine Virtues

118

Funeral Practices

120

Gender Roles

122

Guan Yin

125

Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism

127

Mahayana129 Nuns, Theravada

132

Ordination133 Pajapati135 Prajnaparamita136 Sacred Texts on Women

138

So¯ka Gakkai

140

Tantra142 Tara144 Tea Ceremony

148

Therigatha149 Women in Early Buddhism

150

Women’s Buddhist Networks

152

Zen154 Christianity157 Introduction157 Abbesses160 Abortion161

vii

viii Contents

African American Women

163

Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious

166

Apocrypha168 Art, Modern and Contemporary

170

Charity173 Chastity175 Christianity in Africa

176

Christianity in Europe

178

Christianity in Latin America

180

Christianity in the United States

184

Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1430)

188

Clothing189 Education193 “The Fall”

197

Founders of Christian Denominations

199

Fundamentalism201 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)

204

Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity

206

Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women

208

Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416)

211

Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood

213

Mary Magdalene (ca. first century CE)

216

Middle Ages

221

Ministers223 Missionaries225 Monastic Life

227

Monasticism, Contemporary Women

230

Monasticism, Medieval Women

231

Mormonism233



Contents

Mother of God

235

Mystics239 Orthodox Christianity

242

Pilgrimage243 Polygamy245 Protestant Denominations

247

Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History

250

Roman Catholic Women Religious

253

Saints255 Sex and Gender

260

Sophia263 Stigmatics265 Widowhood267 Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE)

271

Women in the Reformation

273

Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity

276

Confucianism281 Introduction281 Books for Women

282

Classical Confucianism

284

Confucian Revivalism

286

Cult of Female Chastity

289

Feminine Virtues

290

Filial Piety

291

Motherhood294 Women’s Changing Roles

296

Daoism299 Introduction299

ix

x Contents

Daoism in China

300

Goddesses303 Healers305 Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination

307

Wu Wei and the Feminine

310

Hinduism313 Introduction313 Aditi315 Bhakti316 Caste321 Dance324 Devadasis326 Devi328 Draupadi329 Durga and Kali

331

Festivals335 Fundamentalism338 Gurus and Saints

340

Household Shrines

343

Ideals of Womanhood

345

Lakshmi348 Marriage350 Matriliny353 Pilgrimage356 Prakriti358 Radha and Gopi Girls

360

Renunciation361 Sacred Texts on Women

363

Saraswati369



Contents

Sati370 Shakti372 Stage-of-Life Rituals

374

Tantra377 Vedic Hinduism

378

Yoginis383 General Bibliography

387

About the Editor and Contributors

395

Index 411 Volume 2: Indigenous Religions to Spirituality

1

Indigenous Religions

1

Introduction1 Activism (Native American)

3

Ancestors (Native American)

6

Arts (Native American)

9

Ceremonies (Native American)

11

Clothing (Native American)

14

Creation Stories (Native American)

15

Kinship (Native American)

18

Marriage and Social Status (Native American)

21

Matriarchies23 Medicine Women (Native American)

27

Nature (Native American)

30

Sacred Place (Native American)

31

Sacred Spirits (Native American)

34

Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures

36

Shamans in Korea

39

Women Warriors (Native American)

41

xi

xii Contents

Islam43 Introduction43 Coverings45 Diaspora48 Druze Religion

49

Education52 Fatima (605/615–632 CE)

56

Female Genital Mutilation

57

Feminism59 Hagar62 Hawwa63 Honor65 Ideal Woman

67

Islam in Africa

68

Islam in Europe

72

Islam in the Middle East

74

Islam in the United States

76

Marriage and Divorce

79

Maryam81 Peacemaking82 Pilgrimage84 Polygamy86 Prophet’s Wives

88

Purdah89 Qur’an and Hadith

91

Reform93 Saints, Sufi

95

Shari‘a97 Sufism99 Women’s Organizations

102



Contents

Jainism105 Introduction105 Female Deities

106

Jina107 Laywomen108 Monastics and Nuns

109

Ritual112 Judaism115 Introduction115 American Denominations: 1850 to Present

117

Ancient Judaism

122

Art124 Bat Mitzvah

128

Education130 Feminist and Women’s Movements

132

Festivals and Holy Days

137

Food141 Goddesses142 Hasidism147 Hebrew Bible

150

Holocaust153 Israel157 Judaism in Europe

160

Judaism in the United States

163

Kabbalah167 Lilith171 Marriage and Divorce

175

Midrash177 Mitzvah180

xiii

xiv Contents

Modern and Contemporary Judaism

182

Peacemaking185 Performance188 Priestesses192 Rabbis 194 Rosh Hodesh

197

Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE)

199

Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms

200

Sex and Gender

203

Shabbat (Sabbath)

206

Synagogue208 Women and Work

211

Paganism215 Introduction215 Druidry217 Eco-Paganism218 Heathenry220 Magic222 Paganism224 Priestesses and Elders

226

Reconstructionist Paganism

227

Ritual229 Seasonal Festivals

231

Wicca234 Prehistoric Religions

239

Introduction239 Burials243 Crete, Religion and Culture

245

Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe

249



Contents

Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures

251

Neolithic Female Figures

253

Sacred Script

256

Shamanism257 Upper Paleolithic Female Figures

260

Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices

265

Shinto269 Introduction269 Amaterasu Omikami

270

Feminine Virtues

272

Filial Piety

273

Founders of New Religious Movements

275

Kami277 Kinship and Marriage

278

Priestesses281 Shamans and Ritualists

283

Shinto Weddings

286

State Shinto

287

Tenrikyo¯289 Sikhism291 Introduction 291 Art and Performance

292

Feminist Issues in Sikhism

295

Guru Period

297

Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles

298

Sikh Scriptures and Women

303

Spirituality 305 Introduction 305

xv

xvi Contents

Art and Performance

308

Astrology 312 Deep Ecology

313

Divination 316 Drumming 318 Ecofeminism 321 Goddess Spirituality

326

Green Funerals

330

Healers 331 Kirtan 334 Meditation 335 Pilgrimage, Goddess

337

Radical Women’s Spirituality

338

Sex and Gender

343

Sheela na gigs

347

Spiritualism 350 Spirituality and Gender in Social Context

352

Syncretism 356 Women of Color

358

Yoga 363 General Bibliography

367

About the Editor and Contributors

375

Index 391

Alphabetical List of Entries

Abbesses (Christianity)

Astrology (Spirituality)

Abortion (Buddhism)

Athena (Ancient Religions)

Abortion (Christianity)

Bat Mitzvah (Judaism)

Activism (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Bhakti (Hinduism)

Aditi (Hinduism) African American Women (Christianity) African Religions-in-Diaspora (African Religions) Amaterasu Omikami (Shinto) American Denominations 1850 to Present (Judaism)

Bodhisattvas (Buddhism) Body Art (African Religions) Books for Women (Confucianism) Buddhism in the United States (Buddhism) Burials (Prehistoric Religions) Candomblé (African Religions) Caste (Hinduism)

Ancestors (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Ceremonies (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Ancient Judaism (Judaism)

Charity (Christianity)

Anglican/Episcopalian Women Religious (Christianity)

Chastity (Christianity)

Apocrypha (Christianity) Art (Judaism) Art and Performance (Spirituality) Art and Performance (Sikhism) Art in Africa (African Religions) Art, Modern and Contemporary (Christianity) Arts (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Christianity in Africa (Christianity) Christianity in Europe (Christianity) Christianity in Latin America (Christianity) Christianity in the United States (Christianity) Christine de Pizan (Christianity) Classical Confucianism (Confucianism) Clothing (Christianity)

xviii

Alphabetical List of Entries

Clothing (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Confucian Revivalism (Confucianism) Coverings (Islam) Creation Stories (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Crete, Religion and Culture (Prehistoric Religions) Cult of Female Chastity (Confucianism) Dance (Buddhism) Dance (Hinduism)

Education (Christianity) Education (Islam) Education (Judaism) Egyptian Religion (Ancient Religions) Eleusinian Mysteries (Ancient Religions) Engaged Buddhism (Buddhism) “The Fall” (Christianity) Fatima (Islam) Female Deities (Jainism) Female Divinities (Buddhism)

Dance of Tara (Buddhism)

Female Genital Mutilation (African Religions)

Daoism in China (Daoism)

Female Genital Mutilation (Islam)

Deep Ecology (Spirituality)

Feminine Virtues (Buddhism)

Delphic Oracle (Ancient Religions)

Feminine Virtues (Confucianism)

Devadasis (Hinduism)

Feminine Virtues (Shinto)

Devi (Hinduism)

Feminism (Islam)

Diana (Ancient Religions)

Feminist and Women’s Movements (Judaism)

Diaspora (Islam) Divination (Spirituality) Divine Feminine (Baha’i) Draupadi (Hinduism) Druidry (Paganism) Drumming (Spirituality) Druze Religion (Islam) Durga and Kali (Hinduism) Ecofeminism (Spirituality)

Feminist Issues in Sikhism (Sikhism) Festivals (Hinduism) Festivals and Holy Days (Judaism) Filial Piety (Confucianism) Filial Piety (Shinto) Food (Judaism) Founders of Christian Denominations (Christianity)

Eco-Paganism (Paganism)

Founders of New Religious Movements (Shinto)

Education (Baha’i)

Fundamentalism (Christianity)



Alphabetical List of Entries

Fundamentalism (Hinduism)

Honor (Islam)

Funeral Practices (Buddhism)

Household Shrines (Hinduism)

Gaia (Ancient Religions)

Hypatia (Ancient Religions)

Gender Roles (Baha’i)

Ideal Woman (Islam)

Gender Roles (Buddhism)

Ideals of Womanhood (Hinduism)

Gimbutas, Marija, and the Religions of Old Europe (Prehistoric Religions)

Inanna (Ancient Religions)

Goddess Spirituality (Spirituality) Goddesses (Daoism) Goddesses (Judaism) Gorgon Medusa (Ancient Religions) Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of (Ancient Religions) Green Funerals (Spirituality) Guan Yin (Buddhism)

Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women (Christianity) Islam in Africa (Islam) Islam in Europe (Islam) Islam in the Middle East (Islam) Islam in the United States (Islam) Israel (Judaism) Jina (Jainism)

Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures (Prehistoric Religions)

Judaism in Europe (Judaism)

Guru Period (Sikhism)

Judaism in the United States (Judaism)

Gurus and Saints (Hinduism) Hagar (Islam) Hasidism (Judaism) Hawwa (Islam)

Julian of Norwich (Christianity) Kabbalah (Judaism) Kami (Shinto)

Healers (Daoism)

Kinship (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Healers (Spirituality)

Kinship and Marriage (Shinto)

Heathenry (Paganism)

Kirtan (Spirituality)

Hebrew Bible (Judaism)

Lakshmi (Hinduism)

Hildegard of Bingen (Christianity)

Laywomen (Jainism)

Holocaust (Judaism) Homosexuality (Ancient Religions)

Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism (Buddhism)

Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity (Christianity)

Life-Cycle Ceremonies (African Religions)

xix

xx

Alphabetical List of Entries

Lilith (Judaism) Magic (Paganism) Mahayana (Buddhism) Marriage (Hinduism) Marriage and Divorce (Islam) Marriage and Divorce (Judaism) Marriage and Social Status (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Marriage, Ancient Greek and Roman Religions (Ancient Religions) Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood (Christianity) Mary Magdalene (Christianity) Maryam (Islam) Matriarchies (Indigenous Religions) Matriliny (Hinduism) Medicine Women (Native American) (Indigenous Religions)

Monasticism, Medieval Women (Christianity) Monastics and Nuns (Jainism) Mormonism (Christianity) Mother of God (Christianity) Motherhood (Confucianism) Mystics (Christianity) Nature (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Neolithic Female Figures (Prehistoric Religions) Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess ˘ (Ancient Religions) Ninlil (Ancient Religions) Nuns, Theravada (Buddhism) Ordination (Buddhism) Orthodox Christianity (Christianity) Paganism (Paganism)

Meditation (Spirituality)

Pajapati (Buddhism)

Mesopotamian Religion (Ancient Religions)

Peacemaking (Islam)

Middle Ages (Christianity) Midrash (Judaism) Ministers (Christianity) Missionaries (Christianity) Mitzvah (Judaism) Modern and Contemporary Judaism (Judaism) Monastic Life (Christianity) Monasticism, Contemporary Women (Christianity)

Peacemaking (Judaism) Performance (Judaism) Pilgrimage (Christianity) Pilgrimage (Hinduism) Pilgrimage (Islam) Pilgrimage, Goddess (Spirituality) Polygamy (Christianity) Polygamy (Islam) Prajnaparamita (Buddhism) Prakriti (Hinduism)



Alphabetical List of Entries

Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon (Ancient Religions)

Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles (Sikhism)

Priestesses (Judaism)

Roman Catholic Women Religious (Christianity)

Priestesses and Oracular Women (African Religions) Priestesses and Elders (Paganism) Priestesses (Shinto) Priestesses and Their Staff in Ancient Greece (Ancient Religions) Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination (Daoism)

Rosh Hodesh (Judaism) Sacred Place (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Sacred Script (Prehistoric Religions) Sacred Spirits (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Sacred Texts on Women (Buddhism)

Prophet’s Wives (Islam)

Sacred Texts on Women (Hinduism)

Protestant Denominations (Christianity)

Saints (Christianity)

Purdah (Islam) Qur’an and Hadith (Islam) Rabbis (Judaism) Radha and Gopi Girls (Hinduism)

Saints, Sufi (Islam) Salome Alexandra (Judaism) Sappho (Ancient Religions) Saraswati (Hinduism) Sati (Hinduism)

Radical Women’s Spirituality (Spirituality)

Seasonal Festivals (Paganism)

Rastafari (African Religions)

Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms (Judaism)

Reconstructionist Paganism (Paganism)

Sex and Gender (Christianity)

Reform (Islam) Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History (Christianity) Religious Leadership, Ancient Roman Religions (Ancient Religions) Renunciation (Hinduism) Ritual (Jainism) Ritual (Paganism)

Sex and Gender (Judaism) Sex and Gender (Spirituality) Shabbat (Sabbath) (Judaism) Shakti (Hinduism) Shamanism (Prehistoric Religions) Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures (Indigenous Religions) Shamans and Ritualists (Shinto)

xxi

xxii

Alphabetical List of Entries

Shamans in East Asia (Ancient Religions) Shamans in Korea (Indigenous Religions) Shari‘a (Islam) Sheela na gigs (Spirituality) Shinto Weddings (Shinto) Sibyls (Ancient Religions) Sikh Scriptures and Women (Sikhism) Soka Gakkai (Buddhism) Sophia (Christianity) Spiritualism (Spirituality) Spirituality and Gender in Social Context (Spirituality) Stage-of-Life Rituals (Hinduism) State Shinto (Shinto) Stigmatics (Christianity) Sufism (Islam) Sun Goddess (Ancient Religions) Synagogue (Judaism) Syncretism (Spirituality) Tahirih (Baha’i) Tantra (Buddhism) Tantra (Hinduism) Tara (Buddhism) Tea Ceremony (Buddhism) Tenrikyo¯ (Shinto) Therigata (Buddhism) Upper Paleolithic Female Figures (Prehistoric Religions)

Vedic Hinduism (Hinduism) Wicca (Paganism) Widowhood (Christianity) Women and Work (Judaism) Women in Baha’i Scriptures (Baha’i) Women in Early Buddhism (Buddhism) Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE) (Christianity) Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices (Prehistoric Religions) Women in the Reformation (Christianity) Women of Color (Spirituality) Women Warriors (Native American) (Indigenous Religions) Women Writers in Early and Medieval Christianity (Christianity) Women’s Buddhist Networks (Buddhism) Women’s Changing Roles (Confucianism) Women’s Organizations (Islam) Writers and Poets, Ancient Mesopotamia (Ancient Religions) Wu Wei and the Feminine (Daoism) Yoga (Spirituality) Yoginis (Hinduism) Yoruba Religion (African Religions) Zen (Buddhism)

Acknowledgments

Many people helped make this project possible. I am especially grateful to Charlene Spretnak who helped launch the project by introducing me to potential contributors. It was through Charlene that I met Miriam Robbins Dexter, to whom I will be forever grateful; she has selflessly mentored, encouraged, and supported me through the entire production. Many contributors dedicated time and effort to review and sometimes edit my work, including Carol P. Christ, Miranda Shaw, Miriam Robbins Dexter, Lynn Gottlieb, Kathrine Clark Walter, Arisika Razak, Kathryn LaFevers Evans Three Eagles, Riane Eisler, Amanda Haste, and Rachel York-Bridgers. Harald Haarmann compiled the timeline. Joan Marler provided additional support. Numerous others, too many to be listed here, also contributed to the completion of this work. I am deeply grateful to each of them. I wish to remember my teachers at Ventura College and my professors at the University of California Santa Barbara (especially John P. Sullivan) and the University of Southern California (Sheila Briggs and Robert Ellwood). My education also came through life lessons, conversations, and the support of fellow students, colleagues, and fellow writers, with special thanks to Karen Harrison, Amada Irma Perez, Ruth Handy, and Mar Preston. I have also learned from the many conversations I have had over the years with Astrid Potter. For their support and encouragement, I am grateful to friends, family, and colleagues. Foremost among these is my partner, Frank Manning, who generously provided material support without which this project would not have been possible. Thank you, my love.

Introduction

Women are creators and sustainers of culture. Across the span of human history, women have participated in world-building and life-sustaining cultural creativity. Religion is an important area where they have made enormous contributions. Learning about women’s faith practice, creativity, and experience in this area is educational for those in many fields of study. As one half of the human species, in some ways women represent all of humanity. It is a human fact, for example, and not just a fact about one sex, that all humans are mortal. While women’s roles in preparing the dead for burial may differ in some cultures from those of men, the reality and experience of death exists for all humans. Thus, knowledge of women in religion brings us closer to a full knowledge of humanity. Contemporary scholars recognize that a significant number of women’s voices have been suppressed and their lives made invisible by writers of history. The fact is, there is no need for a “men in world religions” encyclopedia because men have been the subject of history en toto for so long that, for the most part, “history” is “men in history.” A project like this comes into existence, in general, to compensate for a lack of exposure of what women have done, how they lived, and who they were. There is currently an enormous amount yet to be made known about women, and Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture across History is intended to contribute to that effort. In recent years, the study of women in religion has grown, as indicated by new titles such as Women in New Religions (Laura Vance, 2013), Women in Christian Traditions (Rebecca Moore, 2015), Women in Japanese Traditions (Barbara Ambrose, 2015), and Women and Asian Religions (Zayn Kassam, 2017). This two-volume encyclopedia contributes to the field of women in religion with articles on a range of topics and is unique in offering nearly 300 reference entries divided into 17 topical sections with a focus on women in world religions. These volumes gather together information on the many ways women express and experience their faith. Designed to complement general studies of religion, this project provides topical and organizational similarities to other studies in religion for readers who have come to expect them. The entries do not offer general descriptions of the world’s religions. They focus instead on the specifics of women in religion. While, ultimately, it would be best to develop materials that integrate the study of women and religion into a general and inclusive religious studies, the development of such literature is currently in its infancy. Given what is available, a combined reading of this work with general sources on religion will provide a more accurate understanding of religion than one provided by general studies of religion alone.

xxvi Introduction

Religion

The entries display common threads across faiths and cultures as well as tremendous diversity in women’s religious and spiritual activities. Each woman is born into a society and culture, and it has often been the case throughout history that one’s religion is based entirely on where one is born; a woman born in India to a Hindu family would become a Hindu, and one born in India to a Muslim family would become a Muslim. Such a person’s life may be lived entirely within one set of beliefs and practices; yet, within her society, and even within her religion, there are many faiths. Hinduism may be the most diverse of any group of practices to be called a religion. Other religions, such as those of indigenous peoples, are also very diverse. In Africa, for example, indigenous traditions find unique expression in each of thousands of groups, many blending in unique ways with the major imported religions of Christianity and Islam. In the diaspora, African religions like Candomblé and Vodou thrive in the spaces between continents and cultures— blending, renewing, and becoming. In Christianity, there are currently thousands of Protestant denominations, with new ones starting up and some dying out. Another factor affecting religion is choice, rather than birth. In many regions of the world today, individuals are free to choose from among many nonexclusive religious or spiritual traditions. Thus, a woman in the United States can choose to become a Christian, a Buddhist, or a Hindu, for example, and can practice her faith with greater or lesser dedication. She may even choose a variety of beliefs and practices from different faith traditions to create a spirituality unique only to herself. Yoga, for example, can be practiced without connection to or knowledge of its roots in Hinduism, or it can become one’s chosen path to the spiritual goal of “yoking” or uniting with the Divine. The incredible diversity among and within religions raises the question, How can we call something by the same name, religion, when there are such vast differences in practice? Sociologist Thomas Luckmann (1967) claimed that there are as many religions as there are people, expressing the idea that each person engages with religion in her own unique way. For Luckmann, to be human is to transcend one’s biological nature; therefore, all humans, regardless of context, experience religion in some fashion. For the sociologist Émile Durkheim (1912), religion is a function of the social rather than the anthropological nature of human beings. He saw religion as a set of inherited narratives and ritualized practices by which groups build and maintain a cultural world, remain socially cohesive, and share an ethos that undergirds the society’s basic laws and governing principles. Given the diverse social, geographical, and historical contexts in which people exist today, either or both of these perspectives may be helpful. In societies where individualism is prevalent and people can choose from and blend an eclectic array of practices, each is free to develop a personalized center and world view, and in this sense, there will be as many religions as there are people. Yet, the individual, as unique as she is, always remains part of a culture and society with roots in the past and a shared ethos grounded to some extent in the religion or religions of that society, past and present.



Introduction

Seeing patterns of religious elements in diverse cultures—such as belief in divinity, moral guidance, rituals, and sacred stories—is what makes possible naming something religious despite each culture’s unique characteristics, contexts, and histories as well as each individual’s experience and response to her faith. A schema of three forms of religious expression developed by Joachim Wach (1944)—theoretical, sociological, and practical—was used as a starting point for this project. Without accepting Wach’s emphasis on a similar core at the base of all religious expression, the schema was useful. Its emphasis on action—what religions do and say and how they organize (as my former professor, Robert Ellwood, described Wach’s schema)—made for a good fit with the intended focus on women as active agents in religion. A few examples will show the three forms in their application to the project: Related to practical expression (referring to “practices”) are entries on women’s rituals, meditation, pilgrimage, art, and drumming. Related to sociological expression are articles on women’s ordination, priestesses, rabbis, shamans, and gurus. Related to theoretical expression are entries on myths, such as those of Lilith (Judaism) and the Fall (Christianity), and female divinities, which are important to many women today and found in many religions. Wach’s Three Forms of Religious Expression Theoretical: Doctrine and myth—What do they say? Practical: Worship, prayer, pilgrimage, meditation, ritual—What do they do? Sociological: Leadership, groups, relation to larger community—How do they organize? (Ellwood and McGraw 2016, 7)

Whatever schema one uses (and there are many to choose from), care must be taken when drawing comparisons. Bracketing is a tactic used by scholars of religion to support objectivity while observing and describing religions. To bracket means to set aside one’s beliefs and assumptions and open up to another’s cultural, emotional, and intellectual world. This tactic is similar to the way science-fiction fans temporarily suspend their beliefs about reality (or suspend their disbeliefs about the world in science fiction) while watching a film or reading a book in that genre. Bracketing helps scholars achieve objectivity to the extent that may be possible. But, there are some caveats. First is the fact that complete objectivity is not possible. The second caveat flows from the first; where one must choose a side, it is best to err on the side of the women whose lives we discuss. Is it possible, for example, or even desirable, to remain completely objective when reporting that millions of women throughout history have suffered under social systems that were supported by religious ideologies which enabled and ignored the abuse of powers in which those women had no share? It is not for us to decide if a partic­ ular practice or system is oppressive to other women, but where women have felt the need to criticize and reform their religions, those voices should be heard and their cries for justice answered. Relevant to the study of women in religion are the ways religion functions as a form of control that perpetuates the social order in which it exists. When scholars began to study religion as an objective science (“the scientific study of religion”),

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xxviii Introduction

the question arose as to what kind of thing religion, and culture for that matter, is. Not a physical entity like a mountain or table, religion is lived through its members. Societies, cultures, and religions preexist us (we are born into them) and perpetuate themselves through socialization and training. Although these systems do change, they depend on our cooperation and include ways of gaining it. Peter Berger (1969) developed a way of looking at religion as functional support for cultural mores and rules of conduct. Though social control is not all that religions do, the fact is undeniable when we consider concepts like “the will of God,” laws revealed in scripture, and creation stories proclaiming that all women must be ruled over by men because the first woman bit into a forbidden fruit. Berger’s explanation is that societies draw on concepts of sacred or divine entities, treat them as concrete realities, and place them at the head of social bodies, such as family, church, and government. This “sacred canopy” guides us like a candle in the night to fulfill the roles we were born to fill. Confucian ritual provides a good example of religion as social control (see the entries in Confucianism). This practice of reifying the Divine into an unquestionable authority over the social order is ingenious; since no one can prove that such entities do not exist, it is all the more difficult to challenge them. Some might say that, on this view, religion is a conservative tool that supports the status quo. They would not be wrong, and many women have left organized religions for this very reason. However, others would argue that religions have a liberating function, and they also would not be wrong; religions can be liberating, but this depends on the specific doctrines promoted and the flexibility of those who hold authority within the religious institution. Do they allow for change? How much change? How difficult is it to budge them, and how far will they go? Because of this function and the ways it plays out within each religion, an encyclopedia on women in religion would not be complete without a discussion of how religion supports the regulation of women’s lives and how some women have sought to change that. Therefore, entries on feminism and women’s movements in religion and spirituality, as well as fundamentalism and other conservative trends, have been included in many of the sections. Women

Wherever they reside, women are part of something larger than themselves; they act in relation to children, to men, to other women, to nature, and to the Divine. Because power is often held by men, and because women are often separated from their natal families and other women in patrilineal and patrilocal social structures, they are sometimes viewed as dependents who partake only of what others create. This project focuses on what women say and do to better see them as agents. It focuses on the issues that are important to women, on how women participate in and work to build, transform, and sometimes leave to create more inclusive faith traditions. The word women refers to more than the female sex and is grounded in society and culture. Societies mark gender in ways far beyond biological difference. When persons are divided according to sex and certain traits attached to each,



Introduction

individuals come to identify and be identified with those traits—a process called the social construction of gender. Over the centuries, societies have regulated what women can wear (such as skirts), what jobs they can take (such as nonleadership positions), and more based on their biological sex. In turn, these limitations have supported particular views of women (as people who wear skirts and are therefore unsuited to certain physical activities, as people who serve but do not lead). Sexism and misogyny have been, and often still are, a part of most religions. We see misogyny in early Christianity, for example, in the writings of Origen, who said that anything coming from the mouth of a woman is of little consequence; Augustine, who wrote that women are only good for procreation; and Tertullian, who said that woman is the devil’s gateway (see Ruether 1993). Similar views are seen in the texts of other religions, and in most cases, such comments are not merely rhetorical. They are used to justify restrictions on women’s lives, including their dress, work, comportment, education, legal capacity, and exclusion from positions of leadership and power. Rejecting all forms of sexism, I take as fact that biological differences do not have to mean differences in education, power, and intellect. It is important to understand that views which deem women as weaker vessels, as persons on whom education is a waste, or as incapable of responsible handling of power are social constructs with serious consequences for women’s lives, for the children who depend on them, and for the societies in which they live. Also of consequence are social limits placed on women according to class, caste, race, disability, sexual orientation, and more. Women do not constitute a singular category. These differences intersect with gender in its social construction and are used to justify forms of oppression, each with greater and lesser consequences for a woman’s ability to access material benefits, social status, freedom, and self-determination. At times, contributors to this work have been tempted to start with a general history of religion and then add women into the mix or to look for causes of women’s situations in what influential men have said and done. This is especially the case where men are or were the main literate ones, where their works were held in highest regard, and where their laws controlled what others, including women, could and could not do. However, it was deemed a better use of space to look at what women have accomplished rather than to detail what they were up against in gaining those accomplishments. Rather than focus on androcentric views and misogynist texts, we have taken as most important what women do and say, because to see women as capable of intent, action, and choice, even where their choices are limited, is to see them for who they are. The facts of the long history of abuses of women have not been ignored, but the chosen focus allows an emphasis on women’s voices, religious experiences, activities, leadership, contributions, and achievements as well as aspects of the traditions that are relevant to the female gender, such as female virtue and feminine images of the Divine. Women’s Issues in Religion

Many women embrace religion or spirituality, and many are adept in the creation and performance of liturgies, rituals, religiously inspired music, dance, song,

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poetry, prose, scriptural interpretation, and historical analysis. Some are great teachers, role models, and leaders. The lesser value that many societies have placed on women’s activities has challenged these women. Some of the ways women resist and rise up will be found in these pages. One especially contentious area where women actively work to gain ground is that of ordination. Many religious institutions have refused to officially recognize the superior insight, understanding, and spiritual advancement of these special women. Where they are refused ordination, spiritually adept women may be offered unofficial roles in which they contribute much to their communities but are denied the prestige and economic rewards of their male counterparts. Such are the shamans, the mystics, the female lay leaders, and, in some cases, the women canonized as saints long after their deaths. With education, which has increased over the past two centuries in most parts of the world, more women are able to get the training needed to prepare for official roles. Many have fought and continue to fight their exclusion from positions of authority as nuns, priests/priestesses, and other ranks within organized religions. Each section contains entries addressing women’s leadership roles. Another issue for women in religion is gendered language. Many of the world’s religions use masculine pronouns that appear to exclude women from the tradition’s history, stories, and liberating ideas. Women seek inclusion, and the use of gender-inclusive language helps make this possible. Beyond the question of ordination is the issue of what to call women should they be ordained. A feminine term many reject, for example, is priestess. Where churches refuse to update to more inclusive language, some women have created their own. See, for example, the entry “Priestesses” in the Judaism section. An especially contentious gendered-language issue is the exclusive use of male pronouns for the Divine in monotheistic religions. Women in Judaism and Christianity, especially, have struggled with this issue. In “Goddesses” (Judaism), Jill Hammer describes the Goddesses of ancient Israel, demonstrating that the Feminine Divine was not always excluded from Jewish tradition. She also relates some of the ways contemporary Jewish women are using feminine language—like God-She and Goddess—for the Divine. Women are also concerned with making the world a better place, and many have a special interest in caring for the natural world, educating children, ending war and poverty, and addressing sexism, racism, and other isms. A number of entries relate women’s involvement in this important aspect of women’s faith-in-action, including “Activism” (Indigenous Religions), “Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women” (Christianity),” “Peacemaking” (Islam and Judaism), “Education” (Baha’i, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), “African American Women” (Christianity), “Women of Color” (Spirituality), “Eco-Paganism” (Paganism), and “Ecofeminism” (Spirituality). When issues are of great importance to women and the changes they seek are withheld, some women do leave. The development of new religious or spiritual traditions in the modern era has been assisted by the exodus of many women from religious institutions. Carol P. Christ is an example of someone who left Christianity and contributed greatly to the development of theologies that address not only



Introduction

issues of gendered language but the gendering of the nature and attributes of the Divine. The Spirituality and Paganism sections cover new religions and spiritualties developed or codeveloped by women, some of whom left their natal traditions. History

This project is not only by women. Some of the contributors are men, and often the sources that contributors drew on in their research were written by men. In many societies, until as recently as the 19th century, most women were illiterate, and this is still true in some regions today. If a rare literate woman wanted to write, she was typically denied the privilege or had to write under a male pseudonym. This left the men of each time and place, limited to those of privilege, to record history. In those records, were women’s stories told, their experiences explained, their creativity and leadership written about? If we want to know what really happened to or by women in history, we have to ask tough questions, such as, Who wrote the existing history? What was their agenda? What was their social location, and what role did that play in their use of the evidence? When the historical evidence is clearly biased, we have to go back to the primary evidence and reinterpret it. Entries in this work that discuss women in history often draw on hard-won knowledge of women in prehistoric, ancient, medieval, and modern periods. This knowledge is hard won because it has had to be gleaned from scarce evidence and interpreted through an ardent process that involves first unlearning male-centric methods of receiving and interpreting the evidence and sometimes starting from scratch. Entries that look at women and religion in times long past, including entries on women in prehistory and ancient history (for example, entries in the Ancient Religions and Prehistoric Religions sections) may involve the application of recent methods over and against traditional methods and applications. One important example is the work of Marija Gimbutas, an archaeologist who combined the methods of archaeology with linguistics, ancient historical evidence, mythology, and folklore to gain what many see as a more accurate understanding of women and religion in prehistory. However, a number of traditional archaeologists, including, for example, Colin Renfrew, sought to discredit her work, and many who failed to even study it dismissed it out of hand (Spretnak 2012). Despite the backlash against her new approach to prehistory, aspects of Gimbutas’s theories continue to be proven correct, and in a lecture at The Oriental Institute (Renfrew 2017), Renfrew himself conceded that evidence has recently come to light that “magnificently vindicate[s]” Gimbutas’s important Kurgan hypothesis. Other methods for overcoming the many biased histories and interpretations written over the centuries were developed by feminist theologians. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, for example, developed a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion for reading, understanding, and interpreting historical evidence. She worked with artifacts beyond texts, such as the tools women used and the clothing they wore, to support more accurate readings of the texts of the earliest Christians and to gain a more thorough understanding of women’s lives, experiences, and contributions

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to early Christianity. Since historical texts were typically written by and for men, additional methods are especially important when searching for historical facts about women. Women and Religion in Contemporary Societies

In the contemporary period, there is vast change happening for women, with great educational opportunities, more female role models in public life, and more opportunities for religious expression than ever before. Women are actively and energetically engaging with religion for themselves, for other women, and for their communities. This shows a new pattern in religion, one of progress for women and, many would argue, for their communities, because the freer women are to contribute, the more the communities gain. This is true not only of women in majority religions, but in minority religions as well. This work offers many entries on women in minority religions, such as Baha’is, Wiccans, Sikhs, and Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries. Religious minorities are often misunderstood—despite the easy availability of interfaith dialogue, college courses that teach cultural competence, and popular and educational books for learning about these groups. Outside of Muslim-majority regions like the Middle East, Muslims are often seen as terrorists, and hate crimes are sometimes perpetrated against them. But there are vast differences between individuals and groups within Islam. Terrorists associated with Islam are limited to a few extremists, while nearly all Muslims have no association whatsoever with violence or extremism. Another group, Sikhs, are sometimes thought to be Muslims (and terrorists) based simply on similarities of dress. Wicca is another religion that is often maligned. Associations of Wicca with those accused of witchcraft during the Inquisition led some people to extreme views about them, such as the belief that witches sacrifice babies and cavort with the devil. Also, doctrinal differences between religions with similar background often have led one group to disrespect another and have even led to war. An important goal of this project is to increase knowledge and understanding to lead to greater tolerance, so that harm, whether intended or not, may be avoided. Language

Language is important, and how we use it may unconsciously perpetuate old prejudices. I have taken seriously the task of finding language that does not repeat old prejudices that, in addition to causing hurt and conflict when used, may also skew the facts. These include pagan with a small p; goddess with a small g; not capitalizing plural words for divinity, such as gods and goddesses; and the word cult. Goddess is foreign to those grounded in monotheism, where only male pronouns are used for the Divine, and God is understood, if not always acknowledged, to be male. Gods and Goddesses are also foreign to monotheists as well as foreign in the sense that they may refer to ancient religions. If, in fact, a religion has many deities, the plural Gods and Goddesses are not common nouns; they are names lumped



Introduction

together in single terms for ease of discussion. If God is a name and not a common noun when referring to any singular male deity of any monotheistic religion (as is often the case in discussions of religion), so are Goddess and Goddesses when referring to the female deities of polytheist religions. Failure to address this problem in language contributes to the colonization of polytheist religions by monotheism. Religions of the past constitute one of the most strenuously vilified areas. It was once thought that culture evolves in a way similar to biological evolution (a view still held by some) and that cultures of the past that have died out, like those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and those of so-called primitives, have been outgrown through evolution. Many of those cultures were polytheistic. Their pantheons included both male and female deities, and their beliefs often linked deities to nature or features and functions of the natural world. They are referred to as pagan, a term meant to be derogatory. But similar beliefs exist in indigenous traditions today and in other religions outside the dominant Western culture within which these prejudices took hold. It is essential to the purpose of learning to understand and empathize with others who are alive today that we do not carry old prejudices forward. The use of pagan with a small p is offensive due to the assumption embedded in its use that “our” religion has evolved and overcome so-called primitive features like multiple deities, female divinities, and nature spirits. Also, today there are groups that self-identify as Pagan. This has changed the meaning of the term and it is now associated with diverse contemporary faith groups that developed in the 19th and 20th centuries and which derive some of their beliefs and practices from ancient polytheistic religions. It is proper to refer to these groups as Pagan with a capital P (see the Paganism section). The term cult, while still commonly used by scholars in some fields, has been replaced in this work by more exact terms, such as religion, worship, and ritual. Cult, which is short for cultus (Latin), can be used for any religion in existence today, but this is uncommon. Instead, it is most commonly used in discussions of ancient religions, rituals, and worship practices, pointing to a possible bias in not naming ancient practices as religions. Another, and more important, reason for not using cult is that it may be taken as derogatory, especially where new religions or spiritualities, such as Wicca, Paganism, and Goddess Spirituality, see ancient religions as inherited traditions. Organization

Each of the entries is placed into one of the following 17 sections: African Religions Ancient Religions Baha’i Buddhism Christianity Confucianism Daoism Hinduism

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Indigenous Religions Islam Jainism Judaism Paganism Prehistoric Religions Shinto Sikhism Spirituality

Some sections are named for a specific religion (e.g., Baha'i, Confucianism, Hinduism, Jainism, Paganism). Other sections are named for a specific era (e.g., Ancient Religions, Prehistoric Religions) or region (e.g., African Religions). Another section, Indigenous Religions, covers a variety of indigenous spiritual practices. The final section, Spirituality, includes entries on contemporary or New Age spirituality as well as some broader topics where spirituality is taken to mean the spiritual aspect of religion in general. Each section includes a range of topics related to features seen in religions across cultures. Some of these are particular to women in the religion, and all focus primarily on women in religion rather than on religion more generally. There are entries that discuss women’s stage-of-life rituals, holidays and celebrations, art, dance, and performance in most sections. There are also entries on women’s roles and expectations in family, religious institutions, and education. See, for example, “Filial Piety” in Confucianism and “Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination” in Daoism. Some entries discuss material culture especially relevant for women, such as food, clothing, and household arts. Naming practices for this project evolved out of the need to simplify and make navigation easier. The word for the most important feature of every section and entry—women—is not used in section titles or most of the entry headwords. This is because to do so would create serious challenges for finding different topics, as everything would begin with women in . . . . Therefore, it should be kept in mind that all entries focus on both religion and women. Also, titles on similar topics may vary according to religion due to the different ways members of each religion speak of things. Contributors

Contributors to this encyclopedia bring a wide range of expertise that was recognized in terms of knowledge rather than office, such as academic rank. Openness to expertise outside of higher education is especially relevant in a field where experience, such as that of leadership in a religious organization, is an excellent teacher. Still, a large majority of our contributors work in academia, including as professors, assistant professors, professors emeriti, adjuncts, and well-prepared graduate students. Some are both academics and religious leaders. Religious leaders among our contributors include Wiccan priestesses, Jewish priestesses, rabbis, Christian ministers and lay leaders, a former nun, and a Native American



Introduction

shaman. There are also a variety of healers, ritualists, artists, performers, and museum directors. Each contributor brought expertise that was needed to provide rounded coverage of women in the world’s religions and that worked to ensure comprehensive coverage. Despite limitations of space, our goal was to cover diverse geographical and cultural contexts across historical periods. Some contributors, including Miriam Robbins Dexter, Harald Haarmann, Selena Crosson, Komal Agarwal, Nicol Nixon Augusté, N. K. Crown, D’vorah Grenn, John W. Fadden, and Sana Tayyen, also worked on the sidebars, which are included in most topical sections. More contributors than can be listed here also participated in a peer-review process in which entries by less experienced scholars were reviewed by those with a higher level of expertise. All the above tasks involved excellence of dedication, knowledge, and communication. It is with great pleasure and excitement that I present this work, Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture across History. Susan de-Gaia Further Reading Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday, 1969. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. Translated by Joseph W. Swain. London: Allen and Unwin, 1912. Ellwood, Robert S., and Barbara A. McGraw. Many Peoples, Many Faiths: Women and Men in the World Religions. 10th ed. New York: Routledge, 2016. Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan, 1967. Renfrew, Colin. “Marija Rediviva DNA and Indo-European Origins.” The Oriental Institute Lecture Series: Marija Gimbutas Memorial Lecture. November 8, 2017. https://www​ .youtube.com/watch?v=y5u7fls9CIs. Ruether, Rosemary R. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Spretnak, Charlene. “Anatomy of a Backlash: Concerning the Work of Marija Gimbutaas.” Journal of Archaeomythology 7 (2012). http://www.archaeomythology.org/wp-content​ /uploads/2012/07/Spretnak-Journal-7.pdf. Wach, Joachim. Sociology of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944.

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Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

Paleolithic Age (“Old Stone Age”)—beginning 2.5 my (million years) BP (before present) • Migrations of hominid species out of Africa (homo erectus, archaic homo sapiens, presence of modern homo sapiens in the Near East since ca. 170,000 BP); archaic homo sapiens develops into Neanderthals and others and spreads into Eurasia • Anatomically modern humans arrive in Southeast Asia ca. 70,000 years BP, in East Asia and Australia ca. 65,000 BP, in Europe and Siberia ca. 45,000 BP, in North America ca. 24,000 BP (Alaska) and ca. 12,000 BP (North American inland), in the Pacific (western part) ca. 3500 BP • Early manifestations of symbolic activity (scratchings of visual symbols on a stone plate from Blombos Cave, South Africa) ca. 77,000 BP

Upper Paleolithic (“Later Stone Age”)—ca. 45,000–12,000 BP • Cave paintings in southwestern France (Cosquer, Chauvet, Lascaux, Pech-Merle) and northern Spain (Altamira) between ca. 35,000 and ca. 18,000 BP • Mobiliary art (figurines) from Europe and Siberia (around Lake Baykal): the HohlensteinStadel lion/human hybrid (perhaps female), female figurines, traditionally called “Venus figurines,” such as the Swabian Eve, the Venus of Willendorf, the dancing Venus of the Galgenberg, the statuettes from Malta near Lake Baykal, from ca. 35,000 BP onward • Cave paintings in the Ural Mountains (Ignatievka) from ca. 14,000 BP • The emergence of shamanistic traditions in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas, with local developments such as Shinto in Japan and dreamtime animism in Australia

Mesolithic Age (“Middle Stone Age”)—ca. 12,000–10,000 BP • The earliest monumental temples, erected by hunter-gatherers, at Göbekli Tepe in eastern Turkey (engraving of a woman exposing her vulva in sacred display on a doorstep, most probably with an apotropaic function to ward off people who did not belong to the congregation) • Sanctuary at Lepenski Vir in the Danube Valley (with the characteristic feature of trapezoid structures)

Neolithic Age (“Younger Stone Age”)—ca. 8000–3500 BCE (before common era) • The beginnings of plant cultivation (independently in three regional centers at different times) and the spread of agriculture in independent movements: o Middle East and ancient Egypt

xxxviii Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

East Asia (rice production in China) American Southwest Çatalhöyük—oldest agrarian settlement in Anatolia (ca. 7500–5600 BCE) The origins of pottery making (ca. 7500 BCE) The emergence of early civilizations and the persistence of their cultural heritage in subsequent periods Old Europe (or Danube civilization)—ca. 5500–3500 BCE o metalworking, first writing, religious architecture, religion of a major female divinity, figurines in abstract style, egalitarian social structures, urbanization (with megacities in southern Ukraine and Moldova) ancient Aegean cultures o o

• • • •

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Copper Age (an extension of the Neolithic Age)—fifth and fourth millennia BCE Bronze Age—ca. 3500–1200 BCE • Ancient Egypt (beginning ca. 3300 BCE) o monumental architecture (pyramids, temples at Karnak), hieroglyphic writing, social hierarchy ancient Nubia • Mesopotamia (the oldest civilization being Sumer; beginning ca. 3200 BCE) o monumental architecture (ziggurats), urbanization, literacy (early Sumerian pictography, later cuneiform), social hierarchy Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian • Elamite civilization (ca. 3050–2700 BCE) major political center was Susa • Ancient Indus civilization (mature period ca. 2600–1800 BCE) centers in Harappa and Mohenjo-daro; egalitarian society • The emergence of Hinduism in India, with its origins in traditions of the Indus civilization and its further development under the influence of Indo-European (Aryan) culture that was transferred to India with the Aryan migrations or invasions around 1700 BCE • Ancient China (Shang, Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties)—ca. 1200 BCE–220 CE o Woodblock printing on paper (before 220 CE) Chinese civilization influencing regional cultures, such as Manchu, Tangut, Naxi, and others; Buddhism and writing spreading from China to Korea and Japan • Mycenaean city-states (ca. 1600–1200 BCE) • The proliferation of polytheism, with statuary depicting divinities with anthropomorphic and zoomorphic features (e.g., Egyptian Cat Goddess Bastet) • The establishment of trade networks in the Mediterranean (Mycenaeans, Phoenicians), the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea (merchants from Dilmun) • The beginnings of science in Babylonia and Egypt • The beginnings of alphabetic writing (Sinaitic) ■

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Iron Age—ca. 1200 BCE–ca. 400 CE • Pre-Columbian Americas (Olmec, Mayan, Aztec, Zapotec, Mixtec)—beginning ca. 1200 BCE o Urbanization, writing, social hierarchy



Timeline: Periodization and Developments in Religion

• Greek antiquity (ancient Greece, classical Greece; ca. eighth century–fourth century BCE)—the emergence of historiography, science, philosophy; polytheism with a marked preference for pre-Greek Goddesses (Athena, Hera, Hestia, Artemis) • Hellenistic age (since the era of Alexander the Great; starting in the latter half of the fourth century BCE) • The emergence of monotheistic religions: Judaism (sixth century BCE), Christianity (beginning of common era, CE), Islam (seventh century CE) • The emergence of Confucianism in China (sixth century BCE) • The emergence of Buddhism in India (fifth century BCE) and its spread into Southeast Asia, Central Asia, China, and Japan • Etruscan civilization (ca. 900–200 BCE)—The Etruscans mediated between the Greeks and Romans • Roman civilization and the romanization of pre-Roman populations in southern and western Europe (seventh century BCE–fourth century CE)

Middle Ages (early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages)—ca. 500 CE–15th century • Consolidation of Christianity in Europe; since the end of the fourth-century division into a western branch (Catholicism) and an eastern branch (Greek Orthodoxy, which later, in the 9th and 10th centuries, proliferates into Serbian and Russian Orthodoxy) • Islamic expansion (since the seventh century CE) and the split into Sunni and Shi’a Islam • The rise of Arabic science; the modern way of writing numbers originated from a collaboration of Indian and Arabic mathematicians in Baghdad from where it spread in the Islamic world; adoption of Indian-Arabic numbers by the Europeans during the era when Spain was under Moorish control (eighth century CE–1492) • Roman Catholic Inquisition (13th to 16th centuries) persecutes Jews, Muslims, and Christian sects deemed heretical, such as the 13th-century French Cathars for their veneration of Mary Magdalene • Exploration and conquest: Vikings (cross ocean to North America, ca. 10th century), Vasco da Gama (finds ocean route between Europe and Asia, 15th century), Columbus (finds ocean route between Europe and the Americas, seeks riches, spreads Christianity, and enslaves Native Americans, 15th–16th century)

Modern Era (since the latter half of the 15th century) • Rise of modern science (ca. 15th century), with developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology, and chemistry; religion-science conflicts (e.g., Galileo’s heliocentrism condemned by the Inquisition 1633; Descartes’s mechanistic philosophy supports destruction and pollution of natural world); and discoveries supporting religious/spiritual perspectives (e.g., quantum physics) • Invention of printing with movable letters (Johannes Gutenberg, ca. 1455), contributing to the Christian Reformation and development of Protestantism (16th century) • Colonialism by Christian and Muslim powers (throughout modern period) • Conquest and genocide of Native Americans (1540 through 20th century); Native American resistance and cultural recovery and renewal movements • 1590s–1680s: Large-scale witch hunts in France, Germany, England, and the United States (three-quarters are women) • 1600–1650: Nonconformist Puritans colonize North America

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• Transatlantic slave trade, slavery of Africans leading to spread and syncretism of African religions (16th to 19th centuries) • Holocaust; nationalist and social reform movements (19th to 20th centuries); secularism • Globalization: global economic and political movements; massive movement of people through global transportation (air, rail, and automobile travel); religious pluralism (coexistence and valuing of diverse religions) (20th to 21st centuries) • Digital technology (since 1980), leading to spread of secular and religious thought over Internet Harald Haarmann

Indigenous Religions

INTRODUCTION This section includes entries on the spiritual traditions of indigenous cultures. A number of challenges arise in the presentation of just a few brief articles on indigenous religions. The greatest of these is the number and diversity of Native tribal cultures. The material included in these entries was selected by each contributor. Some focus entirely on traditions of the preconquest era, while others include contemporary tribal life/spirituality. Some attempt a broad swath across tribal traditions, while others are more specific about the differences in how certain lifeways were/are practiced between tribes. Entries on indigenous religions of Africa have been placed in the section on African Religions. Some religion scholars include only illiterate peoples under the term indigen­ ous; that categorization is not used here. In the Americas, Native peoples have lost much of their cultural heritage, and many indigenous languages have been lost due to colonialism and conquest. In the United States and Canada in the 19th and 20th centuries, Native children were forcibly taken from their reservations and sent to Indian boarding schools for assimilation into the conquering culture and for the purpose of extinguishing Native languages. This practice failed to eradicate indigen­ ous cultures, however. Instead, Native peoples have resisted assimilation and have fought for their rights to retain, recover, and revive their traditions. One tribe in the United States, for example, sued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for the right to practice the religious use of peyote, a sacred plant medicine outlawed in the United States. At the beginning of the European conquest of the Americas, there were thousands of tribes and hundreds of languages among the indigenous population. To describe even a single feature in common between them is impossible given the short space allowed for these entries. However, there is one similarity shared by most, if not all, indigenous cultures—the unity of spirit and nature in the understanding of reality. Some of the entries here focus on seemingly mundane topics, like clothing or marriage and social status. For indigenous peoples, the infusion of all reality with spirit, and the understanding that all human action involves spiritual practice, means that everyday activities are connected to the religious. The making of clothing or preparation of food are not merely mundane activities. Taking plant material for a dress is an action involving the relationship between humans and the spirits of nature. The taking of animals for food involves many spiritual aspects, from preparation before the hunt to spiritual communication with the animal to gratitude and celebration after the animal has been taken. Likewise, interpersonal relations and societal organization are enacted in accord with the tribe’s understanding of a spirit-infused nature and the peoples’ place within it.

2 Introduction

For Native American tribes, there are numerous spirits and kinds of spirits. In “Ancestors,” Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) relates some of these from South and North America and explains several of the ways in which the ancestors are present for the living. These include, for example, the remains (bones) of ancestors, archetypal ancestral women embodied in living women, the presence of ancestors in dreams, and the spirits of ancestors who may be called upon for guidance. Three Eagles offers examples of each type and draws on one or two tribes within each of several regions of the Americas. On a related topic, Beata Anton discusses some of the powers and attributes of female spirit-beings for various Native American tribes in “Sacred Spirits.” Some examples are Corn Mother, associated with corn; Three Sisters, associated with corn, beans, and squash; and Mama Quilla or Mother Moon, associated with the precious metal silver. Dale Stover also mentions Corn Mother and other female spirits, such as White Buffalo Maiden, in “Kinship,” along with fascinating descriptions of Native American kinship with other-than-human persons as expressed in sacred story, ritual, and more. Topics that typically fall under the rubric of religious phenomena are discussed in a number of entries. These include “Nature,” “Sacred Place,” and “Creation Stories,” alluding to mythologies and cosmologies that delineate the place of humans among the creatures and in the larger spaces of cosmos and time. Nature, for Native peoples, is a specific place peopled with natural phenomena—plants, animals, people, stones, caves, and so on—rather than an abstraction. Yet, the peoples’ proximity and dependence on nature are not the only reasons for the perception of nature as sacred. In “Nature,” Three Eagles relates the understanding of women’s bodies as connected to natural cycles, such as the cycles of the moon, the importance of balancing nature in medicine, and the centrality of animals and animal spirits in various traditional practices, including shamanism. In “Sacred Place,” she speaks of the sacredness of place, cosmos, and time, and relates the importance of, and respect for, the feminine in the ways Native cultures understand particular features of the land. And in “Creation Stories,” Three Eagles relates some of the many ways the long span of Native human history in a single place or area has affected indigenous understandings of the earth as Creatrix, Mother, and home. In powerful and poetic prose, she writes, “Prehistoric Native American creation stories are fossilized in stone and earth, a permanent retelling of human and cosmic rebirth via the labyrinthine passage through the Great Mother—the passageway between the world of the dead and the world of the living” (“Creation Stories”). Additional entries on religious phenomena include “Arts” and “Ceremonies.” Also, in “Shamans in Korea” and “Shamanism in Eurasia,” specific religious practices in Asian indigenous cultures are explored. In “Matriarchies,” Barbara Alice Mann draws on recent scholarship that has ferreted out some of the ways that indigenous cultures honored, respected, and embodied women-centered being. Reconstructing this is a challenging task, given the colonization of indigenous peoples everywhere to varying extents. Mann’s discussion of matriarchal spiritualities engages with the customs of language and categorization imposed upon the traditions and lives, and even the ways by which we speak of, indigenous cultures. In the end, however, she writes, the “depredations of monotheistic raiding cultures and nonindigenous economic systems have, over



Activism (Native American)

the last millennium, certainly dented but, interestingly, not destroyed indigenous spirituality.” Finally, in “Activism,” Morgan Shipley discusses many of the causes and actions of Native American resistance and the significant roles of Native American women resisters, such as those involved in the recent protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota. General Bibliography—Indigenous Religions Albers, Patricia C., and Beatrice Medicine. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983. Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996/1982. Buchanan, Kimberly Moore. Apache Women Warriors. El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1986. Dugan, Kathleen M. “At the Beginning Was Woman: Women in Native American Religious Traditions.” In Religion and Women, edited by Arvind Sharma, ch. 1. Albany: State University of New York, 1993. Facio, Elisa, and Irene Lara. Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Gross, Rita M., “Tribal Religions: Aboriginal Australia.” In Women in World Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma, 37–58. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Jaffary, Nora E. Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Kelley, Jane Holden. Yaqui Women: Contemporary Life Histories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Kendall, Laurel. Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983. Lang, Sabine. Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Mihesuah, Devon Abbott. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Miller, Christine, and Patricia Chuckryk, eds. Women of the First Nations: Power, Wisdom, and Strength. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1996. Peters, Virginia Bergman. Women of the Earth Lodges: Tribal Life on the Plains. North Haven, CT: Archon Books, 1995. Powers, Marla N. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. St. Pierre, Mark. Walking in the Sacred Manner: Healers, Dreamers, and Pipe Carriers— Medicine Women of the Plains. New York: Touchstone, 1995. Stockel, Henrietta H. Women of the Apache Nation: Voices of Truth. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991.

A C T I V I S M ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Since the colonization of the Americas by European settlers, Native American women have found themselves trapped between two competing worlds. Drawing from matriarchal spiritual beliefs that bind indigenous people to the land (often

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Activism (Native American)

positioned as Mother Earth), Native American women traditionally assume vital roles within individual households and broader tribal communities, a reality challenged directly by a history marked by colonization, violent expulsion, and forced assimilation vis-à-vis education. Within this context, in which “good Natives”— like Pocahontas, Sacagawea, or Mary Musgrove—are those who work with and assimilate to the demands and expectations of European settlers, national narratives reduce indigenous communities to the position of vanishing Americans, with Native American women’s historical significance, spiritual orientations, and contemporary contingencies most indicative of existing as “invisible” persons. Yet, despite systematic attempts to erase the context and practice of indigenous sovereignty through the violence of poverty, rape, and abuse perpetuated against indigenous cultures, Native Americans have endured by maintaining their voice, often turning to inspirational women leaders who work to maintain both the coherency of indigenous history and the vitality of spiritual ideals that affirm the interconnectedness and mutual beneficence of all things. The European colonization of Native peoples operates through a mythology that intends to legitimate American white dominance through the lens of violence as well as the widespread appropriation of Native American culture by non-Native peoples. From the 1880s to the 1980s, state-sanctioned boarding schools were forced on indigenous communities as a means to compel Native Americans to abandon their identities and cultures. Native American children were immersed in Euro-American culture through lessons predicated on a patriarchic and ethnocentric perspective, which included bans on speaking Native languages, the forced application of European names as a mechanism to locate the “civilized” and “Christianized” versus the “savage,” and widespread (and ignored) abuses that ranged from sexual assault to forced manual labor and physical punishment. This reality of systemic exclusion and violence marks the experience of indigenous women in the United States. Subject to racist reproductive policies that included both forced sterilization and radical (and deadly) medical experimentation, Native women are 2.5 times more likely than any other women in the United States to experience rape, and, on certain reservations, Native women experience a murder rate 10 times that of the general American populace. As a consequence of the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish, indigenous communities in the United States are prohibited under federal law from arresting and prosecuting non-Natives who commit crimes on indigenous land (reservations). Stripped of rights and relegated to bounded spaces often maintained through poverty and substance abuse, Native American women find themselves vulnerable to exploitation and lacking the social capital to fight back. Bound by a centuries-old legacy of ethnocentrism, marginalized from legal and cultural protection, and disempowered by a broader rape culture that reverses accountability to locate blame within the female body, indigenous women, often drawing from a spiritual ethos of harmony, balance, and responsibility that manifests in nonpatriarchal egalitarian societies, have, in the very face of their subjugation, empowered themselves tribally, socially, and nationally. Based largely on



Activism (Native American)

Native American woman gives a clenched-fist salute during the American Indian Movement’s occupation and protest at Wounded Knee in 1973. Native American women are active in environmental and social justice movements, as seen here, and again during the 2016–2017 occupation and protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

indigenous spiritualities that connect individual sovereignty to communal vitality, Native women look at the world—and others—not as objects of conquest but as the constituting elements of a sacred fabric that connects all life, natural and human. In this way, sovereignty shifts from avenues of power to an inherent interconnection with earth, elevating our responsibility to the environment and one another as the ultimate sacred imperative. Musician Pura Fé (b. 1959), for instance, uses her concerts as an opportunity to educate attendees, interspersing her show with slideshows highlighting the reality of missing and murdered indigenous women and the correlation between human activities and climate change. Singer and First Nations activist Ta’Kaiya Blaney (b. 2001) draws from traditional indigenous symbols— often by wearing a traditional cedar-bark hat—and melodies to enhance lyrics that speak to the silencing of indigenous peoples and a need to revitalize their intimate bond with the natural world. In the contemporary United States, this imperative to challenge racist representations while advocating for Mother Earth emerges in environmental protests that range from antifracking activism to direct action aimed at preventing the construction of pipelines that often cut directly through sacred spaces. Winona LaDuke (b. 1959), for example, currently serves as the director of Honor the Earth, whose mission is to create awareness and support for environmental issues by helping the broader

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American populace recognize the joint dependency between indigenous communities and the natural world. LaDuke and Honor the Earth’s message draw directly from the core of Native American spiritual beliefs, understanding the cause of indigenous empowerment as bound to a matrilineal responsibility to become stewards and protectors of the environment. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe, along with members of—and allies to—nearly 100 more tribes from across the United States and Canada, draws heavily from this perspective of spiritual responsibility in their effort to resist the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Positioned as a type of prayer camp, the Standing Rock protest, populated by many young women activists, offers a theological counter to the Christian-based projects of Manifest Destiny that originally justified Native American removal and today materializes through the appropriation and destruction of lands deemed sacred to indigenous communities. The intersection of spirituality and responsibility compels indigenous women to advocate for all marginalized voices, which manifests historically in efforts to reveal the dark history of sexual abuse; by advocating for disempowered youth and exploited (and often missing or murdered) indigenous women; in fighting against racist representations scattered throughout the United States’ educational system and professional sports; in challenging Big Oil; and in modeling healthy lifestyles and reverence for our natural world. Exactly because indigenous spiritualities connect sacredness to humanness, Native Americans, and particularly women whose spiritual essence connects directly to the matriarchal implications of a pantheistic religious perspective, understand themselves as sacred actors, as agents of and for inter- and intraspecies protection. Morgan Shipley See also: Indigenous Religions: Kinship (Native American); Matriarchies; Nature (Native American) Further Reading Johnson, Troy, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, eds. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Krouse, Susan Applegate, ed. Keeping the Campfires Going: Native Women’s Activism in Urban Communities. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Mihesuah, Devon Abbott. Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Million, Dian. Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Nagel, Joanne. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

A N C E S T O R S ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Native Americans, or First Peoples, have inhabited the Americas from Chile in the south through the United States and Canada in the north for tens of thousands of



Ancestors (Native American)

years. Many Native American tribes traced their ancestry through the maternal line, since there could be no question as to the mother of any child. The bones of ancestors were and are considered sacred by Native Americans and their disinterment sacrilege. In North America, the late 20th-century discovery of Kennewick man in Washington state is a case in point: the Colville, Umatilla, Nez Perce, Wanapum, and Yakama revere him as the Ancient One; after proving genetic kinship to him, their Native belief that ancestors live at peace in the Spirit World, as long as their remains are left at peace in Mother Earth, is finally honored with Kennewick man’s reinterment. In South America, rock shelters in Brazil inhabited by various populations of First Peoples over thousands of years, along with artifacts found there that date to around 50,000 years ago, attest to the unfolding mystery of Native American ancestors. Many artifacts found inside ancient dwellings were likely used by female ancestors. Thus, the Native female serves as archetypal ancestor, carrying tribal spiritual lineage from the past into the future through her embodiment in the present. For the Nahuas of the Sierra Norte de Puebla in Mexico, tonalli (radiance or soul) “links one with the past, with the ancestors.” Earthly concerns “are grounded in dialogues with the ancestors who are disembodied embodiments of the past in the present, the arbiters of order in the world.” As ancestor, Talocan Toteizcalticanantzin is “Honored Mother Who Nurtures People” through the exchange of radiance between upper world, middle world, and lower world. Nahuas greet or feed the ancestors “in dreams, or by offering incense, prayers, and flowers on household altars” (Haly 2000, 168–72). First Peoples believe that the Grandmothers of their tribes bring forward the wisdom and powers of the ancestors, through Mother Earth or Sea Woman archetypes, for instance. Beyond the earthly time frame of living Grandmothers, female ancestor spirits are also thought to act as guides for living generations. Oftentimes, ancestor spirit guides are ascribed the animal form thought to embody and impart specific powers or to protect against nature’s elemental powers. The Chumash of southern California, where they enjoy a mild climate, believe that the playful dolphin is their ancestor. For the Inuit tribes of Alaska and Canada, the foreboding nature of water as an all-powerful element—whether in its liquid or frozen forms—is an ever-present reality. Inuits envision Sedna as both Sea Goddess and sea serpent, who proffers the mighty powers of water while protecting against its dangers. Great Plains Indians who dream of the moon while on vision quest are thought to have received power from a female dream-spirit or ancestor spirit guide. The sun is also regarded, among the Plains Cree, as “a female power that gives visions and dreams” (Irwin 1994, 50). A living bond to the ancestors has been essential to the survival of Native American cultures: Grandmothers tell of spirit ancestors in the form of Raven in the Pacific Northwest, Whale in the South Pacific Islands, or Quetzalcoatl the Plumed Serpent in Mexico and Central America. Grandmother as living embodiment facilitates the communion of Native children with the ancestors—at once real, mythological, and spiritual.

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As in prehistoric times, Native Americans today call on their ancestors for strength and guidance, both in practical and spiritual matters. What is known in modern history as the Ghost Dance is a continuance in Native belief and practice of the relatedness of tribal members through the ancestors. At the turn of the 20th century, the term Ghost Dance was ascribed to the ritual practice of dancing in a circle, today called a round dance, which is often led by women. At that time, Natives danced for the spirit ancestors to help them overcome the onslaught of white settlers and the genocide they inflicted on the current generation. The Ghost Dance was a physical enactment honoring the great chain of being, revered by Native Americans over tens of thousands of years, and expressed not only through ritual but also through visual art forms. Rock art depicting rows of animal spirit guides linked together and to the shaman’s spirit body in their ascent or descent to the spirit realms documents Native American belief in the relatedness of all beings. These lines connecting their destinies to generations of spirit ancestors, animal and human, represent the First Peoples’ sense of belonging to, and responsibility for, all that the Great Spirit has created. In Mayan and Aztec mythologies of Central America and Mexico, an aged ancestral couple is central to their spiritual beliefs about ancestors. This pair of Creator Gods is thought to be the literal and spiritual progenitor of humankind. The primordial couple is also identified as the origin of the calendar, another tradition central to the culture of First Peoples. The female half of this androgynous ancestral couple is sometimes portrayed as casting lots, a type of divination conducted by women to predict the future. In other Mayan and Aztec incarnations, the female aspect of the ancestral couple is depicted as curandera, or healer. Curanderas perform their healing skills with herbs and rituals to this day, exemplifying the belief that the healing powers of Mother Earth are carried forward through the female lineage. The female power to create life has also been revered in Mexican cultures, where the Flower Quetzal Goddess embodies female sexual power and serves as the guardian of young mothers, presiding over pregnancy and childbirth (Miller and Taube 1993, 190). In the thought of First Peoples, ancestors were and are alive as Goddesses—humankind’s living archetypes. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) See also: Indigenous Religions: Arts (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Medicine Women (Native American); Nature (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American) Further Reading Haly, Richard. “Nahuas and National Culture: A Contest of Appropriations.” In Native American Spirituality: A Critical Reader, edited by Lee Irwin, 157–94. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Irwin, Lee. The Dream Seekers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Miller, Mary, and Karl Taube. The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya: An Illustrated Dictionary of Mesoamerican Religion. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993.



Arts (Native American)

A R T S ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Indigenous women have not only been frequent objects of artistic depiction but also genuine contributors to the material culture of their societies. Their remarkable skill has been demonstrated in the production of a wide range of items, corresponding to the essential needs of their communities. They provided fabrics for clothing and household use; pottery and baskets for cooking, serving, and storing; and articles for ceremonial purposes. Their impact extends far beyond the utilitarian framework, constituting a powerful tool in transmitting and sustaining cultural values and regional beliefs. Regrettably, the artisans can rarely be identified, as their memory has long since faded away. Subsequently, it is not always possible to recognize female authorship, especially outside of their traditional areas of specialization. Nonetheless, although a part of their legacy has been irredeemably lost due to adverse climatic conditions, historical shifts, and human neglect, enough artifacts survive to bear witness to a female Native American presence in art, both as creators and as subjects. One of the oldest and most widespread crafts of high aesthetic quality mastered by women in the Americas was basketry. It originated thousands of years ago, as evidenced by the earliest remains from Danger Cave (Utah, around 8000 BCE) and Huachocana Cave (Argentina, around 7000 BCE). The basic techniques included twining, coiling, and plaiting. Barks, bear and deer grass, sedge, sotol, bulrush, yucca, and willow were among the many plant species collected and exploited for

Left: Apache girl in 1886, wearing handmade clothing and jewelry; right: Apache bride, undated, wearing handmade clothing and displaying baskets and other household items. Native American women designed and produced clothing, basketry, pottery, and other goods for daily use and ceremonial purposes. (National Archives)

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their useful fibers. Patterns could be created by binding together multicolored components, dyeing, painting, and stamping, as well as by adding feathers, beads, or shells. The spectrum of possible designs is virtually infinite, including abstract, geometrical, floral, and figurative forms, like human or spiritual beings. The styles may vary considerably from region to region. Agile hands could produce various sizes and shapes of baskets that could also be made watertight. Besides serving daily purposes, they were used as prestigious gifts, reinforcing relationships and alliances, or as ritual artifacts. The 16th-century Mexican codices record baskets full of goods required as tribute (e.g., cacao, chile, or copal, a tree resin used as incense during ceremonies). Some classic Maya monuments (ca. 250–900 CE) document baskets used during the rituals of self-sacrifice. A finely carved Lintel 24 from the site of Yaxchilan (Chiapas, Mexico) dated to 709, depicts Lady K’abal Xook, a royal spouse, in such an act. She is perforating her tongue with a thorned cord, while her blood, dribbling down, soaks into a piece of paper placed in a basket. Farther north and centuries later, Hopi and Zuni Indians used baskets as important elements of ceremonial dances (e.g., Hopi Women’s Basket Dance, as observed by anthropologists in the late 19th century) and considered them sacred, especially when used as containers for ritual meals and prayer requisites. At the turn of the 20th century, the women from the Pomo tribe were known to give especially precious baskets as a gift to their daughters at important moments of their lives, such as when they reached puberty. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the art of basketry has never ceased in the Americas and that its spiritual aspect continues to be recognized. Another refined craft mastered by Native women was textile production. Fabrics have been produced in the Americas for at least 12,000 years, using locally available sources, mainly cotton, yucca, hemp, agave, or camelids’ wool (e.g., guanaco, vicuña). With rare exceptions (e.g., Pueblo culture), textile production was a predominantly female occupation. Girls started learning it at an early age, becoming proficient even before reaching maturity. Often, exceptionally gifted weavers were considered better candidates for a wife. The basic methods involved twining, looping, and finger weaving, as well as the use of backstrap and upright looms. Embroidery or feathers could be used as decoration, often conveying a deeper symbolic meaning. Many spectacular fabrics survived centuries since their creation due to favorable circumstances, as in the case of textiles from the Paracas culture (ca. 800–100 BCE). They were deposited in tombs, serving as wrappings for mummy bundles, some of them concealing female remains. Dark and dry conditions helped to preserve the fabrics and their vivid colors. After appropriate treatment, the deceased were encased in large numbers of mantles, shrouds, and cloths, often embroidered with complex imagery representing supernatural figures. Their creation required an enormous amount of work, and this remarkable effort can be interpreted as an expression of faith in the afterlife and care for the departed members of the community. Moreover, noticeable evolutions in style and changes in symbolism reveal the development of local religious beliefs. Fabrics in the Americas were conformed to household and institutional purposes alike and served many functions, providing for clothing, blankets, carpets, and hangings, and were even used for sacrificial offerings to deities. Particularly fine



Ceremonies (Native American)

pieces could embellish places of worship and elite dwellings, reinforcing social stratification and local beliefs. In the Andean region, the “chosen women” (aclla) would learn how to serve the Inca Empire (ca. 1438–1533 CE) from an early age. Among other tasks, they would create outstanding textiles for their sacred ruler, Sapa Inca. Pottery making appeared later than basket and textile manufacture. The oldest evidence of this craft was discovered in the Amazon and was dated at 7,000 to 8,000 years old. Ceramics, thanks to the plasticity of the material and the possibility to re-create almost any form, is one of the most accurate mediums portraying Native American women and their lives throughout the centuries. The clay figurines and vessels showing women are known from all over the Americas. The Jaina-style figurines (ca. 500–1000 CE) from the Maya culture, for example, represent females of various ages, statuses, and occupations: old and young, human and divine, naked and richly adorned. They are holding children, weaving, grinding corn, or simply sitting or standing. The statuettes illustrate complex hairstyles and headdresses as well as tattoos, scarification, garments, and jewelry. Moreover, the images of women were also painted on countless vessels, in ritualistic and mundane contexts alike: from weaving and serving in palaces pouring cacao to giving birth and performing ceremonies. Some examples of fine ceramics with Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions also carry signatures of female authors. Besides basketry and textile and pottery production, Native American women left their unique artistic imprint on miscellaneous types of objects, namely on leather and beadwork, adornments, jewelry, and cradleboards. Beata Anton See also: Indigenous Religions: Ceremonies (Native American); Clothing (Native American) Further Reading Bruhns, Karen Olsen, and Karen E. Stothert. Women in Ancient America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Dransart, Penelope, and Helen Wolfe. Textiles from the Andes. London: British Museum Press, 2011. Dubin, Lois S. North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment: From Prehistory to the Present. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Prager, Christian. “Jaina—the Island Necropolis.” In Maya: Divine Kings of the Rain Forest, edited by Nikolai Grube, assisted by Eva Eggebrecht and Matthias Seidel, 308–09. Translated by Translate-A-Book. Cologne, Germany: Tandem Verlag GmbH, 2006/2007. Teufel, Stefanie. “The Art of Weaving.” In Maya: Divine Kings of the Rain Forest, edited by Nikolai Grube, assisted by Eva Eggebrecht and Matthias Seidel, 354–55. Translated by Translate-A-Book. Cologne, Germany: Tandem Verlag GmbH, 2006/2007.

C E R E M O N I E S ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Native American women have always been active participants in the ritualistic life of their communities. Some of the ceremonies would mark important moments

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of their personal lives, celebrating their birth, transition to adulthood, and death, while others would focus on the well-being of the whole society. Depending on the regional traditions, the first celebration following the birth could be baptism, during which a symbolic ablution would occur. On this occasion, as depicted in the 16th-century Codex Mendoza, Aztec baby girls were given a name and bestowed with typically female artifacts, such as tools for spinning and cleaning. Similar in other cultures was the naming ceremony and blessing of a child followed by a festive gathering. In some tribes, the name given early in life was not meant to be used permanently but could be changed many times in various circumstances. Reaching puberty was deeply significant to a young woman. Marking the end of her childhood, the rite of passage to adulthood carried many implications, above all social ones, expressing the woman’s readiness to become a wife and mother. The attitudes toward the first menses varied throughout the Americas, from fear and imposing restrictions on the girl (e.g., Subarctic tribes) to joy and pride (e.g., Northern California). Menstruating women were usually forbidden from touching weapons and food, as it was believed that this could cause, for example, a warrior to be wounded during the next combat. The ceremony, which usually involved various taboos, could take several days, often consisting of fasting and temporary separation from the rest of the community. This ancient tradition was most actively practiced in pre-Columbian times, and although now lost by many tribes, it is still upheld by some. Today, both the Navajo and the Mescalero Apache celebrations last four days and include references to the figure of a mythical Changing Woman or White Painted Woman, respectively. Moreover, the bath and new clothing, as well as accompanying songs, dances, and even runs, all carry symbolic meaning. The ceremonies involve various members of the community and require the presence of a medicine woman or man. Some of the most significant rituals in which indigenous women were actively participating were sacrifices. These blood- or even life-claiming ceremonies constituted an important part of Native Religions throughout the Americas and were performed for a variety of reasons for millennia. The bloodletting could serve as a means of communicating with the ancestors, as portrayed on some of the classic Maya monuments (ca. 250–900 CE). In other cases, the victims of sacrifice were believed to serve as messengers to propitiate deities and find their favor, especially during difficult times of natural disasters, like drought, or the severe sickness of a ruler. In the high altitudes of the Andean mountaintops, the Inca ritual of capacocha (ca. 1438–1533 CE) left naturally mummified remains of its victims, many of them girls. In turn, the Pawnee tribe believed that the sacrifice of a woman during Morning Star Ceremony, performed until around 1816, could bring an abundance of crops. Furthermore, women impersonating female deities were also regularly sacrificed in the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan according to the ritual calendar, as recounted in the Florentine Codex (ca. 1577 CE). While some of the sacrifices were voluntary, it seems that not all the victims were conscious about their fate. Finally, for centuries, Native American women took part in ceremonies that were performed to assure welfare, prosperity, and fertility to their communities, their



Ceremonies (Native American)

Kinaaldá, Navajo Initiation Rite at Menarche The Kinaaldá is a coming-of-age ceremony performed for Navajo girls that includes a set of rituals, songs, and a celebration. This passage is from a detailed report by anthropologist Bruce Lincoln, who was allowed to observe a Kinaaldá ceremony: An “all-night sing” fills the final night of the Kinaaldá. The first songs sung are called Hogan songs. Which were composed for the Kinaaldá of Changing Woman, according to Blessingway. By means of these songs, First Man and First Woman sang the primordial hogan [dwelling] into existence. Hogan songs of the present repeat this event, and the singer’s words simultaneously secure the continued existence of the family hogan, making it holy, and identify it with the first hogan, which was located at Emergence Rim, the place where the Holy People first issued from a series of underworlds onto the earth’s surface . . . The hogan is thus transformed into the first hogan by the knowledge and speech of the singer. Its space becomes sacred space, and all who enter it once again stand at Emergence Rim. Through this experience, they themselves are also transformed and take on something other than their normal workaday existence—becoming nothing less than the gods and Holy People who dwelt at Emergence Rim. This is most important for the initiand [young woman]. Once inside the hogan, she has her hair combed so that it hangs down her back fixed with an archaic form of thong, and she is dressed in ceremonial finery—a special sash and jewelry of turquoise and white shell being particularly prominent— in order to make her over in the image of Changing Woman. Source: Lincoln, Bruce. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981, 19.

members, and their crops. The women danced, sang, made ritual objects, served as shamanesses, used divination, and went on pilgrimages. Some of these activities were exclusively female, while others involved both men and women. As a consequence of the arrival of Europeans to the Americas beginning in 1492, all ritual activities suffered impediments, as the colonists tried to eradicate them, forcing the indigenous people into submission. During subsequent centuries, many of the ancient traditions were eventually lost due to severe repression, mass migrations, and an extremely high mortality rate. Nevertheless, despite enormous difficulties, some ceremonies were preserved and finally found appreciation, promotion, and protection as invaluable cultural heritage. Beata Anton See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Clothing (Native American); Medicine Women (Native American); Spirituality: Divination Further Reading Barrett, Carole A., and Harvey J. Markowitz, eds. American Indian Culture. Vols. 1–3. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2004.

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Ceruti, Maria C. “Frozen Mummies from Andean Mountaintop Shrines: Bioarchaeology and Ethnohistory of Inca Human Sacrifice.” BioMed Research International (2015):439428. doi:10.1155/2015/439428. de Sahagun, Bernardino. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Book 2: The Ceremonies, 2nd ed. Translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2012. First published 1981 by The School of American Research and the University of Utah. Miller, Mary, and Karl Taube. An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. 1993. Reprint, London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. Taylor, Colin F. Native American Life: The Family, the Hunt, Pastimes and Ceremonies. London: Salamander Books, 1996.

C L O T H I N G ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) In Native American societies, the production of clothing was almost exclusively a female occupation. The great cultural and environmental diversity resulted in a multitude of styles, often expressing regional beliefs and traditions. Depending on local occurrence, season, climatic conditions, and particular needs, the use of plant and animal fibers would encompass cotton, inner bark of the mulberry tree, palm, maguey (agave), yucca, and wool (llama, alpaca, vicuña, guanaco), as well as skins, furs, and pelts (e.g., ocelot, deer, moose, bear, buffalo, beaver, wolf, serpent, caribou, hare). In addition, shells, pearls, hair, feathers, stones, beads, porcupine quills, metal, and embroidery were used for embellishments. Social status usually determined the allowed type of attire for each member of a community, reserving complex headdresses, precious materials, and fine jewelry for the elite. In addition, age and ceremonies or rituals could appear as relevant factors in the selection of a particular garment. Typically, women’s clothing consisted of a wraparound skirt, usually falling to the midcalf or knee, fastened with a belt around the waist; a tunic; a blouse (e.g., Central American huipil); or a dress. The breasts were not covered in some cultures, even as late as the 19th century, as depicted in aquarelle by Peter Rindisbacher in 1821. For centuries, vivid colors and diverse patterns have been characteristic of Native American women’s costumes. Generally, loose draping prevailed over adjusting to body shape and tailoring. However, cloth manufacturing was always more than simply utilitarian. Besides creating fabrics and costumes answering the needs of various members of the community, women were producing textiles that served as objects of trade, tribute, and highly esteemed gifts, playing an important role in regional economy and politics. Moreover, the aesthetic aspect of design cannot be neglected, as numerous pieces were of supreme artistic value. Today their composition bears witness to the beliefs and world view of the women who made them. In the eastern subarctic region, for instance, a hunter’s outfits were meticulously elaborated by his wife with intricate patterns, referring to visions he had received in dreams. Such an effort, performed at least until the turn of the 19th century, was intended to find favor with the game spirits and ensure success during hunting expeditions. Furthermore, festive



Creation Stories (Native American)

clothing not only corresponded to the solemnity of an event but could also have symbolic significance, as in the case of women chosen for sacrifice by the Aztecs, as reported by friar Bernardino de Sahagún around the year 1577. While impersonating divinities, their role was indicated by distinctive apparel, identifying them with a particular deity. For example, the one that represented Ilamatecuhtli, the Goddess of Earth, Milky Way, and Death, would have a white skirt decorated with many shells, probably an allusion to the stars of the galaxy, as well as a feathered shield and headdress. The most dramatic transformation of clothing tradition in the Americas was caused by the arrival of Europeans at the end of the 15th century and its far-reaching consequences. Not only did they bring new materials with them, like silk, glass beads, and ribbons, alongside innovational technologies and tools, but they also caused permanent stylistic changes with time. The excessive fur trade led to the disappearance of the game, severely affecting regional economies and religious systems. Nowadays, the garments best representing native craftwork are especially those of regalia used in ceremonies and gatherings of Indian groups (e.g., Pow Wow). Also, in some communities, as in Guatemala or Peru, the women continue to wear clothes stylistically resembling those of their pre-Columbian ancestors, manifesting cultural continuity and identity. Beata Anton See also: Indigenous Religions: Arts (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Nature (Native American) Further Reading Anawalt, Patricia R. Mesoamerican Costumes from the Codices. The Civilization of the American Indian Series, no. 156. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. Brasser, Theodore. Native American Clothing: An Illustrated History. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2009. Cohen Suarez, Ananda, and Jeremy James George. Handbook to Life in the Inca World. New York: Facts on File, 2011. Foster, Lynn V. Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World. New York: Facts on File, 2002.

C R E AT I O N S T O R I E S ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Native American creation stories, while rooted in female fertility, are as varied as the tribes, numbering roughly 600 federally recognized tribes in each of the Americas’ three major areas: Canada, the United States, and Latin America. Creation-story themes that are constant over time and location are apparent across the Americas. Common creation themes include stories of tribal birth: out of Earth herself, through intermediaries of the natural world, out of archetypal ancestors, and through versions of cosmogenesis. In each of these Native American creation-story scenarios, the archetype of Great Mother giving birth to humankind is intrinsic. The birth of humans, of tribes, of nations, of worlds, and of the cosmos is played out on the body of the archetypal Great Mother. While the borders of prehistoric

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nations altered greatly over the long course of time, historic-era borders between Canada and the United States, and between the United States and Latin America, have been demarcated relatively recently. Tribal migrations—the common factor driving national boundaries—arise through necessity from such factors as climate change, invasions from outside, and religious beliefs or persecution from inside. During the worldwide Medieval Climate Anomaly, this extended drought drove southwestern Native American tribes into what is now southeastern California in search of food. Tribal conflicts that ensued are reflected not only in warfare pictographs but also more pervasively in pictographs of propitiation to the Creator Goddess for the increase of game, such as bighorn sheep. This intrinsic, intimate relationship between Native Americans and nature as the Life-Giving Mother was played out through increased rituals or increased magic and was depicted in female fertility images, such as the proliferation of bighorn sheep and the human vulva. Because of Native American tribal dependence on nature’s fecundity, migration stories played out on earth’s body are thus intimately linked to creation stories. Regardless of the reasons for migration, Native American creation stories, like national borders, also change over time. Specific examples from among the innumerable tribes illustrate timeless creation-story themes as well as ways in which creation stories change over time. Among the ancient Native American cultures, the creation theme of tribal birth out of Mother Earth is common. The Choctaw creation story developed as a result of their long prehistoric migration, which was caused by the incursion of warring nations and other unfavorable conditions that made their original homeland inhospitable. The Choctaw are said to have migrated from at least as far as the Gulf Coast of Mexico to what is now central Mississippi. Once in their new homeland, the Choctaw creation story tells of the first Choctaw’s birth out of Nanih Waiya, the mother mound or place of creation—a large earthwork mound located in present-day Winston County, Mississippi. Alternatively, the Chickasaw and Choctaw, who were by some accounts one tribe at that time, tell of their whole tribe’s emergence out of Nanih Waiya (National Park Service n.d.). Creation myths often position archetypal ancestors in an underworld labyrinth, searching for a way out through the cave’s tunnels. The Choctaw archetypal tribal ancestors, said to have emerged from Nanih Waiya, still reside within that earthwork burial mound because the ancestral bones buried there are thought to embody the tribe’s ancestors, carrying on the living tribal lineage through miraculous emergence from the labyrinth. Nanih Waiya, like many mound temples, has an earthwork semicircle or horseshoe around it on three sides. That exterior semicircle—around what is called the mother mound, sloping mound, or leaning mound—forms the outer wall of the labyrinth, rendering the whole earthwork mound complex as the female reproductive organs. Mounds were often located near springs, streams, and caves. According to another version of the Choctaw creation story, the tribe emerged out of Nanih Waiya Cave (also associated with a nearby burial mound), which is located in present-day Neshoba County, Mississippi. Nanih Waiya Cave has an apparent burial mound above it as well, whether natural or manmade. And the Nanih Waiya Cave entrance has vulva-form carvings



Creation Stories (Native American)

along the cave walls, suggesting that this may have also been a female puberty ritual site. Archaeological evidence dates ritual usage of the Nanih Waiya sites and local habitation from around 100 BCE to around 1650 CE, when Native culture was overtaken by white peoples arriving through migrations out of Europe. On a larger creation scale, imagining back to a time when Earth herself was first birthed from the primordial waters, the Chickasaw tell that “the Earth began when crawfish dove into the watery depths of the world and built the first landmass from mud at the bottom of the ocean. From these early beginnings all things good sprang to life, including the Chickasaw” (Barbour, Cobb, and Hogan 2006, 11). Farther west, in what is now northern California, a Paiute petroglyph site, nearly inaccessible at 9,000 feet atop Mono Craters range, is an ancient pilgrimage site for female puberty rituals. The anthropomorphic images carved deep in the volcanic rim itself are of vulvas, female talismans for fertility and safe childbearing. These ancient glyphs, carved in high relief, are an endless yet varied repetition of a single horseshoe, yoke, or crescentic symbol, representing female genitalia with magical and ceremonial associations. It is likely that the Mono Craters petroglyphs predate historic Native American tribes of the area, created during prehistoric eras before the Paiutes migrated into current-day Mono County. About 400 yards below the rim of Crater Mountain is an ice-cold spring flowing from a subterranean layer of ice imbedded in the lava. The life-giving spring is perhaps the reason for locating a female puberty ritual site on the top of this particular volcano (Davis 1961). The entire volcano mountain represents the female body as Creator Goddess, whose ancient red lava flows and thirst-quenching springs signify fecundity and sustenance. Thus, prehistoric Native American creation stories are fossilized in stone and earth, a permanent retelling of human and cosmic rebirth via the labyrinthine passage through the Great Mother—the passageway between the world of the dead and the world of the living. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Nature (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American) Further Reading Barbour, Jeannie, Amanda Cobb, and Linda Hogan (with photography by David G. Fitzgerald). Chickasaw: Unconquered and Unconquerable. Portland, OR: Chickasaw Press, 2006. Chickasaw Nation. “Beyond the Divide: Chickasaw-Choctaw Warfare.” 2017. https:// www.chickasaw.net/Our-Nation/History/Historical-Articles/Culture/Beyond-the-Divide​ -Chickasaw-Choctaw-Warfare.aspx. Davis, Emma Lou. “The Mono Craters Petroglyphs, California.” American Antiquity 27, no. 2 (October 1961): 236–39. Society for American Archaeology. http://www.jstor.org​ /stable/277842. National Park Service. “Indian Mounds of Mississippi: A National Register of Historic Places Travel Itinerary; Nanih Waiya Mound and Village.” 2017. https://www.nps.gov​ /nr/travel/mounds/nan.htm.

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Kinship (Native American)

K I N S H I P ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) The role of women in Native American Religions is deeply connected with the social institutions of kinship, which demonstrate a variety of structures across the many indigenous nations, such as clans, moieties, and phratries. However, there is one significant feature of kinship among these peoples that is nearly universal in North America. Native American religions include other-than-human persons within their kinship networks (Hallowell 1976, 361–62). Kinship with other-than-human persons means that trees, bushes, grasses, and the like are to be treated as your relatives, along with birds, mammals, reptiles, fishes, and the like. Other-than-human persons may also include rivers, mountains, clouds, sun, moon, and stars. Other-than-human persons are to be treated with kinship respect by acknowledging that reciprocal obligations exist between humans and other-than-human persons. One of the chief means of making that reciprocity real is for human communities to engage in ceremonial rites that celebrate and empower their other-than-human relatives. How the relationship between a particular Native American society and their other-than-human relatives becomes established is orally recorded in their sacred stories. Those stories most commonly derive from a powerful dream or vision experienced by a respected person from that society that carries prophetic meaning for the community as it faces a crisis or turning point in their way of life. All humans share the experience of dreaming, and it is in dreaming, or dreamlike visions, that we are exposed to the power of metamorphosis, which means a change in form. You, as the dreamer, may suddenly become an eagle, flying over the landscape and looking down on everything earthbound, or in your dream a deer may in a flash change into a human person who starts speaking to you. The dream functions as a portal to another dimension of reality in which novel possibilities belong to your own identity and to existence itself. Central to traditional kinship within Native American communities, past and present, is the role of food. Acquiring food by hunting, fishing, and gathering or growing vegetables and fruits was critical to community life and was accomplished by cooperative efforts of males and females. While clear distinctions between genders usually existed regarding the specific roles in acquiring and preparing food, reciprocity and mutuality between genders was critical to the outcome. Just as critical to a good outcome regarding food was the kinship of Native American communities with their other-than-human relatives, since this kinship sanctioned the eating of their plant and animal relatives. One of the well-known figures regarding kinship and the role of food is Corn Mother. There are varying versions of the story of Corn Mother. In the Cherokee story, she is Selu, whose husband, Kanati, hunted game for their family’s sustenance, while Selu provided corn for them that she secretly obtained by rubbing her skin to make corn drop into her basket. All stories of Corn Mother involve some moment of discovery about her secret and her subsequent death as a willing self-sacrifice for the future of the human community, since from her spilled blood on the ground or her buried corpse in the earth new corn plants sprout in the



Kinship (Native American)

appropriate season. George Tinker (1998), Osage scholar, explains the implications of Corn Mother stories. Corn and all foodstuffs are our relatives, just as much as those who live in adjacent lodges within our clan-cluster. Thus, eating is sacramental, to use a Euro-theological word, because we are eating our relatives. Not only are we related to corn, beans, and squash, since these things emerge immediately out of the death of Corn Mother, but even those other relatives like Buffalo, Deer, Squirrel, and Fish ultimately gain their strength and growth because they, too, eat of the plenty provided by the Mother—eating grasses, leaves, nuts, and algae that also grow out of the Mother’s bosom (Tinker 1998, 151). Corn Mother functions as the Life-Giving Mother of all other-than-human plant persons, whose nurture embraces all the life-providing processes of the earth in sprouting, growth, harvest, consumption, and seasonal reemergence, and whose kinship with humans gifts us with food. Kinship reciprocity is extended to Corn Mother by way of the annual midsummer Green Corn Ceremony by the Cherokee and other indigenous nations originating in the southeastern United States. Gender reciprocity also pervades this four-day ceremony. On the second day, the women do their ribbon dance to purify the ceremonial grounds before the starting of the new fire. On the third day, the men drink medicinal tea meant for purging and do their feather dance. On the third night, the fast is broken with a feast featuring green corn at which all the clans offer their kinship thanks as they eat together from the bounty of Corn Mother herself. The White Buffalo Maiden is a sacred female who oversees the welfare of the buffalo nation (Powers 1990). She plays a critical role in the establishment of a permanent kinship between the Lakota nation of hunters and the buffalo nation. In a time before horses were available to the peoples of the northern plains, a Lakota community at the point of starvation is visited by the White Buffalo Maiden in human form. She brings them the gift of a sacred pipe and instructs them in its ritual use, as in the Sun Dance ceremony, which is the sacred rite that enables the hunters to engage in kinship reciprocity with the buffalo (Densmore 1992). Once she has completed her instructions and has presented the White Buffalo Calf Pipe to the people, she exits the ceremonial tipi, and, as she walks away from the tipi, metamorphosis happens and she changes into a white buffalo calf. The annual Sun Dance is the communal centerpiece of Lakota ceremonial life, and the focus of the rite is the reciprocity it offers to the buffalo nation as well as to the entire kinship network of the Lakota people. The central feature expressing this reciprocity is the piercing of the male sun dancers in a way that enables the insertion of bone or wood skewers through the flesh of the upper chest or upper back, which are then attached by thongs to a rope tied either to the tree in the center of the Sun Dance circle or to one or more buffalo skulls. To dance while pulling away from the tree or while dragging multiple buffalo skulls around the perimeter of the ceremonial circle is an act of self-sacrifice involving physical endurance of pain and a symbolic death that honors the sacrifice of the buffalo. As the physical agony of the man dancing tethered to the tree or to the buffalo skulls extends in

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time, eventually the flesh gives way and the dancer breaks free. Piercing is a symbolic killing, and breaking free is a symbolic regeneration. In this way, reciprocity is enacted with the buffalo nation. Young Lakota women play a key role in cutting down the cottonwood tree that is installed at the center of the Sun Dance circle. Lakota women are also Sun Dancers, and some choose to participate in mild forms of piercing of their arms, but the central drama involving a rope tied to the tree or to buffalo skulls belongs to the men, who were once the actual hunters of their buffalo kin. The horse-riding, buffalo-hunting nations of the northern plains were able to defeat federal troops sent against them in the 1860s and 1870s. That power advantage was gone by December 1890, when fearful Lakota Ghost Dancers were slaughtered at Wounded Knee by the Seventh Cavalry. By the time of that massacre, federal policies aimed at destroying the vast buffalo herds of the Great Plains had eliminated the basic food supply of these nations and left them largely defenseless. Moreover, the federal government had by 1883 forbidden the people of the plains to hold Sun Dances and other key ceremonies, thus denying these peoples the possibility of keeping their kinship responsibilities. The Ghost Dance movement, which began among the northern Paiutes under the leadership of Wovoka in Mason Valley, Nevada, had by 1890 been taken up by a great many of the Great Plains nations. The name Ghost Dance came from the settlers and soldiers. The ceremony might better be called the Kinship Dance, because Native American peoples embraced this dance out of a deep sense of loss and mourning over the vanishing buffalo nation as well as over the fundamental reshaping of the landscape of the west by rapacious mining and logging and the building of railroads across sacred lands. This Kinship Dance represented a ritual hope for restoration of kinship solidarity to the lands of the west through the return of relatives like the buffalo and the renewal of kinship reciprocities. As a kinship dance, it was clearly an anticolonial dance, a rejection of the anthropocentrism practiced by the federal government and the immigrant settlers toward the plains, forests, animals, rivers, even mountains—a world view of no kinship except among the “civilized” humans from Europe who, ironically, had left behind their own kinfolk and their ancestral ties in crossing the ocean. Such objectification reflects the patriarchal domination pervading the world view of the European settlers—a domination over women, over nature, and over “uncivilized” peoples. In the hope and expectation of renewing kinship solidarity within Native American communities and restoring to well-being their other-than-human kinfolk, the people took up the dance taught by Wovoka. Men and women danced together, singing and holding hands in a great circle, making a continuous series of side steps as the circle turned, now and then causing individual dancers to fall into trance and involuntarily pass through the dream/vision portal into an aboriginal world of metamorphosis, where they encountered buffalo relatives and their own previously deceased human family members. The Ghost Dance was decisively stopped in the 1890s by military suppression of Native American ceremonies and the government effort to lock down “uncivilized”



Marriage and Social Status (Native American)

peoples on reservations, preventing their freedom to travel. Nevertheless, this dance lives on since its intention to renew kinship is alive in every Sun Dance and Green Corn Ceremony and other such ceremonies still actively celebrated by indigenous peoples of North America—women and men dancing together in solidarity with their other-than-human relatives. Dale Stover See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Nature (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American); Sacred Spirits (Native American) Further Reading Densmore, Frances. Teton Sioux Music and Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Hallowell, A. Irving. “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View.” In Contributions to Anthropology: Selected Papers of A. Irving Hallowell, edited by Alfred Irving Hallowell and Raymond David Fogelson, 357–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Powers, Marla N. “Mistress, Mother, Visionary Spirit: The Lakota Culture Heroine.” In Religion in North America, edited by Christopher Vecsey, 36–48. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1990. Sattwa, Ananda. “Green Corn Ceremony.” In American Indian Religious Traditions: An Encyclopedia, edited by Suzanne J. Crawford and Dennis F. Kelley, 350–55. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Tinker, George. “Jesus, Corn Mother, and Conquest: Christology and Colonialism.” In Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods, edited by Jace Weaver, 134–54. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Warren, Louis J. God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2017.

M A R R I A G E A N D S O C I A L S TAT U S ( N AT I V E AMERICAN) Marriage customs and the social status of women were very diversified throughout the Americas. Dictated by local tradition and conventions, women’s prospects could range from being subjected to the will of their families and husbands to holding full power in their hands as queens. Depending on cultural practice, marriage could be arranged by parents or a mediating matchmaker or at the initiative of the young people wishing to marry. Puberty rites marked the entrance to adulthood and opened the possibility to establish a formal relationship and to start a family. Traditionally, parental consent was a prerequisite, and there was an exchange of gifts between the families. In the Hopi tradition, the wife’s family had to repay the husband’s relatives for making her wedding clothes, a practice that still exists today. As for the wedding ceremonies, they were often filled with symbolic meaning; during the Aztec celebration, for example, the garments of the bride and groom were bound together into a metaphorical knot, as depicted in the 16th-century Codex Mendoza.

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Furthermore, some Native American societies were matrilocal, customarily living with or close to the wife’s family, and matrilineal, which denotes tracing ancestry and passing on inheritance through the female line (e.g., Iroquois, Creek). Marriage within one’s clan was usually strictly prohibited, although there are known exceptions to that rule (e.g., Akimel O’odham people). Also the Inca (ca. 1438– 1533 CE) royal family favored marriages between its closely related members to preserve a clean bloodline, claiming divine descendance. Intermarrying between tribes or polities occurred and could be used for sealing political alliances. Such practices are suggested by the classic Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions (ca. 250–900 CE), and they are also known from early Aztec history (14th century). Moreover, a marriage could bring peace between nations, at least temporarily, as in the wellknown case of Pocahontas from the Powhatan tribe and an Englishman (1613). In Native America, social status was commonly manifested in clothing and tattoos or indicated by the use of restricted materials and items (e.g., quetzal feathers). Frequently, a woman’s position was determined by birth, especially in cultures with strong social stratification, although in certain cases an increase in personal prestige could be acquired by entering into marriage with a person of a higher position or thanks to distinguished personal traits and skills, for example. Usually, women would face more restrictions than men. For instance, women in the Hopi culture could not freely enter kivas, constructions that carried religious connotations and served as places for gatherings, a function they have had for many centuries. The women were allowed inside only in special circumstances, for example, at the time of a council. In some regions, they could also be overburdened with everyday duties and be the first to suffer if there were insufficient resources (e.g., as observed in Chipewyan and Kutchin tribes during the fur-trade period). On the other hand, some American women were deeply respected and revered even for a very long time after their death and were venerated as ancestors. The killing of a woman merited severe, even double punishment in Iroquoian groups, as noted at the beginning of the 20th century, for it implied the loss of potential children in the future. American women could also reach the highest position of power as royal spouses or even as independent queens, the best examples being known from the classic Maya culture (ca. 250–900 CE). Although today the modern states usually dictate the procedures of legal marriage, some communities still observe their own customs, performing traditional rituals and blessings, reciting ancient prayers, burning incense, and offering festive meals (e.g., Guatemala). Women’s status and their social roles have also changed dramatically, especially thanks to improved access to education. Beata Anton See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Clothing (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Matriarchies Further Reading Barrett, Carole A., and Harvey J. Markowitz, eds. American Indian Culture. Vols. 1–3. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2004.



Matriarchies

Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens. 2nd ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 2008. Taylor, Colin F. Native American Life: The Family, the Hunt, Pastimes and Ceremonies. London: Salamander Books, 1996. Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. 3rd ed. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006.

M AT R I A R C H I E S Wherever they are found worldwide, matriarchies have certain features in common. They are mother centered and use maternal analogies in analyzing reality, resulting in cultural values of political equality and peace, social consensus, and gift-giving economies. Most prominently, matriarchies are egalitarian with no one considered or treated as better, higher, or more spiritual than anyone else. Consequently, no one gains (or loses) societal power through pietistic displays of spirituality. There being no superior-to-inferior degrees of being, there can be no elite mythologies looking down on the beliefs and practices of ordinary peoples or instructing others on the “right” beliefs. Instead, organized cant is frowned on as presumptuous. The line between indigenous and nonindigenous spirituality depends on who is drawing the line. Such groups as the Nayar of India, the Kabyle of northern Africa, and the Minangkabau of Sumatra are often characterized as having a “religion,” whereas groups including the Iroquois of North America’s woodlands, the Igboo of Nigeria, and the Lahu of western China are usually presented as having “beliefs” or “traditions,” not religions per se. This preferential distinction between identifying something as a religion or as a belief derives from the antiquated “stages of history” theory (savagery→barbarism→civilization) invented by 19th-century Western anthropology, whose barely disguised purpose was to exalt Western culture at the expense of all other cultures. Under its rubrics, “civilized” groups had “progressed” to monotheism, while “barbarous” groups wallowed in polytheism, and “savage” groups had but superstitions (now rechristened “beliefs”). Modern theorists view all belief systems as spiritual in nature, with the term religion reserved for belief systems that are culturally formalized, usually rigid, and politically enabled, with little room for digression. Anywhere that matriarchies have been historically imposed upon by rigid spiritual systems, usually through colonization, the alien dogma is honored more in the breach than in the observance. For example, after the 14th- to 16th-century Muslim invasion of Banda Aceh, Sumatra, instead of bowing to the alien system of Islam, the matriarchal Minangkabau resisted, obliging Islam to bow to it by requiring that a sixth pillar, that of matriarchy, be added to Islam in Banda Aceh! To this day, the Minangkabau look to their traditional adat philosophies for their spiritual reasoning. When left to their own devices, matriarchies eschew juridical dogma, catechism, and pietism in favor of observed reality, their celebrations circling around stages of human life (birth to death) and seasonal shifts, during which this or that particular aspect of cultural history is reinforced.

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Month-by-month time is counted by watching the always-spiritualized moon. Longer periods of time are counted by watching the progression of the constellations through the night sky. Sky watching has always been important to matriarchy, primarily because star patterns shift with the seasons, a handy way to know when to plant and when to harvest. In northern climes, “conception” is often spiritually associated with the spring planting, resulting in the successful childbirth of harvest. In the Americas—North as well as South—the Pleiades is powerfully connected to woman because she signals seasonal shifts. Indeed, the signal constellation for Iroquoian women is commonly known as the “Seven Sisters,” about whom many stories are told. For the Iroquois of the northeast, she first appears in January, winter being woman’s time of the year, but then again in May, when planting is organized, and again in September, when harvesting is done. In South America, the Pleiades mark the change of wet and dry seasons, equally important considerations for any planning. Motionless stones are frequently linked to death. The Kasi-Pnar of northeast India honor the dead in their dolmen stones. Their Ka Iawbei Tynrai is a lineage’s ancestral matriarch, her stone lying on its side for her long-deserved rest, while the standing menhirs, some with faces carved, still stand with the living. Interestingly, stone associations are commonplace, with the Tibetan Chiang people of northwest China likewise honoring ancestors through the use of stones as connected with people and seasons. Forty-thousand-year-old dolmen and menhirs with carved faces have been discovered in Sardinia, while the fifth-century BCE dolmen of Scandinavia are also linked with matriarchies. In these two latter situations, it is not clear whether the stones were associated with death, but great antiquity of the cultures involved is generally associated with matriarchy. Ancestor honoring, centering on earth as the mother-womb, is typical of matriarchal spiritualities. Among the Luapula, a Bantu group of Central Africa, the ifumu is such a birthing womb of humanity itself. One must be cautious, however, for all terms derive from Western anthropology, which atomizes ideas, often splitting required pairs in half, so that birth is separated from death. Indigenously, the idea of “ancestor” as divorced from future generations is just puzzling, for despite centuries’ worth of Christian and Muslim attempts to uproot such ideas, indigenous groups tend to see generations as cyclical, through reincarnation. In northern Africa, Berber women wishing to conceive visit the death-lamps placed in stone sanctuaries appropriately located in mountains, hoping to attract a spirit to reincarnate through them. Nearly all traditional Native North American cultures entertain reincarnation. In 1703, one Western observer was perplexed to see 30 to 40 Wyandot women racing full tilt to the longhouse of a dying man, each hoping to catch one of his departing spirits for her womb. (Native Americans have complementary spirits.) To this day, traditional indigenous North Americans still look to intuit which reincarnated spirits are in their children, for spirits come again to the same lineages, another matriarchal commonplace. Peripheral considerations occur around specifically powerful female functions, including menstruation, conception, and childbirth, which may each have their own special celebrations. For instance, in Juchitán, Mexico, after growing up in



Matriarchies

her mother’s house (again, a matriarchal commonplace), a girl is presented to the community at the age of two, in a festival. Her most important ceremony comes at age 15, when she is enabled to enter the market as a businesswoman in her own right, following her coming-of-age festival. Trading in the public square is the career of all Juchitecan women, where economics is a festival, all of itself, in this reflection of gifting. When a Juchiteca woman marries, it is in celebration of her female ancestors. All aspects of mother-function are spiritualized as gifts given and received, with gift, not sacrifice, honored as the point. Where ideas of sacrifice enter at all, they are evidence of imposed systems, as in the Caribbean. Before the Spaniards arrived to brutalize both, the Arawak Tainos were matriarchal peoples subjected to the raiding culture of the Caribs, who forced marriage and sacrifice of their male-dominated system on their matriarchal captives. When sacrifice occurred in matriarchal settings, however, it was, interestingly, of males, not females. Instead of hierarchical notions of sacrifice, matriarchies emphasize gifting. The ability to give derives from the ultimate ability, to give life. The one consistent commonality of all matriarchies is that they use some permutation of the gift economy. Unlike in patriarchal culture, whose economics are conclusively secular and sacrificial, in matriarchies, economics are spiritually derived and associated with gifts. Gift giving is inextricably connected with the ability to feed, with breast milk construed as another female gift. Crop growing is, for instance, often seen as gestation in the womb of Mother Earth, which is why matriarchal women worldwide typically do the farming. The Iroquois connect their planting mounds with the female breast; the people are suckled on the breast of their spiritual Mother Earth. Iroquoian men who give gifts are seen as lactating for the people, and in the old days (before patriarchy hushed it in horror), men who brought sustaining gifts from invader forts to the people were said to have large breasts from which to suckle the people. Typically, marriage is casual and not a sanctified concern. The sacred male-female bond is, instead, between sisters and brothers (i.e., the children of one female lineage who are thus sacredly related). Moreover, gender fluidity is commonplace. Among the Lahu people of western China, the creating entity is Seul Sha, which consists of “a pair of cross-sex twins” (Du 2002, 32). Among the Igboo of Nigeria, there are male daughters and female husbands. Indeed, there is even species fluidity among the spirits. The primary Goddess of the Igboo, Idemili, is a shape-shifting python, a woman who can talk hunters out of killing her, a woman important for the people’s well-being. Such shape-shifting is often found among indigenous peoples, especially as connected with the way that the moon can shape-shift. Taking different forms is a staple definition of spiritual prowess among communal societies, such as the Corobisis of Costa Rica, whose jaguar symbolized living in harmony with nature; the Korean Eopsin, a black-snake Goddess with ears associated with prosperity and home security; and the Australian maban, from which everything extant shape-shifts into our reality. Indeed, reincarnation is just another expression of shape-shifting.

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We’wha, a Zuni transgender person, performs traditional women’s work, ca. 1871–1907. Gender fluidity is commonplace in many indigenous cultures where social structures are matriarchal— mother-centered and characterized by political equality, social consensus, and non-hierarchical relationships. (National Archives)

Because of the intensity of colonization and cultural imposition, not just by Christianity but also by Islam, and not just by religions but also by economically motivated raiders from west and east, indigenous matriarchies have had to finesse the continued existence of their spiritual systems. When they do so successfully, it happens because the forms involved are not necessarily recognized as spiritual references by the invading culture. For instance, the Berber women of Kabylia paint their walls with intricate designs laden with spiritual allusion that is unconnected with Islam but that just looks like design art to the uninitiated. Indigenous North American women continue making baskets whose bowls are the earth and whose lids are the sky, traditionally symbolic of the sacred twinship of the cosmos, despite the heavy-handed Christian control of assimilation programs lasting into the late 20th century. Today, one of the most popular Nollywood series in Nigeria is Idemili. Thus disguised as “entertainment,” she spread far and wide. In Central Mexico, Aztec Goddess Tonantzin was mother of all the Gods and, not surprisingly, controller of fertility. When the Spaniards abolished her in 1519, amazingly enough, on Tepeyac, the same hill on which her temple had stood, “Our Lady of Guadalupe” appeared in 1531 and continues to be revered. The Spaniards were willing to believe she was their own Mother Mary, despite her odd skin tone. Another method of surviving hostile takeovers has been to continue traditional practices by stealth. In Juchitán, a girl’s entry into her business life at 15 is easily



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disguised as a quinceañera. The Mosuos of Tibet, whose traditions are overlain by Tibetan Lamaism, take the interesting tack of assigning the dead to the lamas, while taking charge of all to do with the living. The women thus continue their own ceremonies in the mothers’ clan houses, such as the celebration of the girls’ initiation as traditional Mosuo women, a premiere Mosuo rite. Thus do old spiritual systems continue despite the dangers militating against them. The depredations of monotheistic raiding cultures and nonindigenous economic systems has, over the last millennium, certainly dented but, interestingly, not destroyed indigenous spirituality. Barbara Alice Mann See also: Christianity: Christianity in Latin America; Mother of God; Indigenous Religions: Arts (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Marriage and Social Status (Native American); Sacred Spirits (Native American) Further Reading Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters and Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Critique Influence Change Series. London: Zed Books, 1987. Du, Shanshan. “Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs”: Gender Unity and Gender Equality among the Lahu of Southwest China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide. Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe. New York: Lang, 2012. Grasshoff, Makila. The Magical Life of Berber Women in Kabylia. Translated by Elizabeth Corp. Francophone Cultures and Literatures Series. New York: Lang, 2007. Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. New York: Lang, 2000. Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

M E D I C I N E W O M E N ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Found throughout Native American communities, medicine women function as traditional healers and spiritual leaders within particular cultural settings. Not uniform in belief or spiritual heritage, medicine women follow uncounted generations of healers who adhere to the commands of the spirit world and the value of harmonious living to act as providers of medicine, often through allopathic remedies. Healing for Native American medicine women (or men) begins not simply with the physical body but through emotional wellness and individual harmony with nature, the environment, and one’s community. Native American medicine thus centers on promoting healthy living, moving away from disease-producing conduct, while ritualizing spiritual principles to restore balance. This interconnected bond between the spiritual, the natural, and the human outlines an immanently based sacred understanding that medicine women harness to share solutions to the ills plaguing the human condition. From purification and symbolic ceremonies to herbal remedies and healing rituals, medicine women treat illnesses of both the body and the spirit. Respected members of individual tribes, medicine women, in return for ensuring the well-being and balance of individual members and the tribe itself, are often

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provided for (food, shelter, etc.) by their local communities. Often identified early in life, those born with the gift of healing—which includes heightened intuition, sensitivity, and spiritual power—are taught through oral traditions by their local medicine person to recognize sacred herbs and plants and to cultivate healing remedies from teas to poultices. For example, Gladys Tantaquidgeon (1899–2005), a Mohegan medicine woman, began learning ceremonies and healing methods through her nanus (tribal grandmothers or women elders) by the age of five. Tantaquidgeon, who studied the ways of the makiawisug, those who guard the healing plants, was chosen to maintain a lineage of Mohegan women faith keepers. She learned the extensive secrets of herbal remedies, including how to locate, prepare, and administer medicine and how to harness the energies within one’s self and nature. From dreaming to the use of sacred stones and herbal remedies, medicine women rely on sacred wisdom and rituals to seek solutions and cures. During a ceremony, singing and dancing draw in the energy of both spirits and the community to help the healing process. In addition, sacred stones might be rubbed on a person’s body, or one might undertake sweat lodges or baths to purge, revitalize, and balance the body and spirit(s). Traditionally, healers maintain their remedies and tools in medicine bundles referred to as “grandmothers” due to their power to nurture and nourish. Made of leather or animal pelt, the medicine bundle carries a healer’s assortment of ritual objects (e.g., fur, bones, shells, or crystals) and herbs, while also symbolizing a physical artifact of the medicinal power bestowed on the healer by spirits. Indigenous medicine commonly incorporates the use of medicine pipes, which, in addition to representing the ebb and flow of life, are also believed to be a mediator between the afflicted, medicine persons, and the realm of spirits. Such symbolism expands throughout healing rituals and ceremonies to invite participants into greater harmony, not only for those suffering from illness but also for the whole community. Recognizing the interconnection between the spiritual and the phenomenal, medicine women communicate with the realm of the sacred in dreams, vision quests, or peyote ceremonies, directed by such encounters—often in the form of birds or animal spirits—toward rituals of healing, including the distinct capacity to understand and locate cures for diseases and herbal solutions. Bernice Torrez (1927–1996), a Kashaya Pomo medicine woman and daughter of famed dreamer and spiritual leader Essie Parrish (1902–1979), regularly combined song with touch to heal, using both to remove illness from an afflicted body. Considered the last Dreamer of the Long Valley Creek Pomo Indians, as a young child, Mabel McKay (1907–1993) experienced dreams in which she encountered and talked with “the spirit” (her term), who informed her of the steps necessary to fulfill her spiritual path as a medicine woman. Through dreaming, McKay learned songs to put illness to sleep and how to suck disease out of her patients using her mouth, which she would then spit into baskets she weaved and became famous for. Distinctly, medicine women illustrate the sacred underpinning of indigenous medicine and herbalism, often relying on a spiritual ability to speak with the natural world to locate the value and healing capacity of plants and herbs. For



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example, a wise one of the Crow Nation (Apsáalooke or Absaroka), Pretty Shield (1856–1944), in addition to conversing with animals and supernatural helpers called “ant people,” relied on medicine dreams to perform healing. One goal is to restore individual life balance and sociocultural harmony between people and their natural worlds. While directed by the medicine women, healing ceremonies are often familial, drawing on the health, vitality, and spirituality of others to help guide the afflicted back to a sense of harmony. In addition to herbal remedies devised by medicine women for physical and spiritual illness, such ceremonies often incorporate the community through prayer, singing as with chantways (song-based Navajo ceremonials used for healing), dancing, instrumentation, and smoke. Due to government intolerance, much of our contemporary understanding of Native American healing and medicine women is found primarily through oral history, or it remains a guarded secret. Beginning in 1882, the U.S. government began banning Native American religious rights, including specific medical practices and sacred ceremonies. By the 1900s, medicine women (and men) faced imprisonment as modern medicine was forcefully imposed on indigenous communities with the opening of hospitals and clinics by the Indian Health Service. This condition, of being forcefully removed from traditional settings in favor of “modern medicine,” lasted unimpeded until passage of the 1978 American Individual Religious Freedom Act and the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which collectively restored the right to participate in traditional rituals and modes of medicine. Medicine women illustrate how the everyday phenomenal world is intertwined with the spiritual, a balance that is maintained through various forms of medicine. In being able to access, recount, and narrate spiritual truths, medicine women not only operate as keepers of sacred wisdom but also, as a result, uncover the capacity to heal by drawing on their unique connection to the power of the natural world. Morgan Shipley See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Nature (Native American); Sacred Spirits (Native American) Further Reading Fawcett, Melissa Jayne. Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000. Harrow Buhner, Stephen. Sacred Plant Medicine: The Wisdom in Native American Herbalism. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006. Medicine Eagle, Brooke. Buffalo Woman Comes Singing: The Spirit Song of a Rainbow Medicine Woman. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991. Mourning Dove. Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Snell, Alma Hogan. Grandmother’s Grandchild: My Crow Indian Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. St. Pierre, Mark. Walking in the Sacred Manner: Healers, Dreamers, and Pipe Carriers— Medicine Women of the Plains. New York: Touchstone, 1995.

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N AT U R E ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Native American spirit and body are deeply connected to nature through the tribe’s women. This intimacy with the natural world reflects women’s reverence for the circle of life, engendered through childbirth and family caregiving. Historically, many Native tribes traced their family lineage through the mother; tribal families were matrilineal. Among many tribes then and now, Native American women are not only responsible for continuing the tribe’s physical lineage through their moon fertility cycle but are also instrumental in nurturing Native spiritual life through nature’s cycles. Maintaining life’s balance or wholeness is often referred to as “completing the circle” or “turning the medicine wheel.” Completing the circle involves the whole human life cycle; earth’s monthly, seasonal, and annual cycles; and cosmic cycles, marked by comets for instance. Historically, in most tribes, just as men sometimes took on women’s caregiver roles, there were instances in which women took on the role of shaman as spiritual medicine woman. This role was documented in petroglyph and pictograph images of female shamans, depicted with shamanic adornments or tools, such as rod of power and medicine bag. Using traditional medicines made from plants found locally, female healers—curanderas, or medicine women—assured the physical and spiritual continuity of the tribe. Examples of everyday plants still used by Native women today for physical healing are sassafras root and corn hominy. Traditionally, illnesses were thought to have penetrated the body through offended animal spirits or unfavorable natural elements. To bring nature’s elements back into balance within the person’s body, the female shaman practices traditional medicine-wheel rituals, such as calling out earth’s four directions and invoking nature’s elements of earth, water, air, and fire. Within the medicine wheel demarcated on the ground with stones, she balances all of these adornments or healing medicines in the center shaman stone. Center is a spiritual concept manifested in every aspect of Native American life. In ritual round dance, tribal dancers of alternating men and women in a circle chant as they dance around the central fire, which embodies the sacredness of life and the transformations of nature’s power. Practicing solitary vision quest, female shamans evoke tribal healing through animal spirit guides, such as Bear, Coyote, or Deer. Returning to the tribal community, through a practice called “smudging,” the healing spirit of white sage is transferred to the tribespeople via the smoke of burning sage, as it is ritually guided around their bodies by the shaman’s hands. Native women also transfer powers of nature through song or poetry, dance, weaving and beadwork, pottery, and the visual arts. Native artist Jeannie Barbour comments that the Chickasaw people’s embodiment of nature is reflected in the clan names of Eagle, Panther, Buffalo, Deer, Raccoon, Tortoise, Snake, Fish, and Fox. She notes that familial clan associations also encompass wind, sky, water, fire, and earth. Chickasaw southeastern homelands are “the spiritual heart of our nation and a sacred gift given by [the great composite force] Ababinili” (Barbour 2006, 41). Land holds this promise of physical and spiritual prosperity, and in return Natives are good stewards of the land. Chickasaws feel that prehistoric art



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objects buried with their ancestors in the earth of the homelands are sacred, eliciting a sense of awe and reverence. Today, Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan remembers her grandmother Lucy as “the old woman of the turtles, who spoke to them and they listened” (Barbour 2006, 58). Today, female artists like Joanna Underwood, working in native clays, fashion pottery inspired by southeastern designs of the Mississippian period, which are then smoked with cedar branches and pine needles. Completing the circle, Native women acknowledge that “the beginning and the ending of us are always with the earth” (Barbour 2006, 39). Prehistoric Native American religious practice included ingesting or smoking sacred plants, such as tobacco, ayahuasca, and peyote. Some sacred plant traditions have been practiced continually from prehistory to the present day. Other spiritual medicines, peyote for instance, have been reintroduced into Native American religious practice in recent years through appeals to the U.S. legal system. Women play a prominent role in Native American judicial systems today. Religious use of psychotropic plants extends to modern-day Native women as well. In South America, ritually prepared ayahuasca vine is ingested by spiritual seekers on vision quest under the guidance of a trained male or female shaman. Throughout the Americas, women nurture Native spirit using all aspects of nature, from traditional corn recipes to earth medicine-wheel ritual to cosmic vision quest through plant and animal spirit guides. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Arts (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Medicine Women (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American) Further Reading Barbour, Jeannie, Amanda Cobb, and Linda Hogan (with photography by David G. Fitzgerald). Chickasaw: Unconquered and Unconquerable. Portland, OR: Chickasaw Press, 2006. Garfinkel, Alan, and Tirtha Prasad Mukhopadhyay. “Patterned Body Anthropomorphs of the Cosos: How Might Concentric Circle Psychograms Function in Ethnographic Schemes?” Expression 13 (September 2016): 54–70. https://www.academia. edu/29443575/Patterned_Body_Anthropomorphs_of_the_Cosos_How_Might _Concentric_Circle_Psychograms_Function_in_Ethnographic_Schemes.

S A C R E D P L A C E ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Native Americans maintain a relationship with all of Mother Earth as sacred place, feeling that they each are responsible for her well-being, just as she is for theirs. She is honored as the Mother who nourishes, and her embodiments in the elements, such as wind, are spoken of as the Mother. Her rivers and streams are considered the veins of the universe. A Native American farewell is “Walk in beauty,” where every step they take on earth is considered a prayer. Sacred place is often referred to simply as the center, and anywhere you are on Mother Earth is the center of the world. Native American shamans use a shaman stone as the center

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of their medicine wheel, which can be a physical item like a woven rug or a larger circle of stones placed directly on Mother Earth, used to access the spirit world through animal spirit guides. Native American sacred place is also centered on their conception of time as cyclic rather than linear. Conceiving of time as cyclic means that everything in nature is seen as a harmonious process of birth, death, and rebirth: the circle of life. These cultures have remained rooted in earth’s seasonal cycles, with ceremonial dances still held today in reverence for each of earth’s four seasons. Native Americans have strived to live in harmony with nature through ritual offerings to Mother Earth for the things they have taken from her, such as medicinal herbs. In the southeast, the sacred fire is the traditional locus of sacred place. Plains Indians have sought visions on a mountain as sacred place. Concerning the fate of departed souls, the story goes that an old woman at a fork in the Milky Way sits in judgment. The Pleiades has been thought of as the sacred place souls return to. Native American belief in cyclic time renders their cultures timeless because the deepest of their cultural traditions, such as seasonal migrations, remained constant over millennia. Native American sacred rock art sites, dating back 10,000 years and more, document their use of landscape features to calculate winter and summer solstice and fall and spring equinox. Across much of North America, seasonal migration was essential for survival of the indigenous tribes. Cosmological timekeeping calculated and recorded at these rock art sites was juxtaposed alongside petroglyphs (pecked etchings) and pictographs (paintings) of the seasonal hunts for game animals. Rock-art images of game animals acted as fertility prayers for the increase of the herd, offered to Mother Earth and the Creator or Great Spirit. Mother Earth, through whom it is believed that all things needed for survival are birthed, offers passageway to the spirit world. Often this sacred passageway is marked by a geological feature that resembles the female reproductive organs. At these locations, shamans would undertake a vision quest, or ascetic ritual, designed to adorn them with wisdom and powers needed by their communities. To accomplish this at sacred vision-quest sites, shamans might enter a vision cave—a small physical cave symbolic of the womb—where they would receive visions of animal spirit guides conferring their powers and wisdom on them. Pueblo kivas also represent the womb. In the dreamtime, shamans would descend the underworld passageway or ascend the sky ladder to receive their visions. They emerged from the vision cave or kiva as if rebirthed from Mother Earth to record their visions in rock petroglyphs or pictographs before returning to their communities with deep wisdom and powerful medicine to share. At a Chumash sacred place on the Carrizo Plain of California, shamans sought boons (miraculous gifts from a divine source) through its physical fertility symbol: a large rock outcropping resembling the female vulva. Chumash pictographs also portrayed the fertility symbol of circle with a line through it, common to indigenous sacred sites worldwide. This Chumash sacred place was also marked with an etched symbol of the shamanic medicine wheel. The rectangular petroglyph, which is also painted, is anthropomorphic, representing the shaman’s body and head. The center point marks the shaman’s navel or inner center, literal and symbolic connection to nourishment



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from Mother Earth. The medicine wheel’s center is known as the Hogan or Home, archetypal center of the world. In Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, an immense sandstone pillar rises from the canyon floor, representing the womb of Mother Earth. Together with a lower mound shaped like a breast, the pillar marks the sacred place of Spider Woman, the Creation Thinker Woman, whose thoughts are believed to manifest creation. Numic scratched rock art throughout the Great Basin, which extends from western Utah into Nevada and parts of Oregon and California, is thought to be reflective of intimate events in the lives of females and was likely created by women. At these sacred places, the hatched scratching was a means to capture the power of the underlying rock-art images, such as fecundity of game and edible plants. Some believe that women created this art at sacred places in propitiation for childbearing, abundance, and prophesy and that female shamans depicted themselves in rock art with prominent labia, thus identifying themselves as women. Zion Canyon in Utah, which was carved by the Virgin River, is demarcated at the fertile river’s place of emergence from Mukuntuweap, “straight canyon,” by a geological feature known as the Temple of Sinawava. This Southern Paiute sacred place since 1100 CE was also a place of pilgrimage for the Fremont and Pueblo Indians before them, back to around 5000 BCE (National Park Service Archeology Program n.d.). Here the Virgin River’s narrow slot-canyon is itself suggestive of the birth canal, where the immense red sandstone walls surrounding this entrance to Mukuntuweap form a semicircle through which “straight canyon” runs. Also in Utah, the Escalante River has been carving a deep canyon into the sandstone for millennia. One sacred rock-art site high above the fertile river is capped by a geological rock formation shaped like a breast. That place is marked as sacred by the hundreds of human handprints in white pigment pressed up under Mother Earth’s breast. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) See also: Indigenous Religions: Arts (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Medicine Women (Native American); Nature (Native American); Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Sheela na gigs Further Reading Bear Heart, and Molly Larkin. The Wind Is My Mother: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman. New York: Berkley, 1998. Garfinkel, Alan, and Kish LaPierre. “Great Basin Forager Women’s Rock Art: Symbols, Signs and Subsistence.” 2016. https://www.academia.edu/9727700/Great_Basin_Forager _Womens_Rock_Art_Symbols_Signs_and_Subsistence. Grant, Campbell. The Rock Paintings of the Chumash: A Study of a California Indian Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965. National Park Service Archeology Program. “Antiquities Act 1906–2006; Monument Profiles: Mukuntuweap National Monument and Zion National Monument.” 2016. https://www.nps.gov/archeology/sites/antiquities/profileMukuntuweap.htm. Ross, A. C. Mitakuye Oyasin: “We Are All Related.” Denver: BEAR, 1994. Swanton, John R. Chickasaw Society and Religion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

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S A C R E D S P I R I T S ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Female figures played important roles in the religious systems of many Native groups of the Americas. Mostly, they relate to women’s everyday activities, like food giving, weaving, childbearing, and fertility. Despite local variations of specific beliefs, certain common concepts may be observed across cultures. Usually, one of the most important female beings would be associated with the creation and sustenance of the visible world: the earth and the life on its surface. Known under different names (e.g., Pachamama in the Andes; Atira in the Pawnee Nation), in her procreative and nourishing aspects she was frequently connected with broadly defined fertility of living creatures and crops. Sometimes the environment with its ecological and geological features was believed to be created out of the body of a woman, as one Okanagan tale recounts: her body became soil, her hair plants, her bones transformed into rocks and stones. Earthquakes could be perceived as her movements, the wind as her breath. According to some stories, the first people emerged from a cave constituting the metaphorical womb of Mother Earth. Although attitudes toward the natural environment could vary from tribe to tribe, generally they were marked by respect and balanced exploitation. Similarly, the most fundamental crops are often given by female beings, sometimes involving divine sacrifice. Known as Corn Mother to many cultures of both Americas (e.g., Arikara, Cherokee, Choctaw, Inca), she appears in numerous traditions throughout the centuries in reference to the staple source of nutrition and its origin. On some occasions, she may send her daughters called Three Sisters (e.g., Iroquois), representing the main ingredients of the New World’s diet: corn, bean, and squash. Other beneficial plants could also have their patronesses. The Central Mexican Mayahuel, whose earliest known depictions appeared in the early postclassic period (900–1200 CE), was associated with maguey, or agave, a valuable and versatile source to produce cloth, ropes, thorny tools for ritual bloodletting, and perhaps most significantly, an alcoholic drink called octli (pulque). This beverage, consumed during public ceremonies by Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and Aztecs, was made from fermented juice of the plant. The structure of its sap was seen as analogous with mother’s milk, and indeed Mayahuel was often depicted breastfeeding, with agave sprouting from her body. In the Andean highlands, according to Inca beliefs (ca. 1438–1533 CE), there was Mama Coca and the sacred leaves of the coca shrub with their medicinal benefits, enabling people to endure the difficulties of living and working in the mountainous area. Being one of the daughters of Mother Earth, Pachamama, she was also the patroness of health, divination, and joy. Likewise, related to the natural world were Mama Sara (corn), Mama Acxo (potatoes), Mama Quinoa (quinoa), Mama Allpa (harvest), Mama Quilla (moon), and Mama Cocha (sea). Another important female in many religions was a moon-related figure, frequently paired with the usually male-attributed sun. In late classic Maya iconography (ca. 600–900 CE), she may be easily recognized as a young and beautiful woman sitting on a crescent with a rabbit on her lap. Associated with wet environment, she was also connected to agriculture. Correspondingly, as recorded at the turn of the 20th century, the Pawnee tribe of the Great Plains believed that they



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had received the buffalo and corn from the Moon Woman. Distinctively, Mama Quilla of the South American Incas (ca. 1438–1533 CE) was linked with silver, as this precious metal was believed to be made of her tears that had fallen onto the surface of the earth. The inhabitants of Central Mexico also venerated Xochiquetzal, represented for instance in the Codex Borbonicus at the beginning of the 16th century. She embodied everything beautiful and alluring: youth, joy, love, sensual pleasure, flowers, and feasting. She was also the patroness of pregnancy, childbirth, young mothers, spiritual purification, and arts of highest aesthetic value, like embroidery and feather work. The divine patron of weaving was endowed with feminine traits. A number of North American tribes called her Spider Woman, who, besides teaching people the art of spinning and weaving, brought fire and knowledge of pottery making, whose importance for survival and cultural development cannot be overestimated. Interestingly, the Navajo Indians, who acquired weaving techniques from the Pueblo people before the middle of the 17th century, also adopted the traditional stories related to this craft. By the time the Spanish arrived in the New World at the end of the 15th century, there were many important pilgrimage destinations. Among them were Cozumel and Isla Mujeres, two islands located along the Caribbean coastline of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. Both were dedicated to Ixchel, a patroness of midwives, pregnancy, weaving, and divination. The visitors, many of them women coming even from remote areas, searched for divine advice and prayed for fertility. However, not all female spirit beings carried positive connotations in Native American Religions. Aztec Cihuateteo, represented for instance in the Codex Borgia around 1500, were malicious spirits, souls of women who died in childbirth. They were believed to follow the westering sun and to descend to the surface of the earth on five various days during the year. Seducers and kidnappers, they could provoke madness and haunted the crossroads where their shrines were usually located. Another one was Sedna, known from the old Inuit creation stories recorded by Franz Boas (1888) and Knud Rasmussen (1927). She was associated with the sea and the underworld, Adlivun, inhabited by the dead, and was capable of provoking storms and keeping the sea animals from hunters, who were thereby doomed to hunger. For millennia, sacred stories were passed on by oral tradition, which renders tracing their origins, evolution, and local adaptations very difficult. Although the European settlers tried to impose their own vision of the world, destroying places of worship and representations of indigenous divinities, some of the native beliefs withstood these difficult times. In certain areas, they eventually syncretized with Christianity, as may be observed in many communities of Guatemala and the Andes. While for some this has become a treasured identity, others aim at the revival of the original traditions of their ancestors. Beata Anton See also: Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Creation Stories (Native American); Nature (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American)

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Further Reading Leeming David A., and Jake Page. The Mythology of Native North America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Miller, Mary, and Karl Taube. An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya. London: Thames and Hudson, 2014. Steele, Paul R., and Catherine J. Allen. Handbook of Inca Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Stockel, Henrietta H. Women of the Apache Nation: Voices of Truth. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991. Stone, Andrea, and Marc Zender. Reading Maya Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Maya Painting and Sculpture. London: Thames and Hudson, 2011. Waldman, Carl. Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes. 3rd ed. New York: Checkmark Books, 2006.

S H A M A N I S M I N E U R A S I A N C U LT U R E S Shamanism is the key to understanding how cultural convergences in northern Eurasia are overarched by belief systems in which an animistic world view crystallizes. It has been emphasized that shamanism is the most ancient and most long-lasting of all cultural institutions in the Northern Hemisphere. The spiritual gravitation of this world view lies in the necessity of a harmonious relationship of human beings with nature. Given the fragile balance of life resources in the north, the living conditions and activities of human beings cannot evolve in a kind of antagonistic tension with the life cycle but in concordance with it. Human beings are supposed to live and breathe in the rhythm of nature to minimize conflict when interacting with the world of animals, plants, and spirits. In this world of animated nature, the shaman possesses a key role for communication between the worlds, as a mediator to convey the vital spiritual needs of the community to the forces that guarantee a harmonious balance among the participants in the life cycle. The shaman acts with a mandate from the spiritual powers that inhabit the animated world. But without the responsibility for his or her action vis-à-vis the community, the shaman’s doing would be futile. There is an intrinsic interconnection between the shaman as a member of the community, selected for special tasks by this community, and his or her role as a mediator between the world of the living and the spirit world. Only with the shaman’s intervention can the community experience the oneness of the spirit world and the protection provided by the spirits inhabiting everything in the environment (plants, animals, and natural phenomena such as rivers or lakes, mountains, or the forest). Among the responsibilities of the shaman is looking at the spirit world with a gaze that is supposed to reflect his or her spiritual tuning. A shaman’s visionary quality of “seeing” differs by its very nature from that of ordinary members of the community. When a shaman makes pronouncements about the matters of the spirit world, these explanations are based on his or her specific experience of especially tuned “seeing.” The tradition of shamanism among the peoples of northern Eurasia includes both male and female shamans. In communities where shamans of both sexes function, they function alongside with—not in competition with—one another. As



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mediators between the worlds, their roles are distinguished by the different tasks they perform. In connection with the celebration of a funeral, the male shaman would be responsible for the performance of rituals of transcending the world of the living to gain access to the spirit world and to escort the soul of the deceased to the netherworld, while the female shaman’s responsibility would be to comfort those who suffered a personal loss and to ease the pain of mourning in the community by performing rites of spiritual healing. A similar role, that of spiritual healing, is traditionally taken by women as the performers of laments among the Finnic peoples (Ingrians, Izhorians, Vots, Karelians) living in the Baltic area. Female shamans among the Saami and the Samoyed peoples of Siberia were held in high esteem. Those traditions must be ancient because there is evidence for the presence of women in the Neolithic imagery of northern Europe relating to mythopoetic contexts of shamanism. Among the finest specimens is an image of a female shaman that features in the largest picture complex of rock art found thus far in Finland, at Astuvansalmi (in the municipality of Ristiina) on the shore of Lake Saimaa. The female shaman holds a bow. The figure is centered and surrounded by elks with their heads turned toward her. The site has been identified as a place for the performance of rituals related to hunting magic. In all probability, the female figure that is depicted represents the performer of such rituals. The pictures at Astuvansalmi that date to the third millennium BCE were painted (in red) by archaic hunter-gatherers in the region. Early evidence for the activities of female shamans in community life also comes from regions farther south. Since the late 1970s, Chinese archaeologists have retrieved corpses from earthen burials that had been preserved in the dry air and had been naturally mummified. Ever more graves were opened, and their contents became a sensation worldwide. The human remains of that ancient culture have become known as the Mummies of Ûrümchi or Tarim mummies. Ürümchi is the capital of the westernmost province of China, Xinjiang, and Tarim is the name for the large Taklimakan desert, a southern outlet of the Mongolian Gobi desert. The Tarim people established their flourishing culture on the northern and southern rim of the Taklimakan desert and founded the oasis settlements that were later integrated into the silk road. This culture dates to the second millennium BCE. DNA analysis shows that the people who lived in those settlements were, genetically, not of Chinese stock. The Tarim people were of Indo-European affiliation. Archaeologists have traced the migratory routes of the ancestors who came from the west through central Asia and southern Siberia. Among the well-preserved mummies were those of women, and some of them distinguish themselves—by their attire and grave goods—as shamans. Most famous are the female shamans from the graves of Subeshi. It is significant that people of Indo-European stock participated in the cultural traditions of the Eurasian convergence zone, in the prominence of female practitioners of shamanism for one. At an early stage of cultural development, the role of female shamans is associated with the tradition of ancient literacy. Early writing during the era of the Shang dynasty in ancient China was instrumentalized by the functionaries of ritual life as

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a powerful means to communicate with the supernatural. Female shamans were engaged in ritual practices associated with divination, and this included the use of writing on oracular bones (i.e., turtle shells, shoulder blades, or bones of deer). Before any important event, such as the foundation of a temple, a military campaign, or decisions in state affairs, the ancestors were invoked and asked for guidance by means of oracular practices. The inscribed oracular bones were thrown into a ritual fire, and the shaman (or priest) would interpret the ancestors’ advice by interpreting the cracks in the bones caused by the heat. Among the functionaries who practiced divination by means of inscribed oracle bones were highly respected female shamans. The role of the female shaman tends to dominate over that of the male shaman among the ethnic groups of Tungus (Altaic) stock. Such attitudes are also known from the Palaeoasiatic peoples in northeastern Siberia. “Women were considered better shamans than men, as in most ecstatic cults. The phenomenon of change of sex, noticed among the Koryak and Itelmen, may have been related to this. A male shaman not only dressed as a woman but also adopted women’s manners and work” (Serov 1988, 248 f.). Female shamans enjoyed a greater prestige than male shamans because people believed that they possessed sacral and latent gifts, and they were considered to be more powerful as healers than male shamans. In modern times as in the old days, the female shaman transfers her knowledge to her daughter if she possesses the exceptional qualities to make her eligible for shamanhood. The relationship of a shaman to a lineage or clan was of particular importance for its status in the eyes of the other members in the community. This was of special significance in the case of female shamans. Social bonds of kinship were even established beyond existing bloodlines as a strategy of gaining prestige. “The shamans of the Altaic peoples regarded it as important to have female shamans in their family tree. They called female shamans ‘flying female shamans’. If a family lacked female shamans, they were adopted from other families” (Dyakonova 2001, 64). The esteem in which female shamans were held also articulated itself in more developed cultures with a stratified society. In medieval Mongol society, for example, there was equality of the sexes in the professional class of shamans who belonged to the ruling elite. The most famous of all Mongol shamans were the son of Genghis Khan (1162–1227), Chagatai, and his wife. It is noteworthy that the prominent status and function of the female shaman has survived up to the present not only in the traditional communities of northern Eurasia but also in societies that have entered the information age. This is true for communities in which ancestral cultural patterns of great antiquity have persisted throughout the ages and have remained intact despite fundamental transformations of society. Illustrative of this is the popularity of female shamans in Korea. Among the constitutive elements of culture among the Koreans are traditions that have been inherited from Tungus ancestors who had a part in Korean ethnogenesis. The female shamans are called mudang or mansin (10,000 spirits) in Korea. The mudang perform shamanistic rituals not only in the rural areas but also in urban environments.



Shamans in Korea

The shaman herself is clad in a long garment that “captures the spirit,” and among her requisites are a fan and magical mirrors. The mudang is assisted by male aides who wear cock feathers, a reminder of this animal’s status as a totem among Tungus people. Harald Haarmann See also: Indigenous Religions: Shamans in Korea; Prehistoric Religions: Burials; Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures; Neolithic Female Figures; Shamanism; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices; Shinto: Shamans and Ritualists Further Reading Dyakonova, Vera P. “Female Shamans of the Turkic-Speaking Peoples of Southern Siberia.” In Shamanhood—Symbolism and Epic, edited by Juha Pentikäinen, 63–69. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001. Haarmann, Harald. Ancient Knowledge, Ancient Know-How, Ancient Reasoning: Cultural Memory in Transition from Prehistory to Classical Antiquity and Beyond. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2013. Haarmann, Harald, and Joan Marler. Introducing the Mythological Crescent: Ancient Beliefs and Imagery Connecting Eurasia with Anatolia. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2008. Mallory, J. P., and Victor H. Mair. The Tarim Mummies. Ancient China und the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Müller-Ebeling, Claudia, Christian Rätsch, and Surendra Bahadur Shahi. Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002. Serov, S. I. “Guardians and Spirit-Masters of Siberia.” In Crossroads of Continents. Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, edited by William W. Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell, 241–55. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.

SHAMANS IN KOREA Shamans—religious practitioners who actively engage spirits, deities, or other invisible forces on behalf of the community and who convey this engagement through the medium of their own bodies—are found all over the world. But shaman, like magic, or even religion, is a term borrowed from one context (the Even reindeer herders of Siberia gave us shaman) and applied to another to enable a broad, comparative conversation. Such exercises also demand caution lest the experiences of one setting be overread to the distortion of another. Korean shamans (called mudang, mansin, posal, and other regional variations) counter standard expectations of shamans on two counts: most of them are women, and they are active in a historically complex and now hyperdeveloped society. Precisely because shamans transmit visions and experiences invisible to ordinary mortals, bringing an “out there” into a ritual performance here and now, shamanic practice is fluid and adaptive. In Korea no less than anywhere else, shamanic visions draw on the living surround. The deities and ancestors who appear in a Korean shaman’s ritual kut articulate an essentially Confucian morality shared by most participants. Shamans have also borrowed deities, vocabulary, visual imagery, and the netherworld from

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40 Shamans in Korea

Korean shamaness communicates a message to her client from the client’s deceased husband. The majority of shamans in Korea are women. (Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images)

Buddhist practice. The issues that shamans address are drawn from contemporary life; in the new millennium, divinities address the uncertainties and anxieties attending businesses, precarious investments, and debt. “Shamanism” is an “ism” only in the sense that “journalism” is likewise an “ism,” a practice and not a distinct and coherent theology. Ancient texts suggest the presence of shaman-like figures early in Korean history, and scholars cite these as evidence for contemporary shamans as practitioners of a primordial, indigenous religiosity predating the incursion of Confucianism and Buddhism from continental Asia. However, the first clear evidence of female mudang appears in the 13th century, an account of a woman who hangs colorful images of their deities above her altar, dances and sings in the deity’s persona, issues cautions, and channels blessing. In South Korea today, some shamans are recognized government-designated “heritage bearers” who perform otherwise endangered rituals and train successors. Some shamans have begun to challenge the “heritage” designation, arguing that only state recognition as a “shaman religion” (mugyo) will protect them from harassment by Christian zealots and halt the destruction of their sacred sites for property development. Efforts to organize the shamans into an official religion have, to date, met with failure. So far, with one outstanding exception, these quixotic movements have been led by men. Folkloric descriptions of kut, the Korean shaman’s primary ritual, are fixed, archetypal sequences of deity appearances. But what the deities say and do when they appear in sequence is intended to address the particular needs of different client households: illness, adultery, investment risk and financial loss, or unruly



Women Warriors (Native American)

children. Happy families are all alike, and unhappy families hold kut, to paraphrase Tolstoy. Women are, with a few exceptions, the primary participants in shaman rituals, initiating contact through a divination session and then, if it seems warranted, as sponsors of a kut. This role is consistent with the cultural expectation that women, as domestic managers, are responsible for maintaining harmony and prosperity. The kut is a ritual theater, not theater as something artificial but as something alive and powerful, enacted in and through temporal space. In the 1970s, when I did my first fieldwork, that space was a traditional rural Korean house. The kut began outside the main house gate with an invitation to the deities and then moved inside the gate and up onto the veranda, where most of the action took place. It honored the Seven Stars and the Mountain God—deities who inhabit pure, high space—on the storage platform and the Birth Grandmother in the inner room where children were conceived and born. As the ritual unfolded, deities appeared, each in turn, complained of past neglect, bargained for cash, and when finally won over gave lavish promises of succor, predictable encounters interspersed with personalized bits of recent family history and flashes of humor and grief from the deities and ancestors. When the kut reached its climax, the action moved away from the house again as negative forces were expelled into the fields beyond the house wall, the success of the ritual confirmed with the cast of a knife, the tip pointing away from the open gate. These procedures are approximated and abbreviated today in commercial shrine space rather than in the apartment buildings where most South Koreans now live, transformed and still transforming. Laurel Kendall See also: African Religions: Priestesses and Oracular Women; Ancient Religions: Shamans in East Asia; Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Ceremonies (Native American); Kinship (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American); Sacred Spirits (Native American); Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures; Prehistoric Religions: Shamanism Further Reading Kendall, Laurel. Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983. Kendall, Laurel. Shamans, Nostalgias, and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009.

W O M E N WA R R I O R S ( N AT I V E A M E R I C A N ) Although they comprised a small minority of all warriors, women played a number of roles supporting warfare, and the female warrior was a cultural role found in numerous Native American societies across North America. When women became warriors, it was typically for a short duration and in response to a specific event, and their status as a warrior supplemented feminine gender roles and social expectations. Before, during, and after warfare, women often played an important part in

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Women Warriors (Native American)

religious ceremonies connected to warring, and the acquisition of the warrior role was often justified by supernatural means, such as visions. Warfare and raiding were generally conceived of as masculine activities in the Native American societies of North America. Nevertheless, in many Native societies, women often had a substantial role in warfare in motivating men to engage in warring, providing logistical and moral support prior to a war party’s departure, fasting and praying while a war party was away, and sometimes accompanying war parties as sentries or messengers. In select cases, women deviated from these roles and joined their male counterparts as combatants. Women warriors are attested among the Apache, Blackfeet, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Cree, Kaska, Ojibwa, Oneida, Lakota, Tewa, and Zuni, as well as in many other tribes (Medicine and Jacobs 2001, 128; Lang 1998, 303–05; Niethammer 1977, 167–73). Unlike male berdache, women did not become warriors because they failed to live up to the expectations of their gender, and they generally maintained other aspects of their gender identity, including dress. Women engaged in warfare for the same reasons as their male counterparts, including defense, revenge, wealth, and prestige, but they rarely continued in the warrior lifestyle for the duration of their lives. The warrior role provided these women a means to acquire militant prestige typically reserved for men and generally did not otherwise endanger their social status (Medicine and Jacobs 2001, 128–36). Women warriors often had religious compulsions and received visions or repeated dreams motivating their participation in warfare, especially in cases of revenging the loss of a family member. Examples of women compelled to become warriors as a result of visions can be found among the Lakota, Nootka, and Ojibwa (Lang 1998, 304; Medicine and Jacobs 2001, 131–32). Religious practitioners sanctioned such supernatural experiences. Although most women warriors only continued in the warrior lifestyle for a short duration, they were accorded traditional martial honors and prestige that lasted throughout their lives. David Dry See also: Indigenous Religions: Ceremonies (Native American); Medicine Women (Native American) Further Reading Buchanan, Kimberly Moore. Apache Women Warriors. El Paso: Texas Western Press, University of Texas at El Paso, 1986. Jones, David E. Women Warriors: A History. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1997. Lang, Sabine. Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Medicine, Beatrice, and Sue-Ellen Jacobs. Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining “Native”: Selected Writings. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Niethammer, Carolyn J. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Collier Books, 1977.

Islam

INTRODUCTION One of the first things people think of when they hear the word Islam is women’s rights, or, more specifically, the lack of women’s equal rights under Islam. It is true that women in Islam face certain entrenched gender inequalities. A man may have up to four wives, while a woman may have only one husband, for example, and men receive a greater share of inheritance. Outsiders to Islam also worry about terrorism. These worries suggest the need for education and understanding about Islam. For example, unequal inheritance laws are intended to balance scriptural and legal requirements that men support their wives and children. And, while it is true that some Islamic extremists promote violence (as do extremists from others faiths and cultures), it is also true that the vast majority of the world’s nearly 2 billion Muslims are peaceful. Women’s lives in Islam, the ideals set out for them, and some of their responses to gender inequality are discussed in this section. Muslim women’s dress is the subject of “Coverings,” in which Sana Tayyen discusses Muslim sensibilities on the scriptural requirement that women dress modestly. In most Muslim-majority countries, Tayyen explains, women’s coverings are a choice rather than a requirement, and women may choose (based on their own leanings and those of their family and society) whether and what kind of covering to wear. Role models and ideals for women are discussed in the entries “Ideal Woman,” “Saints,” “Maryam,” “Hawwa,” “Fatima,” “Hagar,” and “Prophet’s Wives.” Some of these relate to the Bible: Maryam refers to the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, whom Muslims revere as a prophet of God. Hawwa is Arabic for Eve from the book of Genesis. And Hagar is the mother of Ishmael, who is believed to be an ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. Women’s education in Islamic societies and in the diaspora is discussed in “Education.” In this essay, Ali A. Olomi relates some educated women in Islamic history, current strides for Muslim women in higher education, and the unfortunate restriction in some regions on girls’ education due to conservative movements in Islam. Issues in law and cultural practice affect the health and happiness of women in Islam. Entries that discuss some of these are “Polygamy,” “Marriage and Divorce,” “Shari’a” (Islamic law), “Honor,” and “Female Genital Mutilation.” Reforming social, cultural, and legal factors that limit women’s lives is an ongoing process in Muslim societies, as in others. In “Reform,” Sana Tayyen discusses women’s reform movements in Islam, which she states “aim to reform religious texts, government, and society in general.” And, in “Feminism,” Rannveig Haga discusses Muslim women who actively work toward gender equality. While feminist in their intent,

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Haga notes, such women often reject the label “feminist” due to its association with westernization and colonialism. Muslim women are also peacemakers and organizers. Muslim women’s peacemaking roles and activism are discussed in “Peacemaking” (also see “Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women” in the Christianity section). And “Women’s Organizations” looks at Muslim women’s engagement with religion, education, professional occupations, politics, and programs for social welfare through their development, management, and maintenance of women’s organizations. Women in lesser-known traditions related to Islam are discussed in “Sufism” (mystical Islam) and “Druze Religion,” an offshoot of Islam. Also, a number of informative articles relate features of life and faith for women in specific regions, including “Islam in Africa,” “Islam in the United States,” “Islam in Europe,” and “Islam in the Middle East.” Diaspora, meaning dispersion of peoples away from their homeland, is taking place more and more today. “Islam in Diaspora” discusses the roles and impact on Muslim women of living in non-Muslim-majority nations. General Bibliography—Islam Abusharaf, Rogaia Mustafa. Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Ahmed, Leila. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Azzam, Intisar. Gender and Religion: Druze Women. London: Druze Heritage Foundation, 2007. Badran, Margot, ed. Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2011. Boddy, Janice. Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar cult in northern Sudan. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Deeb, Lara. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Hammad, Ahmad Zaki. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Helminski, Camille Adams. Women of Sufism. Boston: Shambhala, 2003. Karim, Jamillah. American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Mernissi, Fatimah. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Boston: Addison Wesley, 1991. Nadwı-, Mohammad Akram. Al Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam. Oxford: Interface, 2013. Pemberton, Kelly. Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013. Rinaldo, Rachel. Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rouse, Carolyn. Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.



Coverings

Sadiqi, Fatima. Women’s Movements in Post-“Arab Spring” North Africa. London: Springer, 2016. Sayeed, A. Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Sayeed, Asma. “Women and the Hajj.” In The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo and Shawkat M. Toorawa, 65-86. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Schimmel, Annemarie. My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam. New York: Continuum, 1997. Sharoni, Simona. “Gender and Conflict Transformation in Israel/Palestine.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13, no. 4 (2012): 113–28. Shirazi, Faegheh. Velvet Jihad: Muslim Women’s Quiet Resistance to Islamic Fundamentalism. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2011. Smith, Jane I., and Yvonne Haddad. “The Virgin Mary in Islamic Tradition and Commentary.” The Muslim World 79 (1989): 161–87. Tucker, Judith E. Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. van Nieukerk, Karin. Women Embracing Islam: Gender and Conversion in the West. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

COVERINGS Among Muslim communities, head and body coverings, known as the hijab, can be seen on Muslim women. Although male members of the society dress modestly, women are more distinct in the way they dress, particularly when the full body and head covering is practiced. After reaching puberty, a Muslim woman may generally cover her hair, body, arms, neck, and feet. In some Muslim communities, women also include a face veil or a niqab, or a burka, which covers the entire body, except for a screen for vision; however, these two types of dress are not required in most Muslim countries, and a relatively small percentage of Muslim women wear this type of covering. Islamic veiling stems from the Qur’an, which impels women of faith to “cover their adornments and to draw their veils over their bosoms” (24:31). Different interpretations of this verse are the source for different types of Muslim women’s coverings. Some interpret this verse as an obligation to simply dress modestly and not necessarily to cover the head. Others interpret this verse to include the entire body, head, and face. However, according to the majority of Islamic schools of jurisprudence, particularly the Sunni branch of Islam, this covering should be of the hair and the full body, excluding the hands and face. Muslim women who dress according to Islamic jurisprudence will usually cover their hair with a scarf and wear long-sleeve tops and loose-fitting pants, skirts, or dresses. Due to the number of differing interpretations of this Qur’anic verse and accompanying hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) that elaborate on the hijab, one can notice a variety of ways that women may cover in Muslim communities. In many countries that have majority-Muslim populations, such as Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Indonesia, and Pakistan, it is very typical to see women dressed in hijab walking next to or with women who have not covered their hair or dressed modestly.

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The hijab, which literally means “barrier,” is meant to be worn in the company of men outside a woman’s immediate family. She does not cover in front of her husband, father, sons, brothers, uncles, and nephews. The covering of her body is meant to protect her from unwanted sexual advances and according to the Qur’an to allow her to reach an emotional and physical state of happiness and/or success. A woman doesn’t wear her hijab inside her home unless a male is present who doesn’t fit the Islamic description of immediate family. Also, Muslim women do not cover in all-female gatherings. Hence, many Muslims prefer to have social gatherings where men and women occupy different rooms or banquet halls for wedWomen in Istanbul, Turkey, wear niqabs (coverings dings, parties, and other social with only the eyes showing). Muslim women’s cov- events. erings vary according to local tradition, values, and A woman’s hijab also acts as personal choice. (Nicholas Pitt/Getty Images) an identity marker as she is singled out as a Muslim woman particularly in multireligious societies. Her hijab is at times a sign of her religiosity, yet, it can also be a sign of her cultural location and not a sign of how pious or religious she is. Her hijab is also not indicative of her education level or socioeconomic status in society. Muslim women from all cultures, races, and geographies wear the hijab. Although the hijab runs through all of these categories, it is very common to see these categories imposing themselves on the hijab; that is, there are a variety of ways that Muslim women from around the world style their hijab. The hijab is not limited to any color or style as long as it is loose fitting, not see through, and covers all parts of the body discussed above. Not only is the hijab a sign of religiosity, identity, and culture, but it has also been depicted as a political symbol. Some governments view the hijab as a threat to political order and a form of backwardness. Many countries, Muslim populated and secular, have placed constitutional bans on the hijab, particularly in public buildings such as universities, schools, and libraries. These government bans have created tense environments between the people and the established authorities. Countries such as Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, and Syria have all imposed restrictions on the hijab, although presently they no longer enforce these bans due to the high level of protest they received from Muslim women who did



Coverings

Muslim Women’s Coverings Burka: Full body and face covering with a mesh fabric over the eyes Chador: Square of dark fabric that falls from the head to the ankles, usually held by hand under the chin Dupatta: A long scarf that is loosely draped over the head and shoulders, commonly worn in south Asia Hijab: Headscarf covering the head and the neck but not the face or eyes Jilbab: Long, loose outer garment worn over other clothes; nowadays this often takes the form of a long coat, which is worn with a scarf or head covering Khimar: Scarf that covers the head, neck, and shoulders Magneh: Head covering for Iranian women—does not necessarily have to be tightly worn Manteau: Outer coat or cloak worn by Iranian women (word adopted from French) Niqab: Head and face veil exposing the eyes only

not want governments regulating their dress. France, a secular European country, has made the hijab illegal in government buildings, which includes public schools. On the flip side of this, certain governments, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, have made the head and full-body coverings mandatory. However, the majority of countries with significant populations of Muslims do not have governments regulating how women should dress. Usually, the culture, family, or religious affiliation influence whether or not a woman wears the hijab. Covering the female body and hair was never meant to be a punishment or oppression of women. Historically, wearing a veil was viewed as an elite way of dressing. However, there are vocal critics who view the hijab as oppressive. Certain feminists have seen the veil as a tool to keep women from rising above men. The famous Egyptian feminist Huda Sha’arawi made history in 1923 in Egypt when, while disembarking from a train, she removed her veil in front of a crowd. The removal of her veil was seen as an act of liberation and hailed by feminists and Westerners. The hijab still maintains its critics from within and without the Muslim tradition. Sana Tayyen See also: Islam: Feminism; Honor; Purdah Further Reading Bowden, John R. Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Bullock, Katherine. Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes. London: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2003. Karim, Jamillah. American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. New York: Perseus Books, 1991.

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DIASPORA The word diaspora defines people who (1) have moved or whose families have moved a significant distance to new countries, (2) where they are a minority, (3) maintaining a relationship with the countries of origin, even remembering them, and thus developing transnational belonging, and (4) have built a common self-consciousness, a sense of (national, cultural, linguistic, religious) identity, on the basis of which people can recognize themselves and be recognized by others (Mandaville 2001). Muslim diaspora usually refers to the community of migrants or migrants’ descendants linked to 20th-century migration toward Europe and North America, despite large Muslim communities having historically crossed borders. It is generally assumed that women make up half of all diasporic Muslims, though there are no specific statistics. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center report, among the almost 2 billion Muslims in the world, fewer than 25 percent live in non-Muslim countries, and 3 percent live in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. This figure is likely to grow because of a high fertility rate, Muslims’ young average age, conversion, and international migration flows. For Muslims, living in diaspora has proved to be a challenge, with special challenges for Muslim women. Muslim women in diaspora are at the intersection between private and public, community and society, beyond individual religiosity and different personal paths (Moghissi 2006). In diaspora, they are often considered by their community to be a symbol of the group’s identity and a link with the country of origin. Host societies, on their side, often perceive Muslim women as oppressed by a patriarchal structure, engendering discriminatory attitudes and practices. At the crossroad of these conflicting pressures, diasporic Muslim women creatively process their religiosity and belonging. Concerning religious practices, specific statistics report that there are no major differences among male and female diasporic Muslims concerning praying or accomplishing rites, such as Ramadan’s fasting. The only difference is mosque attendance, which is slightly lower among women due to persistence in some ethnic communities of cultural norms that exclude women from places of worship. Nevertheless, living in diaspora means living in a religious context freed from tra­ ditional centralized Islamic political and religious authorities. Women, thus, can use Islam and religious knowledge as flexible resources to support their views and life choices, fighting predetermined discourses and relations that affect and limit their agency. Nontraditional readings of the Qur’an in particular can be a starting point to negotiate women’s place in private and public life and to promote gen­ der equality by opening common spaces of communication and negotiation with familiar and communitarian roles. Research in Europe and North America show how wearing the veil can be a way to justify access to the public sphere—school or jobs—enabling personal choices while avoiding familiar and communitarian conflicts. At the same time, the use of references to historical Muslim women, like the Prophet’s family, who were educated and performed public roles, justifies the view that Muslim women who are educated and who attain social and economic capital can be good Muslim women who respect religious traditions. Although this does not automatically guarantee women the right to act, since conservative cultural



Druze Religion

traditions may prevail, in diaspora, religion has proven to be a potential resource for women to achieve personal goals. Theologically, diaspora gives space to address feminine religious discourses around two discursive strategies: the vindication of universal women’s rights and the promotion of a gendered interpretation of the Qur’an (Wadud 1992). The first strategy recognizes the role of women in contemporary societies, assessed in terms of citizenship and the fight against all forms of discrimination; the second stresses the need to reappropriate religious texts, freeing them from cultural and traditional readings, to contextualize them, producing an autonomous female discourse on Islam. The latter has sustained both the development of feminine (or feminist, according to some studies) interpretations of the Qur’an and the implementation of practices aiming to regain the religious sphere and those roles that traditional patriarchal interpretations have historically denied to women, such as leading mixed prayer, as Amina Wadud did in New York (2005) and Oxford (2008). Women-led prayers have been condemned by traditional Muslim authorities, but the number of cases of Muslim women in diaspora who have been involved in leading religious activities inside and outside of mosques is growing; an example is the increasing number of Muslim women chaplains in prisons or hospitals who perform religious assistance on a par with men, despite mixed-gender environments. Valentina Fedele See also: Islam: Education; Feminism; Islam in Europe; Islam in the United States; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, Lamia. The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History and Ideology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University College of London Press, 1997. Mandaville, Peter. Transnational Muslim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. London: Routledge, 2001. Moghissi, Haideh. Muslim Diaspora: Gender, Culture and Identity. London: Routledge, 2006. Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. The Future of the Global Muslim Population. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Washington, DC, 2011. Wadud, Amina. Qur’an and Woman. Kuala Lumpur: Fajar Bakti, 1992.

DIVORCE See Marriage and Divorce DRUZE RELIGION Druzism is a syncretistic doctrine (a religion that integrates several traditions) founded in Fatimid Egypt in the 11th century. It includes elements and concepts from Shi‘ism, Ismailism, and Greek philosophy (particularly neo-Platonism and Gnosticism), Hinduism, and Islamic Sufism. The number of Druze in the Middle

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East today, scattered across Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordon, is estimated at around a million. Both women and men in Druze society are traditionally divided into two sectors—the religious Uqqal and nonreligious Juhal. Druze religious men and women are distinguished by their external appearance, dress, manners, and social behavior. Druze religious women must cover their heads and whole body and speak modestly and generally are not to be seen or heard. Although both men and women customarily gather in al-Khilwa, the Druze place of worship, every weekday evening, they are strictly segregated by a partition. The al-akhawat (sisters) are required to cover their heads with a white veil (al-niqab) to hide their hair and entire face, leaving only their eyes visible. Prohibited from taking part in worship in al-Khilwa, they congregate behind the partition to listen to al-Dhikir—the rhythmic recitation of al-Hikma. Although women are allowed to read or recite al-Hikma texts, they may not do so in the presence of men. They nonetheless have full access to Rasa’il al-Hikma, the 111 Epistles of Wisdom that constitute the secret sacred texts of the Druze doctrine. They may also transcribe al-Hikma texts. In these religious functions, men and women are largely equal. In the Druze religious community, Druze religious men are obligated to teach their wives to study al-Hikma and fathers to teach their daughters. While religious men and women cannot be taught together, women may teach girls and women or their mahrams (a degree of consanguinity precluding marriage). The number of women within the Uqqal community is greater than the number of men, possibly due to the physical and social limitations placed on female relations with others. While only men can enter the closed Uqqal circle, taking an oath to forswear killing and adultery, no such restrictions are imposed on women (Dana 2003). In terms of sexual morality and social behavior, Druze doctrine does not differ from the common religious morality of Islam. In comparison to Sunni or Shi‘ite Islam, however, Druze doctrine grants women more legal and social rights in religious functions, marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Despite this, their social and moral status is primarily determined by the Druze society’s patrilineal and patriarchal heritage, which establishes male superiority and discriminates against women, especially in regard to sexual morality. Historically, it is reasonable to assume that Shi‘ite Ismailism (from which Druzism split off) formed the historical context in which legal and social equality between men and women was established, developing within an urban intellectual elite at the Fatamid court in Cairo, whose family structure was almost certainly nuclear. The Druze doctrine, in contrast, spread primarily among a rural and mountainous population that has traditionally been patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal. This disparity between the historical urban background of Druzism and the social disposition of the rural communities explains the contradiction between doctrine and real life. Religious men also tend to exploit the fact that Druze doctrine is not known to all in the community in order to impose conservative social values and norms whose contravention of religious law they ignore. Religious Druze women enjoy full access to the scriptures and can be elected to all spiritual positions. According to Druze religious tradition, women may serve as spiritual heads and occupy any religious position—the only monotheistic strand



Druze Religion

within Islamic civilization to do so (Dana 2003). As early as the Druze Dawa (the spreading of the new doctrine in the 11th century), women were sent on secret missions and appointed to leading roles. Al-Sitt Sarah (early 11th century), for example, was dispatched to southern Lebanon to reorganize the community in that region (Makarim and Abu-Salih 1981). Although such female figures are rare in Druze history, some women have gained a high spiritual status within Uqqal society (the religious group). Some examples are Al-Sitt Sarah (Dawa period), al-Sitt Nayfa in the 19th century (known for her asceticism, philanthropy, and spiritual leadership after her husband’s death), and Um Nasib Fatima Falah, who was responsible for religious affairs in Kfar Samia in northern Israel until her death in November 1979, when she was replaced by her granddaughter Hadiya Nasib Falah (b. 1938), who is still alive. In 1961, the Druze Religious Council in Israel adopted the Lebanese Druze community’s laws regulating personal status (1948) as the law of the Druze courts in Israel. In contrast to Sunni and Shi‘ite Islam, Druzism prohibits polygamy; men are not allowed second wives. Husband and wife are treated as equal, nonconsensual divorce is not recognized, property is divided between the two parties, and talaq (unilateral divorce of one’s wife) is conditional on the ruling of a qadi (a Muslim judge who interprets and administers the religious law of Islam) rather than solely on the husband’s wishes. Druze men may not annul a divorce to take their first wife back or remarry her. If a husband is jailed for more than 10 years and spends 5 consecutive years in prison, his wife is entitled to ask for a separation. If a husband disappears or is absent for three years and does not pay alimony, the wife’s request for separation must be honored. If the qadi believes a divorce lacks valid legal grounds, he must grant compensation and damages in addition to the dowry, taking into consideration both the material and moral damage caused to the wife— the effect on her reputation and her reduced chances of remarrying due to her age or number of children. Women have the right to sue for divorce and are granted a divorce with compensation if they prove their husband has been unfaithful or violent (Azzam 2007). Although all these rights are guaranteed by the law, they are frequently denied in practice. Today, no restriction on women seeking educational and employment opportunities outside of the Druze religious community exists. This development is most prominent among the Lebanese Druze, whom recent scholarship shows to have the largest number of working Druze women (Azzam 2007). The same is true of the Druze in Israel, where more than two-thirds of Druze students in Israeli universities are women. Educated Druze women, particularly in Lebanon, use modern education as an agent of social change and as a way of challenging the traditional authority of al-Uqqal. One of the most prominent of these was Nazira Zin al-Din (1908–1976), a pioneer of Islamic feminism. Ordinarily, restrictions and limitations placed on religious Druze (Uqqal) women means that only nonreligious Druze women seek education and jobs outside of their place of residence. Yusri Khaizran See also: Christianity: Polygamy; Islam: Marriage and Divorce; Polygamy; Shari‘a

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Further Reading Azzam, Intisar. Gender and Religion: Druze Women. London: Druze Heritage Foundation, 2007. Dana, Nissim. The Druze in the Middle East: Their Faith, Leadership, Identity and Status. Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic, 2003. Makarim, Sami, and Abbas Abu-Salih. History of the Druze: Muwahidin’s Political Role in the Arab East. Beirut: Manshurat al-Majlis al-Durzi Lil-Buhuth wa al-Inma’, 1981.

E D U C AT I O N The role of Muslim women in education is one of the major debates and controversies in contemporary Islamic discourse. Women’s access to education is an important rallying point for activists and reformers. From the struggles of Malala Yousafzai, who defied the Taliban for her education, to the growing number of Muslim women with PhDs in diverse fields, the issue of women in education is a complicated one in which Islam, politics, and anxieties about gender norms intersect. Today, those in the Muslim world cite religion as both the inspiration for their right to education as well as justification to restrict women. The paradoxical relationship of Islam to women’s education requires a deeper understanding of the history behind the debate. Early Islamic history is replete with women participating in education. Muhammad, the prophet and founder of Islam, educated women and men side by side as religious leaders in the nascent faith, and by most accounts, he expressed in his teachings the equality of men and women when it came to their piety and education. After his death, Muslim women became an essential part of the intellectual and scholarly tradition at the heart of Malala Yousafzai, Muslim activist and winner of the Islam. Two of Muhammad’s wives, Nobel Peace Prize. Yousafzai became a speaker and Aisha bint Abu Bakr (d. 678) activist for human rights and female education, surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban in her and Hafsa bint Umar (d. 665), native Swat Valley, Pakistan. (Tolga Akmen/Anadolu became leading religious scholars. They educated new converts in Agency/Getty Images)



Education

the study of the Qur’an, and provided two major sources for transmitting the teaching of Muhammad through a collection of his sayings, known as the hadith. The tradition of collecting, transmitting, and teaching the sayings of Muhammad became one of the central doctrinal elements in the development of the religion. These expert scholars who produced Islam’s earliest attempts at documentation and historicity were called the muhaddith (feminine: muhaddithat). Female scholars rose to great prominence, drawing students from around the world and participating in the education and training of countless aspiring scholars. Muhadditha, like Fatima al Batayahiyyah (eighth century), taught hadith and jurisprudence in Damascus. Al Batayahiyyah was so famous that when she grew old she retired to Medina and taught directly from Muhammad’s mosque. As education became institutionalized in the Muslim world, women played important roles in the libraries and universities that sprung up in cultural centers from Cordoba to Baghdad. In 859 CE, Fatima Al Fihri established Al Qarawiyyin, the world’s oldest university, in Morocco; it survives to the present day. In Baghdad and Cordoba, women scholars took up residence in the great libraries, taught sciences, wrote poetry, and undertook translation projects. The 10th-century Andalusian scholar Lubna of Cordoba led a cadre of 170 women in a massive literary project that involved the procurement and translation of texts for the caliph’s grand library. From Muhammad through the major caliphates that succeeded him, until the collapse of the great Muslim gunpowder empires, Muslim women not only participated in the intellectual and scholarly tradition of the Islamic world but also shaped its very development. But participation in education does not always signify equality of status or access. Though Islamic doctrine encourages both women and men to seek out knowledge, in practice women did face restrictions as regional cultural practices varied and contradicted Islamic precepts. Not all rulers believed in an Islam based in an egalitarian scholarly tradition. After the destruction of Baghdad in 1258 CE by the Mongols, subsequent Mongol and Turkic empires, though converted to Islam, were not as keen on female scholarship. In contrast, the Ottoman and Mughal empires continued to produce influential female scholars, but Safavid Iran was more restrictive of women’s education. Once they formally adopted Shi‘a Islam, the Safavid dynasty funded a project of proselytization and special tutoring for court princesses, but due to the establishment of a formal, predominantly male clergy, women’s presence in religious education declined dramatically. Some female ayatollah or mujtahideh did occasionally break this norm. The state of women and their right to participate and have access to education became more complicated with the coming of European colonialism. In places like Egypt and India, British colonists, under the guise of fiscal reform, confiscated the endowments (called waqfs) that supported female scholars and institutions of education, effectively dismantling the Islamic education system where many female scholars thrived. Developing a new modern education system with standardized curriculum became a source of deep conflict in the Muslim world.

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For Muslim reformers, modernizing education was the means by which to fashion a robust civil society and strong central government capable of repelling colonial intrusion. Many of these early reformers were men who saw women’s education as a marker of the modernity they sought. Individuals like Jamal ad-Din Al Afghani argued that women’s education was needed for the health of the state, while the Egyptian reformer Qasim Amin encouraged a nascent Egyptian feminist movement with his book Tahir al Mara’a (Women’s Liberation). In Iran, female scholar Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi (1858–1921)—with the blessing of the secularist Pahlavi dynasty—founded the first modern girls’ school. She defended the rights of women through a series of stirring articles and became an influential figure in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution from 1905 to 1911. When Mohammed Reza Shah, the secularist king of Iran, forcibly banned the hijab and chador, Islamic headscarves, women donned the religious garments and came out in support of Ayatollah Khomeini in the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Though the Islamic Republic of Iran has curtailed many women’s rights and enforced gender segregation, education remains one of the cherished rights of Iranian women. As of 2012, the university population in Iran was over 60 percent women. In Afghanistan, Queen Soraya Tarzi (1899–1968) led modernizing reforms. In the 1920s, she established the first girls’ school in the country and encouraged all young women to get an education. Amanullah Khan famously said of her, “I am your King, but your Minister of Education is my wife—your Queen.” Like her Iranian counterparts, Queen Soraya drew inspiration from the long line of female scholars in Islamic history and cited Islam’s stance on education as justification for her efforts. However, Queen Soraya’s modernizing efforts were not welcomed by all. British colonial officials spread photos of Queen Soraya dining with foreign dignitaries among the rural population of Afghanistan to rile up conservative religious leaders. Many male conservative religious scholars, or ulama, saw the new schools established around the Muslim world as colonial imports threatening the social fabric of society. Like the modernists, these conservative ulama also cited religion in their efforts to curtail women’s education. Rather than go after education itself, religious conservatives like the Saudi-based Wahhabis cited the public presence of women as a threat to public safety. Often arguing that women needed to be secluded for their own protection, these preachers undermined women’s efforts in education. In countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the efforts by the conservative ulama meant restricting women’s movements and secluding them at home. In Afghanistan, where women’s education has produced professional classes of female scientists, teachers, and journalists, the Taliban undid years of progress. Inspired by their own brand of Wahhabi-Deobandi ideology (a puritan interpretation of Islam), in the 1990s, the Taliban shut down women’s schools and enforced the wearing of the burka—a head-to-toe veil. Women like Malalai Joya (b. 1978) led efforts against the Taliban’s restriction of women’s education. A harsh critic of the Taliban and U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Malalai Joya became a fierce champion of women’s education.



Education

In 2009, in defiance of the Pakistan branch of the Taliban, a young Muslim woman, Malala Yousafzai (b. 1997), became an advocate of women’s education. After she gained prominence for her courageous profile in Western media, the Pakistani Taliban attempted to have her assassinated. She was severely injured but made a full recovery and went on to become a Nobel Laureate and the face of activism for women’s education around the world. For many Western think tanks and policy makers, the story of Malala Yousafzai was evidence that Muslim women needed saving, and this became the post hoc justification for U.S. intervention in places like Afghanistan. Anthropologists like Lia Abu-Lughod dispute these claims (see, for example, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? 2013). In the contemporary United States, Muslim women have pioneered new studies and research in Islam. Ingrid Mattson (b. 1963), who had encountered the Taliban early in her career, has emerged as a preeminent scholar of Islam. She established the first graduate program for Muslim chaplains, accepting both female and male students. Scholars like Kecia Ali (b. 1972) and Amina Wadud (b. 1952), building on the work of early 20th-century feminist writers like Aisha Abd al Rahaman (1913–1998)—who wrote under the assumed name Bint Al Shati— have been undertaking feminist readings of early Islamic sources and producing new exegetical works on the Qur’an. Others, like Asma Afsaruddin (b. 1958), have taken on the claims of conservative ulama directly by writing new works of history on the early Muslims and how they differed from the puritan imaginings of Wahhabism. Women’s education remains a complicated issue in the Islamic world. On the one hand, religion is cited by conservative ulama to justify restricting women’s movements. Yet those same nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Iran for example, boast higher female enrolments at university than many Western nations. In some instances, it has little to do with religion at all and more to do with totalitarian regimes like the former Saddam Hussein government of Iraq. Yet, Islam has also been a source of great inspiration for women’s education. Drawing on centuries of scholarship and a long line of famous female educators, some reformers see Islam as a source of liberation for women. Ali A. Olomi See also: Islam: Coverings; Druze Religion; Prophet’s Wives; Purdah; Qur’an and Hadith; Reform Further Reading Abu-Lughod, Lia. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Ahmed, Leia. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Nadwi, Mohammad Akram. Al Muhaddithat: The Women Scholars in Islam. Oxford: Interface, 2003. Wadud, Amina. Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

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56 Fatima (605/615–632 CE)

FAT I M A ( 6 0 5 / 6 1 5 – 6 3 2 C E ) Fatima, also known as Fatima al-Zahra (the bright) or Umm al-A’imma (Mother of Imams), is the fourth daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife, Khadija, and the only biological one, according to Twelver Shi‘a, as the others were adopted after the death of Khadija’s sister, Hala. Married to Ali, the fourth caliph according to the Sunnis and the first imam according to the Shi‘ites, and mother of Hasan and Husayn, Fatima gave birth to the modern genealogy of the Prophet, whose descendants are called Sayyid or Sharif (Stowasser 1996). Although Fatima is not directly mentioned in the Qur’an, exegetes generally claim that in at least two instances—33:33 and 3:61—there are allusions to her. In the first instance, the phrase “people of the house” (ahl al-Bayt) is generally interpreted as including Muhammad, Fatima, her husband, and her two sons; in the second instance, Fatima is one of the mentioned guarantors for the pact with a Christian delegation. In the few months that she survived after her father’s death, she was involved in political struggle, and she courageously sustained the succession of Ali against Abu Bakr and Umar (the first and second of the caliphs). According to some Shi‘ite historians, the latter indirectly caused her death: when he forced open the door to her house while looking for Ali, he caused her ribs to break, which killed her unborn child, Muhsin, and eventually led to Fatima’s death (Blomfield 2003). According to the Sunnis, however, Muhsin would have died of natural causes in his childhood, and Fatima would have died from grief after her father’s death, being reconciled with Abu Bakr. After her death, following her will, Ali secretly buried her in an unknown location, setting up three fake graves to hide the real one (Kashani-Sabet 2005). Fatima is considered a model of womanhood by all Muslims. She is described as an exemplary daughter, a pious and gentle wife, a loving mother, a brave and trustworthy person, and an example of compassion, humility, enduring suffering, and generosity. In particular, in Shi‘ite piety, she is considered immaculate and sinless, with a sublime personality, and the most important woman in Islamic history. Her suffering for her father’s death and for Ali’s fate, and, after her own death, in heaven, for her children’s violent passing, together with her deep devotion to her family and to God, are considered a gift to humanity; she is believed to be the redeemer of all pains (Blomfield 2003). For this reason, Fatima is often compared to Mary, Mother of Jesus, and both are mentioned by Muhammad, along with Khadija and Asiya (Pharaoh’s wife), as the most perfect women of all time (McAuliffe 1981; Sered 1991). In the contemporary age, her figure has been highlighted by several devotional Shi‘ite writings but also by Iranian reformists, such as Shariati and Nuriyani, as well as in Islamic feminine or feminist religious interpretations (Kashani-Sabet 2005). Valentina Fedele See also: Islam: Ideal Woman; Maryam; Prophet’s Wives; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Blomfield, Bridget. “Fatima.” In Islamic Images and Ideas, Essays on Sacred Symbolism, edited by John Andrew Morrow, 101–12. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003.



Female Genital Mutilation

Kashani-Sabet, Firoozeh. “Who Is Fatima? Gender, Culture, and Representation in Islam.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 1, no. 2 (2005): 1–24. McAuliffe, Jane D. “Chosen of All Women: Mary and Fa-tima in Qura-nic Exegesis.” Islamochristiana 7 (1981): 19–28. Sered, Susan. “Rachel, Mary, and Fatima.” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 2 (1991): 131–46. Stowasser, Barbara. Women in the Qur‘a-n, Traditions and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

F E M A L E G E N I TA L M U T I L AT I O N Female genital mutilation (FGM) is referred to as the “procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs whether for cultural or other non-therapeutic reasons” (World Health Organization 1997, 3). In Africa, FGM is still practiced by followers of Islam in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, and other countries. Gambia, Mauritania, and Guinea have the highest percentage of girls that underwent FGM from 2010 to 2015. In these countries, approximately half of the girls aged from birth to 14 years have undergone this procedure, followed by Eritrea, Sudan, Guinea Bissau, and Ethiopia (United Nations Children’s Fund 2016, 2). In the Middle East, FGM is predominantly practiced in Egypt, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Yemen. Since FGM has a lot of immediate, intermediate, and long-term complications, this practice is considered a violation of human rights and woman and child abuse. These complications include severe blood loss, shock, infected wounds, infectious diseases, impaired menstrual flow that contributes to reproductive tract infections, inhibited and painful sexual intercourse, and prolonged childbirth. The most common psychological problems related to this procedure are posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression. Nowadays, both scientific and Muslim religious communities agree that FGM has no roots in Islam, since this practice was known since ancient times. As indicated in ancient scripts, FGM was practiced in ancient Rome as a mean of controlling the sexual desire of women slaves. In ancient Egypt, in the pharaonic era, FGM was practiced as part of girls’ initiation. People commonly believe that FGM was practiced predominantly by the followers of Islam; however, it was widely practiced across the centuries by the followers of other major religions and traditions, including animism, Christianity, and Judaism. Conversely, in Saudi Arabia, which is considered the motherland of Islam, and in many other Muslim countries, FGM is not practiced. Moreover, in similarity with all other mutilations to the body, this practice is forbidden by Islam, which supports the principle of doing no harm. However, some Islamic groups believe that FGM can be practiced since there is no direct prohibition of it by the Prophet Muhammad. FGM procedures are commonly referred to by the followers of Islam as khifad and sunna. Khifad usually refers to removal of the clitoral hood. Sunna comprises removal of either clitoral hood or clitoral hood and clitoris. Frequently, people use the terms sunna and khifad to refer to all types of FGM. For example, in Sudan, most Muslim women undergo infibulation—excision of the clitoris and the inner labia with further stitching to narrow the vaginal opening; however, they refer

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to this procedure as sunna. There are a lot of controversies about FGM among the followers of Islam, both in relation to terminology and to the practice itself. In regard to the terminology, some religious authorities and groups believe that the terms sunna and khifad refer to the same procedure and, thus, both terms can be used interchangeably. Other followers believe that khifad comprises a lesser degree of mutilation. The other controversy relates to religious instructions in regard to FGM, particularly to one sentence from Islam’s sacred scripture, the Qur’an, in which Prophet Muhammad gave advice to a lady, Umm Habibah, to not overdo the excision. His justification was that reduced mutilation can enlighten a woman’s face and make her more desirable to her husband. Some religious groups interpret this statement as Prophet Muhammad’s approval of the existing practice. Other groups believe that Prophet Muhammad was suggesting lessening bodily harm related to the established traditional practice at that time. There are also ideas that this was neither approval nor disapproval but an individual suggestion to a particular person. Otherwise, the Qur’an has no indication for practicing FGM. Although FGM has no religious origins, many followers of Islam still believe that FGM is a religious requirement. Some people indirectly link FGM with religion, believing that this procedure ensures girls’ sexual purity, promotes cleanliness, maximizes femininity, and increases attractiveness to a future husband. In some Middle Eastern countries, for example in Egypt, this practice is medicalized, and FGM is performed by qualified health professionals. FGM as a cultural practice is not static. The incidence of this procedure is decreasing due to effective health promotion campaigns and women’s rights activism over the past two decades. Many women who have undergone FGM do not plan to perform this procedure on their daughters. Men, too, have changed their attitudes toward FGM. In many modern families, this practice has been abandoned; however, it is still practiced in traditional families. Particularly in African countries, people’s belief that girls should be circumcised is associated with their level of education. Victoria Team See also: African Religions: Female Genital Mutilation; Islam: Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Abusharaf, Rogaia Mustafa. Female Circumcision: Multicultural Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Connor, Jennifer Jo, Shanda Hunt, Megan Finsaas, Amanda Ciesinski, Amira Ahmed, and Beatrice “Bean” E. Robinson. “Sexual Health Care, Sexual Behaviors and Functioning, and Female Genital Cutting: Perspectives from Somali Women Living in the United States.” Journal of Sex Research 53 (2016): 346–59. United Nations Children’s Fund. Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Global Concern. New York: UNICEF, 2016. United Nations Children’s Fund. Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting: A Statistical Overview and Exploration of the Dynamics of Change. New York: UNICEF, 2013. World Health Organization. Female Genital Mutilation: A Joint WHO/UNICEF/UNFPA Statement. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1997.



Feminism

FEMINISM The combination of feminism and Islam within the term Islamic feminism is heavily laden with meaning. Commonly, the two words are thought to be opposites. Many Muslims, even those working for gender equality, do not wish to be called feminists because of the association with westernization and colonization. On the other hand, many who are happy to be called feminist break with Islam because they see it as a patriarchal or antifeminist religion. The latter can be named secular feminists. There are a variety of feminisms, especially if feminism is given a broad definition, such as pointing out oppressive practices and/or actively engaging in the work for gender equality. Among Muslim moderates, fundamentalists, Islamists, extremists, and secular women in Muslim contexts, women have an active place and may work for women’s rights within their ideological framework. Islamic feminists are critical of patriarchal religious interpretations in Islamic tradition that sanction gender inequality and want to reclaim what they see as the egalitarian ethos of Islam. Islamic feminists seek reform from within the tradition from a faith-based position that believes in the divinity of the Qur’anic text. They are committed to rereading the Qur’an and deconstructing patriarchal interpretations in exegesis (tafsir) and the rulings that discriminate against women in Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). The work of these scholar-activists, who are predominantly women and come from several geographical contexts, can be traced to the late 1980s and onward. Some of these scholars, such as Asma Barlas, reject the term feminist because they associate it with Western feminism, which is seen as an accomplice of or at least tacit enabler of Western colonialism of the Muslim world. Other scholars emphasize how bringing together Islam and feminism gives a fruitful perspective, termed double-consciousness or double-critique, which can bring new insights (Harris 2012). An example is Amina Wadud, a prominent Islamic feminist scholar who argues that patriarchal social relations are incongruent with seeking a life that embodies the Islamic notion of tawhid, the oneness of God (Wadud 2006). There have always been reform movements in Islam, and Islamic feminists would even say that Islam began as a reform movement. This view sees the Qur’an as an attempt to restrain the power of men over women and create equality between the genders. This reading of scriptures, both the Qur’an and the hadith, distinguishes between its universal principles and its specific social context. It sees the Qur’an not as a book of law but as a divine response mediated through Prophet Muhammad and the specific moral-social situation of the commercial Meccan society of his day. Not all of these solutions are relevant or applicable to all times and contexts, but the moral principles behind them are seen to be permanently valid. Hence, gendered religious rules may be suited for the context of revelation but fall short of fulfilling the moral principles of the divine text in the lived realities of Muslims today. Islamic feminists see the patriarchal readings of Islamic sources, such as men’s right to unilateral divorce, polygamy, and male guardianship of children, as causing problems for women. These patriarchal readings are partly caused by the fact that women have mainly been excluded from shaping fiqh and that men

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Leading Islamic feminist Amina Wadud (front) leads Friday prayers for men and women at a mosque in Oxford, England, 2008. Most mosques forbid women from leading men in prayer, though they may lead other women. (Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images)

within patriarchal cultures have been the primary interpreters of scripture. Also, even though women were actively involved in narrating the hadith during the formative years of Islam, they have not had the chance to shape the interpretations of scriptures and, importantly, the laws deduced from them. Another important issue for Islamic feminists is women’s exclusion from religious domains such as mosques. According to the Egyptian American historian Leila Ahmed (1999) this resulted in the emergence of two Islams. Muslim women worked out their own understandings of Islam “as a broad ethos and ethical code and as a way of understanding and reflecting on the meaning of one’s life and of human life more generally”; whereas men’s official arena has been more law oriented and has shaped institutions (Ahmed 1999, 126). In Haga’s (2009) study, Somali women traders showed concern for Islam’s regulations and codes of conduct as well as the inner dimension of faith as ethical guidance, with mercy, compassion, and honesty at the center of their personal relationship with God. Many female scholars, such as Amina Wadud, Asma Barlas, and Ziba Mir-Hosseini, understand their own life in direct connection with scripture rather than mediated through patriarchal interpretations as central to their faith. One of the most influential and famous recent initiatives by Islamic feminists is Sisters in Islam. This is a group of activists who came together in Malaysia in 1989. The question that brought them together was this: If God is just—if Islam is just—why do laws and policies made in the name of Islam create injustice? They emphasized their right as nonscholars to interpret and talk about the religion that



Feminism

has so much influence on their lives. They started with their own experiences of injustices and asked the Islamic scholar Amina Wadud for assistance (Anwar and Ismail 2012, 63). Wadud is most famous for leading a prayer for a mixed congregation in South Africa. However, her lifework consists of much more, such as her important contribution to reinterpretations of the Qur’an and her active engagement for Islamic feminism across the globe. In 2007, Sisters in Islam, together with scholar activists from different countries, initiated a global movement for equality and justice in Muslim families, naming it Musawah, Arabic for “equality.” Musawah links scholarship and activism to bring new insight to Islamic teachings and to bring women’s voices and experiences into the production of religious knowledge and legal reform in Muslim contexts. The first project was to rethink two central concepts for the unequal treatment of women and men within Islamic legal tradition. The first concept, qiwamah, generally connotes the husband’s authority over his wife and his financial responsibilities, while the second concept, wilayah, connotes male family members’ duty of guardianship over female family members. These concepts, as they are constructed within classical fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and reflected in present-day laws and practices, are central to institutionalizing, justifying, and sustaining gender inequality. There are other concepts used in the Qur’an more frequently in relation to marriage, such as ma’ruf (common good) and mawaddah wa rahmah (love and compassion), and the female scholars within the Musawah project ask why the classical jurists did not choose to translate these two terms into legal rulings. Moreover, they question how qiwamah and waliyah have gained their specific meaning, and by rethinking and reconstructing these concepts in conversations with Muslim women across the world and through rereading Islam’s sacred texts, they seek to establish an egalitarian construction of gender rights from within Muslim legal tradition. With an Islamic revival especially since the 1970s, female spaces of worship and education have grown dramatically across the world. Central to these movements is the goal of differentiating between cultural and Islamic norms, seeing Islam as bringing justice. Commonly, the scriptures are not read critically, such as is the case with Islamic feminists. Still, they work for an improvement of women’s position and could therefore be called feminists. They work for complementarity. They want separate but equal spaces for women and men and wish for female traditional roles to be respected. Quite often these movements are seen to be the only alternative to liberal feminism. However, an anticapitalist feminist movement has also been present within the Muslim world since the 1950s. Social media has been an important resource for both bringing women together and creating more space for women within Muslim communities while at the same time showing non-Muslims the variety that exists. Muslimgirl.com is one example where Muslim women speak out. Muslim women post articles that relate to modern women across the globe, bringing together women of different faiths with the intention of having an open and honest discussion about Islam’s place in today’s society. Moreover, they want to draw awareness to the message of gender equality that they find in the Qur’an. Another example of this is a movement started on Facebook and Tumblr by Hind Makki named “side-entrance.” This is a continuation

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of a conversation among Muslim women about the inadequacy of female praying spaces within mosques. Makki started the initiative when her friend was nearly kicked out of the mosque for praying in the male section because the designated place for women was a hot, moldy basement. Muslim women across the world send in pictures of both good and bad examples of female praying spaces. This has started a worldwide debate among Muslim women and initiatives to improve spaces for women in mosques. Recently, several all-female mosques with female imams and mosques led by LGBTQ Muslims have opened in South Africa, Europe, the United States, and Canada. Moreover, gatherings of Muslim women around the world have also intensified, such as the gathering in 2017 of 500 female Muslim clerics in Cirebon on the island of West Java in Indonesia consisting of leaders of Islamic boarding schools and preachers. The clerics believe that especially complex issues that are directly related to women, such as child marriage, domestic violence, polygamy, and women’s role in combating the rise of radicalism, can only be adequately addressed if women take the lead in reinterpreting religious scriptures. Rannveig Haga See also: Islam: Education; Islam in Africa; Qur’an and Hadith; Shari‘a Further Reading Ahmed, Leila. A Border Passage: From Cairo to America—A Woman’s Journey. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Anwar, Zainah, and Rose Ismail. “Amina Wadud and Sisters in Islam: A Journey towards Empowerment.” In A Jihad for Justice: Honoring the Work and Life of Amina Wadud, edited by Kecia Ali, Juliane Hammer, and Laury Silvers, 63–73. Akron: 48hrBooks, 2012. Haga, Rannveig. Tradition as Resource. Transnational Somali Women Facing the Realities of Civil War. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 2009. Harris, Rabia Terri. “Permission to Think.” In A Jihad for Justice: Honoring the Work and Life of Amina Wadud, edited by Kecia Ali, Juliane Hammer, and Laury Silvers, 77–85. Akron: 48hrBooks, 2012. Karam, Azza M. “Globalization, Women, and Religion in the Middle East.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religious Theology, edited by Sheila Briggs and Mary McClintock Fulkerson, 195–211. Oxford: Oxford University Pruess, 2011. Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

HADITH See Qur’an and Hadith HAGAR Hagar, the Egyptian wife of the patriarch Abraham, holds a highly esteemed position in Islam. A servant given to Abraham by his barren wife Sarah, Hagar is known in both biblical and Islamic traditions as the mother of Ismail in Arabic or Ishmael in Hebrew or Ismael in English. Islamic sources, mainly the hadith literature (the authentic sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), tell of her heroic struggle in the desert to find nourishment for her



Hawwa

dying son. After marrying Hagar and conceiving with her his first son, Ismail, Abraham takes Hagar and their son and leaves them in the middle of a lifeless desert in Arabia. Muslims believe this to be present-day Mecca. Left only with a waterskin and some dates, Hagar questions Abraham, “O Abraham! Where are you going, leaving us in this valley where there is no person whose company we may enjoy, nor is there anything?” (Hadith 583). After no response from Abraham, Hagar continues to question him until she is told that she has been placed in the desert according to God’s will, not Abraham’s. Hagar’s response is monumental for Muslims, “Then He (God) will not neglect us” (Hadith 583). Hagar is remembered by Muslims throughout the world for her trust in God and struggle in the desert. Muslims today mimic her actions and identify themselves with her heroic sacrifice and reliance on God. During the annual hajj pilgrimage, Muslims emulate Hagar in a physical and spiritual ritual between the hills of Safa and Marwa, where she ran between the two places looking for sustenance for her son. This ritual is supposed to bond the pilgrims to the miraculous survival of a pious woman and her infant son through physical and spiritual identification. Muslim women see Hagar—along with Mary, the mother of Jesus—as one who has carved out space for women’s participation in divine guidance and spirituality. Her struggle or jihad to survive according to God’s will has made her one of the matriarchs of Islam. Hibba Abugideiri (2001), in her chapter on Hagar, describes her as the role model for today’s Muslim feminists struggling to carve out space for women’s leadership in Islam. She highlights key Muslim women leaders, like Amina Wudud, in their gender struggle or jihad and demonstrates how Hagar is to them the matriarch of this “gender jihad.” “Just as Hagar’s faith inspired her to struggle to establish God’s will in a pagan patriarchal society, so does the faith of these women inspire them to embark upon a jihad of gender aimed at correcting the misogynist ideas and behaviors that plague Muslim communities today” (Abugideiri 2001, 100). Sana Tayyen See also: Islam: Feminism; Pilgrimage; Qur’an and Hadith; Judaism: Hebrew Bible Further Reading Abugideiri, Hibba. “Hagar: A Historical Model for ‘Gender Jihad.’” In Daughters of Abraham, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John L. Esposito, 81–107. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. Alavi, Karima Diane. “Pillars of Religion and Faith.” In Voices of Islam, edited by Vincent J. Cornell, 5–42. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007. Kathir, Ibn. Stories of the Prophets. Translated by Muhammad Mustafa Gemeiah. Mansoura, Egypt: El-Nour, 1996.

H AW WA Hawwa, the Arabic name for Eve, is never mentioned by name in the Qur’an. Instead, she is referred to as Adam’s wife. It is only in the hadith (the collection of words and deeds attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that her name appears.

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Her story and the story of the temptation appear intermittently throughout the Qur’an in several different suras (chapters). The temptation story in the Qur’an reveals significant differences from the biblical version, most notably in the areas of transgression, culpability, and punishment. Both narratives have in common a garden, a tree, a temptation, and an expulsion. But whereas in Genesis, Satan appears to Eve, who then seduces Adam, in the Qur’an, Satan (Iblis) tempts Adam and Hawwa at the same time, and both transgress simultaneously. Sura 7:20 tells us: “Then Satan whispered to them that he might expose to them that which was hidden from them of their nakedness.” (See also 2:35–37; 7:19–25; 20:117–123.) There is no mention anywhere in the Qur’an of Iblis whispering exclusively to Hawwa. According to the Islamic tradition, therefore, Hawwa was not the focal point of Iblis’s temptation; nor was she the vehicle of Adam’s temptation. The Qur’an uses the plural form of speech to indicate that Iblis tempted Adam and Hawwa simultaneously. The only exception occurs in Sura 20:115, where Adam seems to be singled out for greater moral culpability: “And We made a pact with Adam aforetime, but he forgot. And We found no resoluteness in him.” And in verse 120 of the same sura, Iblis specifically singles out Adam: “Then Satan whispered to him. He said, ‘O Adam! Shall I show thee the Tree of Everlastingness and a kingdom that never decays?’” This verse seems to suggest that Adam shoulders greater moral culpability. Both Adam and Hawwa succumb to temptation together, both repent, both are forgiven, and both experience an identical, collective punishment consisting of expulsion from the garden: “He said, ‘Get down, each of you an enemy to the other! There will be for you on earth a dwelling place, and enjoyment for a while’” (Sura 7:24). Hawwa does not experience Eve’s punishment as told in Genesis: the Qur’an does not give the male power over her, nor does it assert the pain of childbirth as a form of punishment. The Qur’an’s treatment of the temptation, culpability, and punishment is absent the gender specificity of Genesis. Iblis never appears to Hawwa exclusively, so she is not singled out as the primary agent for expulsion from the garden. She is tempted and succumbs to temptation alongside Adam. And her punishment is identical to that of her mate—no more, no less. The picture of Hawwa that emerges in the Qur’an is a radical departure from her counterpart in Genesis. Woman is not the source of sin in the Islamic tradition. This has profound social implications for the treatment of women in Islamic culture. Any attempt to misuse the story of Hawwa in the way that various Christian theologians have historically used the story of Eve to justify the subjugation of women flies in the face of generations of Islamic scholarship. Tamara Agha-Jaffar See also: Christianity: “The Fall”; Islam: Qur’an and Hadith; Judaism: Hebrew Bible; Lilith



Honor

Further Reading Agha-Jaffar, Tamara. Women and Goddesses in Myth and Sacred Text: An Anthology. New York: Pearson, 2005. Hassan, Riffat. “The Issue of Woman-Man Equality in the Islamic Tradition (1993).” In Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender, edited by Kristen E. Kvam, Linda S. Schearing, and Valarie H. Ziegler, 464–76. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, ed. The Study Qur’an: A New Translation and Commentary. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. All translations of the Qur’an are taken from this edition. Smith, Jane I., and Yvonne Haddad. “Eve: Islamic Image of Woman.” In Women and Islam, edited by Azizah Al-Hibri, 135–44. Oxford: Pergamon, 1982.

H O LY D AY S See Festivals and Holy Days HONOR Honor, in the Qur’an (the Islamic scripture), is termed izzah, denoting personal responsibility for exemplifying honesty, self-restraint, generosity, and social responsibility. The term applies equally to females and males and includes, but is not limited to, the concept of sexual purity. The term can also reflect collective identity, as the honorable behavior of individuals raises the status of the entire group to which the individuals belong. The concept of honor found in the hadith (statements made by Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam) is conveyed in the term sharaf, which refers to a person’s integrity and generosity and is used for both men and women. However, as Muslim families and societies are often organized according to gender roles, the outward expression of honorable characteristics and what is considered the appropriate model of an honorable person may be influenced by gender. As members of interdependent and collectivist societies, Muslim women are often defined in relation to their families and domestic roles. An honorable Muslim woman expresses her integrity and generosity by nurturing those around her with her compassion and acts of service, as a devoted wife, daughter, or sister. She is also loyal, safeguarding her family and her family’s reputation from those with ill wishes. She is upright in her language, dignified in her behavior, and careful to maintain her respectability in all settings. She avoids any situation or association that may make her or her family the subject of gossip or scandal. Within this framework, male roles focus on protecting and providing for their families. As protectors, men ensure the physical safety of the family unit as well as its adherence to cherished religious and cultural values and its honor in the eyes of the surrounding society. This duty to protect may be perceived as a man’s permission and even obligation to discipline women (and other dependents) who are not compliant with the expectations of honorable behavior. Although this perceived right is justified in reference to Islamic teachings, the historical root of this world view predates Islam and often represents a culturally exaggerated interpretation of

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Islamic sources. Similarly, the meaning of sharaf articulated in Islamic teachings is related, yet distinct from, the pre-Islamic Bedouin honor codes of sharaf and ird. In the pre-Islamic, tribal context, ird was a term associated with women, referring to the honor given at birth but which could be lost, particularly by unchaste behavior. Sharaf applied to men and referred to their generosity, courage, and manliness, including their ability to protect the ird—the sexual purity—of their women. Despite the more balanced Islamic teachings concerning izzah and sharaf, the cultural emphasis linking women’s honor with sexual purity has given rise to the gender-based crimes of honor-related violence and so-called honor killing. Honor-related violence occurs in both Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries as well as in other non-Muslim traditional societies in which the concept of honor is associated with an exaggerated focus on female sexual purity. In contrast to honor, dishonor and shame are associated with females who have violated the community’s sexual mores. Shame causes the entire family to lose face (lose public dignity) and requires cleansing (removal), often through violent actions. Within this cultural understanding, personal ethics are subordinate to the dynamics of patriarchal control, and females are defined more as possessions than as partners. Hence, being raped—an occurrence specifically against the will of the victim—may require the female, who has now fallen from honor, to be killed to cleanse the family from shame. Behaviors perceived as violations of honor include premarital and extramarital relationships, marrying without family approval, pursuing divorce or remarriage, immodest dress, and violating family boundaries. Additional studies include the factors of being kidnapped or raped (United Nations Population Fund 2005). There are also characteristics that differentiate honor killing from general femicide: perpetrators often include members of the victim’s own kin, the social status of the perpetrator often rises as a result of the crime, and male kin who fail to cleanse the family’s honor may face intense social pressure. Some Western scholars have attempted to link honor killing directly to the Islamic shari‘a (generally translated as Islamic law), and the works of these scholars have been widely disseminated in Western media sources following prominent cases of honor killing, helping inflame anti-Muslim sentiment (Helms 2015). However, these attempts have failed to distinguish between Islamic law and other factors affecting Muslim societies. Non-Islamic origins of honor killing include pre-Islamic tribal practices and exposure to foreign influences such as the French Penal Code of 1810, which was incorporated into Jordanian law (Article 340) and continues to provide the most extensive legal protection for perpetrators of honor killing in Jordan (Helms 2015). Also overlooked in understanding shari‘a is the distinction between severity of punishment and the rigorous requirements for conviction. These requirements directly contrast with the cultural practice of honor killing, which may be based on the mere perception of immorality and perpetrated by enraged kin rather than legal authorities. Finally, many of the cultural perceptions of dishonor are in contrast with specific rights granted women by the shari‘a, particularly the right to not be forced into marriage, the right of divorce, and the right (and explicit encouragement) to remarry. However, it should be



Ideal Woman

noted that in some settings, Muslim women have not always been able to access these rights. Regardless of their origin, honor-related violence and honor killings do occur within Muslim populations. They are complex issues with devastating impacts. Education can clarify the distinctions between the definition of honor according to Islamic teachings and harmful cultural practices and gender-based crimes prohibited by Islamic law. Barbara Lois Helms See also: Islam: Coverings; Ideal Woman; Marriage and Divorce; Purdah; Qur’an and Hadith; Shari‘a Further Reading Baobaid, Mohammed, and Gahad Hamed. “Addressing Domestic Violence in Canadian Muslim Communities.” London, ON: Muslim Resource Centre for Social Support and Integration, 2010. Helms, Barbara Lois. “Honour and Shame in the Canadian Muslim Community: Developing Culturally Sensitive Counselling Interventions.” Canadian Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy 49, no. 2 (2015): 163–84. United Nations Population Fund. “The Dynamics of Honor Killings in Turkey: Prospects for Action.” Ankara, Turkey: United Nations Population Fund, 2005. http://www​ .unhcr.org/refworld/docid/46caa4412.html.

IDEAL WOMAN The early historiography of Islamic societies portrays women as key contributors to religiously informed community-building processes and supporters of the Prophet. Structures of female identity hover between the Prophet and his immediate family, on one hand, and on the other, archetypal non-Muslim women like Eve and the Virgin Mary. Ideal women also model themselves on Muhammad himself. His kindness, integrity, and humility are the standard yardsticks against which all respectable persons—irrespective of their gender—may be judged. Today, cultural constructions of ideal woman bring the debate on women into the dialectics of power, nationalism, and religion in relation to both nation- and state-building processes. Early intellectuals appear to consolidate a norm of woman as a politically, socially, and religiously active subject. In his revised, edited version of Ibn Ishaq’s (704–67 or 771 CE), as-Sira an-Nabawiyyah, Ibn Hisham (d. 883 CE) promotes Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija bin Khuwaylid (555[7]–620 CE), as the ideal woman. An influential and successful merchant, Khadija converted to Islam immediately after her husband’s first revelation. Her moral support proved to be critical in persuading the Prophet of the truthfulness and the divine nature of the revelation. And, Nusaybah bint Ka’b, one of Muhammad’s first disciples, drew a sword and fought alongside the Prophet during the Battle of Uhud (625 CE). Her heroic deed became a recurrent theme in the early treatises on Islamic history, reinforcing the idea that an ideal Muslim woman is not someone who lives relegated to the margins of the public political and religious spheres.

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Muhammad himself acknowledged the relevance of the active involvement of (learned) women in the transmission of religious knowledge. Ayesha bint Abi Bakr (613[4]–78 CE), his third wife, belongs to the pantheon of models of female virtue. Like all Muhammad’s wives, she is an umm al-muminin, or Mother of the Believers. The Islamic tradition owes her the passing on of 2,200 hadiths (sayings of the Prophet) on pilgrimage, eschatology, inheritance, and the life of the Prophet. Muhammad encouraged his companions—and, by extension, all Muslims, women included—to emulate her and her diligent quest for religious knowledge. Models of modesty, respect, contentment, and the fulfilment of religious duties serve as a moral compass for Muslim women. The Prophet’s daughter Fatima sets an example for all women as a loving daughter and a good wife and housewife. Notable women belonging to the Ahl al-Kitab religious communities (literally People of the Book: Jews, Christians, and Sabaeans) inspire values of repentance, contrition, chastity, obedience, pity, patience, gratitude, commitment, and diligence. With decolonization, the rise of the nation-states, and the elaboration of national identities among Islamic societies across the non-Western world, women’s sexuality, bodies, and behaviors are increasingly identified with the nation itself. Debates on female domesticity, intimacy, health, representation in the public sphere, and ideas of equality and independence interweave in intricate, nuanced, and multifaceted ways with nationalist concerns and the spread of both feminist and maternalist movements. Whether secluded housewives or successful merchants, conservative or feminist, Asian, African, or Middle Eastern women, as well as their status, ideal image, and different voices, all matter for their ability to challenge or advance states’ political ideologies. Elisabetta Iob See also: Christianity: Mother of God; Islam: Hawwa; Maryam; Prophet’s Wives; Purdah; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Kashani-Sabet, F. Conceiving Citizens. Women and the Politics of Motherhood in Iran. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Metcalf, Barbara D. Perfecting Women. Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar (A Partial Translation with Commentary). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Moghissi, H., ed. Women and Islam: Critical Concepts in Sociology. London: Routledge, 2005. Sayeed, A. Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. (al-) Tabari. Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1879.

ISLAM IN AFRICA Islam in Africa is as diverse as the continent of Africa itself. This is because there has been a mixture of Arabization, indigenous African cultural traits, environmental components, and historical factors, so much so that different parts of the continent have developed unique characteristics of the religion, making African Islam unique. The experiences of Muslim women in Africa represent an array of developments



Islam in Africa

over several centuries that have given way to innovations, syncretism, and different interpretations to law, education, and growth. African Muslim women contend with cultural and traditional dictates, environmental conditions, and religious demands as to how to live their daily lives. Islam arrived in Africa in the seventh century CE. It spread through warfare in North Africa and trade and immigration in East, West, and South Africa. The continuity and diversity in developments emanating from the growth of Islam in Africa are enormous. All regions are similar as they believe in and uphold the Qur’an, sunna, and ahadith (sing. hadith) and follow the five pillars of Islam. But differences of interpretation exist in different sects. These include the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement, Shi‘a, Sunni, and their associated beliefs, and schools of law— Maliki, Shafi, and Salafi/Wahabis. Gender relations—the attitudes and social and moral behaviors that exist between men and women as they pertain to Islam—are stipulated by the Qur’an, ahadith, and the interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence. These are further influenced by patriarchy, traditions, and the people in authority, who are men. The combination of these elements creates a general opinion of Islam as oppressive and inimical to women’s welfare, while Islamic scholars have argued the egalitarian nature of Islam stipulated by the Qur’an in affording men and women the same rights and obligations insofar as they all believe and live according to the dictates of the Qur’an. African Muslim women operate at different levels of religiosity. The levels of religious devotion vary from extreme spirituality to nominal practice to ceremonial (festival) or occasional devotees. African Muslim women embark on the annual hajj to Mecca and partake in the spiritual ceremonies admonished by the Qur’an. The mosque strictly separates men and women. Women frequent the mosques as often as they like, especially for Jumah (obligatory Friday noon prayers). The Ramadan fasting season has specific injunctions for women who are pregnant, menstruating, or breastfeeding to either delay their fasting or to make up for it when they are “clean.” All over Africa, Muslim women wear their clothes loose and long accompanied by their veil, niqab, hijab, or burka. The variety of the veiling depends on the society or the Islamic sect. In West African countries like Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Nigeria, the mayaafi (Hausa word for “veil”) is popular among the Tijaniyya (Islamic sect of the Sufi order). In Chad and Cameroon, the burka (veiling that covers the entire face) is banned. Certain practices among African Muslim women—purdah and female genital mutilation—have come under attack from both Africans and Westerners. Purdah, the seclusion or complete confinement of women within their homes based on interpretation of Qur’an 33:33, is a popular practice in the Muslim world. In Africa, it presents itself in different ways even though it is challenging to adhere to strictly. It is practiced in northern Nigeria, northern Sudan, and Mombasa but is absent in Senegal, Mali, Niger, and Gambia. The practice has been limited to wealthy women who have husbands and maids to fend for them. Poor women find it impossible, as economic hardships necessitate that they go out to work. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a common practice in some African communities, but its Islamic origin is questioned. In countries like Sudan, Mali, Egypt, and Gambia, it is practiced

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as a religiously sanctioned exercise. Meanwhile, in Algeria, Tunisia, and northern Nigeria, all major Islamic countries, FGM is viewed as a Pagan practice. Women in leadership positions, such as heads of states and imams of mosques, are as contentious as the injunctions that presumably prohibit them. One Qu’anic verse (4:34), “Men are the protectors and maintainers of women,” and a hadith, “A nation which makes a woman its ruler will not make progress” (Khan 2006, 64), are the basis for all arguments barring women from leadership positions (Mernissi 1991, 56-7. Many Islamic feminists challenge the authority with which the hadith sanctions women to only be followers based on lack of authenticity of the hadith. That notwithstanding, women lead their own kind in their communities to gather funds for economic activities, self-assist programs, and education. Muslim women preachers making da’wah (proselytizing in Islam) are popular in Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Morocco (known as Mourchidat), and Egypt. African Muslim women act as their own agents of change by carving niches for themselves in their male-dominated societies. Muslim women have been involved in political activities for a long time. They choose to be moderates or radicals depending on how best their needs are served in the parties they join. North African women have a long history in political organizations, even aligning with the Muslim brotherhoods. However, in recent times, there is a marked decline in female participation in elections, according to a 2015 study by the Middle Eastern Institute (Benstead and Lust 2015). Sub-Saharan African women also mobilized in groups such as the Federation of Muslim Women’s Association of Nigeria and Sudanese Women’s Union on their own or joined their men in groups such as Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims and the Muslim Youth Association in South Africa to educate their fellow women on politics, Islamic laws, and women’s rights. Literacy is an important component of Islam. The ability to read, write, and recite the Qur’an is basic to a Muslim’s spiritual growth. Women are the custodians of Islamic traditions and obligated by the Qur’an to teach Islam to their children. Yet, some Muslim scholars advocate denying women access to education, secular or Islamic, even though Islamic education has a long history in Africa. Several examples of prominent Muslim women include Aisha and Khadija (Muhammad’s wives), Fatima (Muhammad’s daughter), Rabia Adawiya (Sufi saint, ca. 717–801 CE), Fatima al-Fihriyya (d. 878 CE; founder of the al-Qarawwiyyin mosque and university in Fez, Morocco), Zainab al-Ghazali of Egypt (1917–2005; author and organizer of a brotherhood), and Nana Asma’u of the Sokoto caliphate (1793–1864; poet, historian). Traditionally, male children enjoyed the privilege of being educated, while females were passed over to train for marriage and domestic chores. This created a large number of illiterate Muslim women. Illiteracy led to poverty, poor health, high mother and infant mortality rates, high birth rates, and poor child rearing. Most governments of African nations, including Morocco, Ghana, and Nigeria, having realized the importance of education for women, have enacted laws that encourage and allow the education of females. Muslims, who previously thought



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Western education stole its wards from Islam, realize the benefits of having both forms of education and are willing to access both systems. Most of Islamic religious and cultural practices are based on the interpretation of the laws by men influenced by their culture and their own misogynistic tendencies. In this case, the shari‘a, which is supposed to be equitable to all Muslims, could be advantageous or disadvantageous to women when it comes to criminal justice, inheritance, divorce, and child custody. Countries such as Tunisia have enacted new family laws that grant men and women equal rights in seeking divorce and child custody. The tendency for the woman to be disinherited is too high when her fate is determined by men. In northern Nigeria, where the promulgation of the shari‘a has been controversial, women have been particularly placed at risk by the excesses of their patriarchal society. A case in point is Amina Lawal, a divorcée who had consensual sex, and Safiya Hussaini, who was raped. Both were sentenced to death for adultery under shari‘a law, and both had their sentences overturned in 2002 after public outcries at home and abroad necessitated they be retried. African Muslim women have been modernizing and continue to do so in the 21st century. More women are getting high academic degrees, taking part in politics, working outside the home in all professions, mobilizing their fellow women to be their own agents of change, and, most importantly, challenging the status quo held by patriarchy in the Muslim society. They do all this without compromising their religious beliefs. It is their way of surviving and making choices for themselves. Lady Jane Acquah See also: African Religions: Female Genital Mutilation; Islam: Coverings; Education; Female Genital Mutilation; Prophet’s Wives; Purdah; Shari‘a Further Reading Armah, Rabiatu. “Ghanaian Muslim Women Negotiating Leadership Space for Self-Actualization.” In Unpacking the Sense of the Sacred: A Reader in the Study of Religions, edited by Abamfo O. Atiemo, Ben-Willie K. Golo, and Lawrence K. Boakye, 104–15. Accra: University of Ghana Press, Legon, 2014. Badran, Margot, ed. Gender and Islam in Africa: Rights, Sexuality, and Law. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2011. Badru, Pade, and Brigid Maa Sackey, eds. Islam in Africa South of the Sahara: Essays in Gender Relations and Political Reform. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2013. Benstead, Lindsay J., and Ellen Lust. “The Gender Gap in Political Participation in North Africa.” Middle East Institute, September 24, 2015. http://www.mei.edu/content/map/ gender-gap-political-participation-north-africa. Callaway, Barbara, and Lucy Creevey. The Heritage of Islam: Women, Religion, and Politics in West Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1994. Khan, Maulana Wahiduddin. Woman in Islamic Shari'ah. India: Goodword, 2000. Maher, V. “Women and Social Change in Morocco.” In Women in the Muslim World, edited by L. Beck and N. Keddie, 100–23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Mernissi, Fatimah. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Boston, MA: Addison Wesley, 1991.

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ISLAM IN EUROPE While Western popular perception of Muslim women living in Europe is still often characterized by essentialism, radically opposing Islam to Christianity, East to West, scholars of Islam in Europe have engaged in a process of women’s “invisibilization,” ignoring the feminine side of Muslim immigration. Muslim women arrived in Europe especially during the second, postcolonial wave of Islamic immigration in Europe, helped by the family reunification programs that were implemented in the 1970s and beyond, but also in the third, postwar migratory wave consisting of asylum seekers, which included many Muslim women who were single or on their own (e.g., in Italy and Spain after 1990) (Cesari 2004). These Muslim women immigrants to Europe have contributed to establishing and reinforcing contacts between their countries of origin and the various European host societies, becoming key to conveying Islamic culture and religion to generations of Muslim women born in Europe. Muslim women are also more open than men to accommodating Western cultural acquisitions—like gender equality, freedom of expression, and a woman’s right to manage her personal life—to their own culture, engaging actively in Islamic movements and organizations constructed in connection with other Western women’s organizations (Roald 2001). Today, there seems to be an intensification of Muslim women’s commitment to religion, especially among the younger generations living in Europe (Suad 2007). Many Muslim women living in Europe regularly attend local mosques to fulfill their need to socialize with each other as well as with men, enjoying the pleasure of speaking the same language and feeling part of the ummah (the community of Muslim believers from all times and spaces). Here, women can participate in teaching activities either as pupils or as teachers, usually in groups of women segregated from men. The majority of mosques in all the European countries today have rooms specially designed for women’s activities. The mosque is the ideal place for Muslim women to form and develop associations and networks that address religious and female issues, concentrating on aspects like rituals and morality (Suad 2003). In fact, it appears that one of their core characteristics is the focus on social issues as opposed to the typical male focus on ideology. Women can also engage in associations that are led by men, in which case they play a less influential role. This religious revival among Muslim women is sometimes perceived as Islamization or even fundamentalism, overlooking the existence of secular Muslim women and the fact that many women rely on Islam to take on a different identity, a cultural and not necessarily a religious one (Ahmed 2011). Moreover, a steady social and religious empowerment of women is increasingly visible and acknowledged by scholars and can be observed in the proliferation of alternative interpretations of Islamic religious sources from a women-friendly perspective. Many of these are discussed within the Islamic study groups guided by women with expertise in Qur’anic studies. They distinguish between traditional, pre-Islamic customs and Islam as such and claim that their right to make their own marriage choices does not contradict the most profound spirit of Islam. Many women of all social backgrounds, but especially those with a higher degree of education in Europe and the United States, distinguish between the private and the public manifestation of their



Islam in Europe

faith, choosing not to be singled out as Muslims in society (EUMC 2006). They fast during Ramadan and refuse to engage in premarital intimate relationships, but they wear the headscarf rarely or not at all (Cesari 2004). Sometimes, Europe hosts radical and critical Muslim groups, such as Muslim and South Asian women in Britain. Although representing a minority, they strongly and actively question the authority of men over women by organizing conferences and offering education classes. Europe’s cultural climate, with its emphasis on personal freedom and women’s rights, has influenced Islamic customs and brought intergenerational conflicts as well as positive outcomes for Muslim women (Roald 2001). For example, polygamy has declined considerably and is expected to decrease further, as it is no longer adopted by Muslims raised in European societies, the mere idea being strongly rejected by women. The custody of children in the event of divorce, typically given to fathers under shari‘a law, is granted to the mother by European courts, unless it is not in the best interest of the child. In divorce, according to Islamic law and in the eyes of their community, the wife is the first to be blamed and, as a consequence, suffers humiliation, social abandonment, and exposure to poverty, while Muslim women living in Europe can find at least partial protection in the Western courts. Unfortunately, not all Muslim women living in Europe are married according to European custom. Many marriages are still arranged by parents, and women who continue to accept that do it to retain strong ties with their family and not because they are forced. They express the need for constructing their families according to Western values, such as shared domestic responsibility, especially concerning children’s education. Celibacy, postponement of marriage, and the option of having fewer children (ideally two or three) have increased among Muslim women living in Europe, but the traditionalist, essentialist idea of motherhood is preserved: women cannot choose not to become a mother, as being a mother is perceived as a fundamental part of women’s identity (Suad 2005). In the area of work, the traditional pattern of men as those who ensure the family’s main income is largely preserved, with notable exceptions for divorced women and widows. Nevertheless, an increasing number of European Muslim women manifest their desire to harmonize work with activities dedicated to family and children (Cesari 2004). But finding and keeping a job is much more difficult for Muslim women, as they experience frequent discrimination in the workplace, from verbal insults to harassment and even dismissal—sometimes being forced to choose entrepreneurship or self-employment (EUMC 2006; Šeta 2016). In their attempt to mediate between multiculturalism and the need to guarantee Muslim women’s freedom, European countries try to regulate the issue of the veil. The headscarf or hijab tends to be perceived as a symbol of gender inequality prescribed by the religion of Islam. With the biggest Muslim minority in Western Europe, France is the very first European country to ban the full-face veil in public places (April 2011). The French population, including the majority of Muslims, endorse this measure. Critics, especially outside of France, argue that women’s individual liberty is being violated. France’s ban was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights (2014). Along with other religious symbols (Christian

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crosses, Jewish cloth skullcaps, etc.), Muslim headscarves have been banned in French public schools since 2004. Belgium, too, adopted a ban of the full-face veil in public places (July 2011). Although Spain has not enacted a national ban, Barcelona and some other small towns in the province of Catalonia forbid the display of headscarves in public spaces, such as markets and libraries. Since 2007, schools in Britain are encouraged to choose their specific dress code. Since 2015, in the Netherlands, it has been illegal for Muslim women to cover their face with a full veil in many public spaces for security reasons. Germany, Italy, and Switzerland have no national restriction for the wearing of headscarves, but they allow local regulations of it (Sanghani 2016). Adriana Teodorescu See also: Islam: Coverings; Diaspora; Feminism; Islam in Europe; Marriage and Divorce; Reform; Shari‘a; Women’s Organizations Further Reading Ahmed, Leila. A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Cesari, Jocelyne. When Islam and Democracy Meet: Muslims in Europe and in the United States. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Muslims in the European Union: discrimination and Islamophobia. Vienna: European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, EUMC, 2006. Roald, Anne Sofie. Women in Islam: The Western Experience. London: Routledge, 2001. Sanghani, Radhika. “Burka Bans: The Countries Where Muslim Women Can’t Wear Veils.” The Telegraph, July 8, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/burka​-bans​-the​ -countries-where-muslim-women-cant-wear-veils/. Šeta, Đermana. Forgotten Women: The Impact of Islamophobia on Muslim Women. Brussels: European Network Against Racism, 2016. Suad, Joseph, ed. Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Vols. 1, 2, 4. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2003, 2005, 2007.

ISLAM IN THE MIDDLE EAST Islam is the most widely followed religion in the Middle East, and many of the world’s Muslims reside in the region, though the practice, theological orientations, role of women, and interpretations of the religion vary across countries and sects. The spectrum of lived experiences of women in the Middle East is due to such factors as tradition and customs, geographical location, and exposure to other cultures and ways of life. The Middle East is known to be the birthplace of Islam and the site where its foundational tenets and laws developed. Islam was introduced in the Middle East—the Arabian Peninsula, in particular—in the seventh century and brought with it many changes and improvements to the status of women, including abolishing such practices as female infanticide and bride-price (dowry). The region is currently the center of religious and traditional scholarship with students from all over the world traveling to the Middle East to study under renowned scholars of



Islam in the Middle East

Islam. While all Muslims believe in the fundamentals of Islam, a major source of conflict and division in the Middle East has been due to differences in the religion’s two major sects: Sunni and Shi‘a. The schism between Sunnis and Shia‘s is the largest and oldest in the history of Islam and stems from the dispute of the legitimate leadership of the Muslim community following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Sunni Islam dominates most countries in the Middle East. The most overtly religious states in the region are Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy, and Iran, a Shi‘a majority. A variety of subsects within Shi‘a Islam, including Twelver, Ismaili, Zaidi, and Alawi, are also practiced across various countries in the region. The perception of women in the Middle East as oppressed victims does not reflect the reality of many women in the region. In several countries in the Middle East, women enjoy various social and political rights. There has been increasing female leadership in the parliaments of Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, with women serving as ministers, as several Muslim-majority countries have passed laws to ensure that more women are included in political processes. Saudi Arabia’s more conservative approach to Islam, however, has led to greater restrictions for women in terms of access to employment and other social rights, such as the ban on driving motor vehicles that was long in effect but was finally lifted in June 2018. Islam highly encourages equality in education for both men and women and advocates for the rights of both sexes to search for knowledge, though educational opportunities for Muslim girls and women remain limited as compared to men across the region. Muslim clerics in the region still enjoy a tremendous amount of power and influence in the field of education, leading to the large gender gap. Countries such as Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Oman, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Syria rank among the worst-performing nations in the world in terms of the education gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2012 (Hausmann, Tyson, and Zahidi 2012). During early Islamic history, women’s religious education and scholarship were relatively common across the Muslim world. In recent times, cultural barriers in most countries prevent women from pursuing religious studies, though many opportunities for accessing such a vocation are available. Iran, in particular, boasts the inclusion of women’s religious education as a pillar of its education policy and has established numerous Shi‘ite seminaries (hawzat) across the country (Künkler 2016). These state-run religious seminaries are known to be some of the largest and most successful in the Muslim world, where women are trained to become ulama (teachers) and proselytizers of religion. As religious leaders, contemporary Muslim women in the Middle East have found relative opportunities and success, establishing themselves in a variety of religious leadership roles as instructors of Islamic texts, teachers, and preachers. This includes Zahra Rahnavard (b. 1945), a revolutionary Muslim intellectual in Iran, and Munira al-Qubaysi (b. 1933), founder of Al-Qubaysiyat, a female-only Islamic organization that originated in Syria and is influenced by Sufi ideology. With regards to clothing practices, the veil has been stereotyped in the West as a symbol of oppression and Muslim women’s subordinate status in society. However,

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adherence to hijab and other traditional Islamic clothing is tremendously diverse, and the type of veiling practiced is dependent on tradition, sects, and laws. While the Qur’an states that both men and women should dress modestly, interpretations and meanings of this vary by culture and range from loose scarves to full-body coverings. Full-body and face coverings in the form of burkas can be found in Afghanistan, or as niqabs in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, women are expected to wear abayas (literally “cloak”; often a loose robe-like garment), and this is enforced by the religious police. Many women in Iran wear a chador—a black, full-body open cloak held closed by the wearer’s hand. In both Saudi Arabia and Iran, the respective governments emphasize women’s clothing expectations. In Turkey, however, a decades-long law banned women from wearing headscarves in the country’s government offices and universities, though the ban was lifted in 2013. Muslim women in the Middle East are often depicted as oppressed by their religion and denied basic human rights, but this is far from the truth. In the region, many of the rules and practices that have prevented women from enjoying opportunities stem from local cultural traditions. Despite these obstacles, Muslim women in the Middle East are advocating for the various rights that Islam has given them. Farhana Rahman See also: Islam: Coverings; Druze Religion; Education; Reform; Qur’an and Hadith; Shari‘a Further Reading Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Hausmann, Ricardo, Laura D. Tyson, and Saadia Zahidi. “The Global Gender Gap Report 2012.” World Economic Forum. 2012. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Gender Gap​_Report_2012.pdf. Künkler, Mirjam. “Training Women as Religious Professionals: Iran’s Shiite Seminaries.” Middle East Institute. 2016. http://www.mei.edu/content/map/training​ -women​ -religious​​ -professionals-iran-s-shiite-seminaries. Lefèvre, Raphaël. “The Rise of the Syrian Sisterhood.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 2013. http://carnegieendowment.org/sada/51633. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

I S L A M I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S Muslim women have been part of the American religious landscape since the 17th century when African slaves were brought from Muslim-majority kingdoms; however, these women, like many of their male contemporaries, are absent from the historical record. The arrival of Muslims in the United States follows two separate trajectories: through slavery and through immigration. A third path is that of conversion to Islam by American Muslim women, known as reverts. For African American women, the practice of Islam is a way to connect with their West African ancestry, and, in the case of membership in the Nation of Islam (NOI), a means



Islam in the United States

of asserting Afrocentric pride and black nationalism. In contrast, for women from Muslim-majority countries, the experience is largely dependent on how their community integrated Islamic belief into American values and beliefs. Finally, reverts rely on modeling of practice by other Muslims, observance of mosque culture, or knowledge gained through academic study. Revert practice varies widely in the United States from conservative to liberal. In the 17th century, slave traders brought Muslim women to the Americas on slave ships from West Africa from Muslim kingdoms in Senegal, Mali, and Niger. Through the process of enslavement and conversion, millions of African Muslims lost their Muslim identity, leaving only a few slave narratives written by men. These narratives, written by formerly enslaved black Muslims like Omar Ibn Said, represent a limited historical record of Islam among male African slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States. The role of African American women in Islam would become more public with the founding of the Nation of Islam in 1930. The NOI emphasized gendered roles for men and women; however, it is not considered a mainstream iteration of Islam, and it was founded out of the schism that occurred in the 1970s after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. Islam, as practiced among African Americans, experienced an ideological schism in the 1970s when many members of the NOI became disillusioned with the politics of the NOI and began gravitating toward orthodox Sunni Islam. For African American Sunni Muslim women, Islam is also a means of expressing antiracist discourse and black nationalism. African American Muslim women are also at the forefront of Muslimcentric gender reform in the West, with women like Dr. Amina Wadud, a professor emerita of Islamic studies, and writer Nakia Jackson leading Friday prayers in 2005. In the 19th century, Muslim women in the United States were known through books like Richard Burton’s translation of 1001 Arabian Nights or as part of a hypersexual narrative that dovetailed with growing social challenges related to sex and social change. Examples of this tension were Egyptian and native-born Chicagoan women dancing the hootchy-kootchy (belly dancing) at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Muslim women were often conflated with “Middle Eastern” and were part of an aesthetic movement related to a surge in American interest in Arab and Islamic art and culture. It was not until after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which represented an influx of millions of Muslim immigrants to the United States, that Muslim women in the United States became more dynamic participants within the cultural and religious landscape. The practice of Islam and the role of American Muslim women in the late 20th-century movement gained momentum after the 1960s. Muslim immigrants settled in ethnic enclaves and began the process of Americanization. They followed similar patterns of assimilation as other immigrant groups. First-generation Muslim immigrants are more likely to emphasize complete assimilation, while second- and third-generation Muslims are more likely to wear hijab, attend religious schools, and seek balance between Western and Islamic social norms. The 2000s are the formative years of progressive Islam and represent the most important, and inclusive, decade for American Muslim women. After the

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Women pray at Masjid Muhammad, “The Nation’s Mosque,” in Washington, D.C. African Muslim women first came to America in the 17th century as slaves; today, many African American women embrace Islam through inheritance, conversion, or immigration. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

September 11, 2001, attacks, American Muslim women took the initiative to seek reform and to more publicly and aggressively pursue an Islam that was compatible with being American. In 2005, the first woman-led prayer occurred in New York City, emboldening women to challenge traditions that they felt were not compatible with an American Islam. The very public event gave momentum to a growing movement of progressive Muslims in the United States. Through a variety of platforms, from publications like Azizah and Muslim Girl to the journalist-led Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour in 2002–2003, Muslim women began to craft a public identity that was compatible with being both Muslim and American. In 2009, Muslim women at the University of Kentucky founded Gamma Chi, the first Muslim sorority. Women were also behind the “side-door” movement, a social media project documenting the use of separate entrances and areas designated for women’s prayer. One recent result of women’s activism was the founding of the Women’s Mosque of America in Los Angeles in 2015. Most recently, in response to the 2016 presidential election, Muslim women formed the American Muslim Women Political Action Committee. Alexandra Méabh Brandon See also: Islam: Diaspora; Education; Feminism; Islam in Africa Further Reading Abdo, Geneive. Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.



Marriage and Divorce

Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Dirks, Debra L., and Stephanie Parlove, eds. Islam Our Choice: Portraits of Modern American Muslim Women. Beltsville, MD: Amana, 2003. Jeffries, Bayyinah S. A Nation Can Rise No Higher Than Its Women. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. Karim, Jamillah. American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Nomani, Asra. Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam. New York: Harper, 2006.

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE For Muslims, a virtuous life entails marriage and family. The Prophet Muhammad encouraged Muslims to get married to maintain a moral society. The protective nature of marriage is emphasized in the Qur’an: “They are as a garment for you, and you are as a garment for them” (2:187). Also emphasized in the Qur’an is the human need for intimate companionship: “And among His wonders is this: He creates for you mates out of your own kind. So that you might incline towards them, and He engenders love and tenderness between you” (30:21). The overwhelming majority of Muslim women and men seek to get married and start a family out of a sense of religious duty or an act of worship and personal intimacy. For Muslim women, marriage is the place where Islamic law, shari‘a, plays an intricate role in protecting her rights and outlining her obligations. Marriage in Islam is between a man and a woman. Same-sex marriage is strictly forbidden. The purpose of marriage is twofold: to create lawful intimacy between a man and a woman and to build a family where children can develop and flourish. A Muslim woman may not be coerced into marriage, and if for some reason she finds herself in a marriage without her due consent, she is allowed to seek a divorce and nullify her marriage contract. Muslim women enter into a marriage through a contract in which her conditions of marriage are written, presided over by witnesses, and honored by an Islamic legal system. An Islamic legal jurist must uphold her conditions in the marriage contract. In her contract, she may request anything that does not infringe upon the rights of another. She has the right to request any dower (mahr) from the groom, known as a bridal gift. The mahr plays an important role in honoring and protecting women. It demonstrates that the groom is serious about marriage and his responsibility to his future wife and commitment to family life. The husband is obligated to give the bridal gift to the bride; no one can claim it but her. There is no set limit placed upon the mahr other than the bride’s choice. If the groom cannot or does not want to agree to the mahr, he can walk away from the marriage proposal before signing the contract and consummating the marriage. Certain restrictions upon women are present in Islamic marriages. For example, a Muslim woman must marry only a Muslim man, whereas a Muslim man may marry non-Muslim women who are considered to be believing Christian or Jewish women. Also, under Islamic law, polygyny is an acceptable form of marriage. A Muslim man may marry up to four women at the same time, albeit under particular

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circumstances and rulings, while a Muslim woman may only be married to one man at a time. However, due to historical and cultural practices in our modern times, polygyny is not very popular and is seldom practiced. Further, there are differences among Sunni women and Shi‘i women when it comes to the types of marriage. Shi’i tradition includes a form of marriage called zawaj al-mut’ah, or temporary marriage. In a temporary marriage, two conditions must be met: the term of cohabitation and the dower that is to be given to the woman. Like the permanent marriage, a Shi‘i Muslim man may enter into a temporary marriage with a non-Muslim believing woman (i.e., Christian and Jewish women), whereas a Shi‘i Muslim woman may only marry a Muslim man. Sunni Muslims forbid zawaj al-mut’ah. Divorce in Islam is part of the Islamic legal tradition. While it is religiously lawful to divorce a husband or wife, it is highly frowned upon because it is seen as destructive to familial and communal life. The Islamic legal tradition found within the Qur’an and sunna governs the process of divorce for both women and men. In the case of a woman who is not satisfied with her marriage due to issues of safety, well-being, or any other legitimate reason, she may seek a divorce by appealing to a qadi, an Islamic jurist, or an Islamic court system. Further, she may seek a divorce based on the grounds of her unmet contingencies in her marriage contract. For example, if a woman requests that her husband remain monogamous with her in marriage, she may have her marriage nullified if her husband enters into a polygynous marriage. A husband may divorce his wife through a process that has multiple stages. The rules regulating this process differ depending on which Islamic legal school the family follows. There are four schools among Sunni Muslims: Shaf’I, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Malki. Upon divorce, a woman should receive enough sustenance to support her and her children. Further, the process of divorce may take a number of months to be complete. Divorces such as the pronouncement of a triple divorce all in one sitting, as we hear about in the popular media, is highly controversial and mischaracterizes the emphasis that Islam places on the importance of family and care between husband and wife. Marriages in Islam are not meant to dissolve quickly and without due consideration for all sides of the family. Upon divorce, a Muslim woman enters a waiting period called iddah. This is a temporary period during which a woman must wait before she decides to remarry after the dissolution of her marriage through divorce. An iddah period is also observed when the marriage ends due to the death of the husband. The waiting period is usually around three months or three menstrual cycles. The objectives of iddah are to make sure the wife is not pregnant, and if she is, to determine who the father is; to give the husband and wife a chance to reconcile and return to each other; and/or in the case of a deceased husband, to give the wife time to mourn her husband’s death and heal. There is no iddah or waiting period for men. Weddings are highly festive occasions for Muslims that are not only encouraged by cultural practices but are supported by the prophetic tradition of Islam. The Prophet Muhammad encouraged singing, dancing, and the beating of drums to honor the marriage bond between a bride and groom. He also encouraged attending weddings as a way of contributing to the blessings of a marriage and receiving blessings and good deeds for attending a wedding. Weddings in Muslim



Maryam

communities are often large, serving meals and sweets. Weddings vary from culture to culture, and the normative behavior of the bride, groom, family, and friends shifts depending on which culture is being represented. A wedding in the United States may resemble a typical American wedding minus the alcohol and at times the extensive gender mixing. Some Muslims hold separate wedding receptions for women and men. The bride dances and eats with her female friends and family members, only joining the groom at the end of the reception; at the same time, the groom enjoys the reception with his male relatives and friends, joining his bride at designated times. Muslims highly encourage married life and the production of children. Husbands are legally responsible in Islamic law to provide for the family. They are the protectors of their families, and that includes providing adequate housing, sustenance, and education. Many Muslims will try to emulate the lifestyle that the Prophet Muhammad shared with his family. As Muhammad was a loving husband and father, they will often look toward the sunna or prophetic way for marital guidance. Sana Tayyen See also: Christianity: Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Islam: Diaspora; Druze Religion; Feminism; Honor; Ideal Woman; Islam in Africa; Islam in Europe; Islam in the Middle East; Polygamy; Qur’an and Hadith; Shari‘a; Judaism: Marriage and Divorce Further Reading Hammer, Julian. “Marriage in American Muslim Communities.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Islam, edited by Yvonne Y. Haddad and Jane I. Smith, 208–24. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Nasir, Jamal J. The Status of Women under Islamic Law and Modern Islamic Legislation. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008.

M A R YA M Few women are as honored or as well respected within the Islamic tradition as is Maryam, the Arabic name for the Virgin Mary. Since she is the only woman to be identified by name in the Qur’an, her name bears such significance that Muslim families frequently name their daughters after her. Other women in the Qur’an are identified by their relationships (e.g., the wife of Abraham, the mother of Moses) or by their titles (e.g., the Queen of Sheba). Only Moses, Abraham, and Noah are mentioned by name more often than is Maryam. Her name appears more frequently in the Qur’an than in the entire New Testament. The frequent references to her in the Qur’an point to her role as the mother of the prophet Isa (Jesus). While Maryam’s story appears intermittently throughout the Qur’an, the bulk of her narrative occurs in Sura 19, known as Surat Maryam, the only sura (chapter) named after a woman. The Qur’an tells us Maryam withdraws from her family and “veils” herself. While she is in this pure state, isolated from family members, an angel appears before her in the guise of an adult male.

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Finding herself unprotected and vulnerable, Maryam seeks refuge in Allah. The angel announces the birth of her son. When Maryam questions how, as a virgin, she could conceive, she is told Allah can do all things. The Qur’an is silent on the nature of Maryam’s conception or length of pregnancy: “So she conceived him and withdrew with him to a place far off” (Sura 19:22). Maryam cries out in anguish while in the throes of labor pains. A voice instructs her to shake the trunk of the date palm, eat its dates, and drink from the nearby rivulet, all of which have been provided for her by Allah to ease her discomfort. The sensitivity and tenderness shown toward Maryam while in the throes of labor pain is in marked contrast with God’s decree in Genesis that Eve endure pain in childbirth as punishment for her transgression. Islamic scholars cite Maryam’s pain during childbirth as proof her son is a natural human being, born naturally to a woman experiencing a natural delivery. The final detail the Qur’an provides about Maryam’s life occurs when she takes the baby home to her family, where she is chastised and accused of sexual misconduct. Having taken a vow of silence, she does not respond. She points to the infant in the cradle, who then speaks, affirming his status as a prophet and defending his mother against accusations of illicit behavior. As the vehicle chosen to bring the prophet Isa into this world and as an embodiment of absolute obedience to the will of Allah, Maryam enjoys a special status within the Islamic tradition. Sura 66:11–12 establishes her as an example of piety, obedience, and devotion that all believers, male and female alike, should aspire to emulate: “And God sets forth as an example for those who believe . . . Mary, the daughter of Imran, who preserved her chastity. Then We breathed therein Our Spirit, and she confirmed the Words of her Lord and His Books; and she was among the devoutly obedient.” As the mother of a prophet (Jesus), Maryam enjoys a high position, since motherhood is considered a metaphor for guidance and compassion. Tamara Agha-Jaffar See also: Christianity: Mother of God; Islam: Ideal Woman; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Agha-Jaffar, Tamara. Women and Goddesses in Myth and Sacred Text: An Anthology. New York: Pearson, 2005. Geagea, Rev. Nilo. Mary of the Koran: A Meeting Point Between Christianity and Islam. Translated by Rev. Lawrence T. Fares. New York: Philosophical Library, 1984. Hammad, Ahmad Zaki. Mary: The Chosen Woman: The Mother of Jesus in the Qur’an: An Interlinear Commentary on Surat Maryam. Chicago: Quranic Library Institute, 2001. Smith, Jane I., and Yvonne Haddad. “The Virgin Mary in Islamic Tradition and Commentary.” The Muslim World 79 (1989): 161–87.

PEACEMAKING The work of Muslim women peacebuilders within both domestic and interna­ tional contexts is characterized by at least two essential dispositions. The first entails the practical and theoretical enterprises associated with specifically Islamic



Peacemaking

peacebuilding, focusing on developing local peacebuilding practices, such as Dr. Hawa Abdi and her privately run shelter, a hospital, and a school in Somalia. The second comprises the evolving discourses of Islamic feminism and/or Muslim womanism, with Muslim women advocating for global women’s issues in social contexts shaped by Islamic ideals and values, best represented by Malala Yousafzai (b. 1997). Between these two dispositions are movements rooted in the idea of Muslim women participating in social, political, religious, and cultural contexts, which, by virtue of their positions in a conflict area, also find expression in conflict transformation processes. Examples of such movements can be found in the Palestinian women’s peace movements, such as the Jerusalem Center for Women, and in the work of Palestinian women peace activists like Hanan Mikhail Ashrawi (b. 1946) and Zahira Kamal (b. 1945). Palestinian women’s peace activism was born out of a strong tradition of female involvement in sociopolitical and cultural dynamics in Palestine, which in turn significantly shaped their roles in Palestinian peace processes. In addition, because such movements are inspired by the notion of Islamic feminism, rather than being limited to the realm of local issues, the movements have also served as a medium for global issues such as antiracism. An example of this last point would be the Women for Palestine organization, which, in addition to the Palestinian cause of peace, advocates for women’s empowerment and antiracism at the global level. To date, most analyses of the roles of Muslim women peacebuilders have suffered due to a process of double marginalization. The first marginalizing dynamic has to do with the fact that many conflicts have been highly militarized and thus are highly masculinized—both in terms of the structures of the conflicts as well as the usually unquestioned assumption that males must take the leading roles as the entrepreneurs of any actual or potential peace process. The second is that actual religious leadership is, with few exceptions, overwhelmingly male in many Muslim-majority societies and communities. Thus, when they do cross the threshold of historical visibility, Muslim women peacebuilders must resist hypermasculinized conflicts and peace processes as well as highly patriarchal understandings of normative religious leadership, authority, and interpretation of core Islamic doctrines and teachings. Nonetheless, these very forces that mitigate against the emergence of Muslim women peacebuilders as formidable agents of social change have been highly generative. In many cases (e.g., Mama Jibu-Jibu, female fish-sellers in Moluccas, Indonesia, who pioneered the first interactions between Christian and Muslim communities after the 1999 conflict), Muslim women peacebuilders have been in a unique position to transform conflicts. Exercising the social capital of their traditional roles, many women are able to mobilize grassroots networks across conventional familial, ethnic, sectarian, and religious lines in ways their male counterparts cannot. Also, the extent to which women and their children are often the primary victims of protracted conflicts can and has lent credibility to the leadership of Muslim women peacebuilders who are able to speak with a special authenticity rooted in their experience as survivors of cultures of violence.

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The roles Muslim women take in peacebuilding processes are diverse and often undocumented. They usually fall into two categories that are not, in any sense, mutually exclusive. The first is peacebuilding directed at, or within, the framework of an existing reconciliation process. The second is peacebuilding aimed at efforts to end violence (physical, structural, symbolic) and oppression against women specifically as well as against other distinctly marginalized groups within Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority communities. Noteworthy examples of initiatives in the first category are Small Steps in Sarajevo and a women’s interfaith-based conflict reconciliation initiative called the Concerned Women’s Movement in Ambon-Moluccas, Indonesia. Examples from the second category include the efforts of many individuals, scholars, and activists (e.g., Tawakkol Karman, Amina Wadud, Najeeba Syed) who work tirelessly to empower Muslim women and other marginalized groups and to advocate for their rights. It is also important to take into consideration the roles of traditional Muslim female religious leaders. Muslim peacebuilders like Huda al-Habash (?), Dr. Su’ad Saleh (b. 1946), and some female preachers and heads of madrassas in Indonesia contribute to the peacebuilding processes through their educational and clerical authorities. Finally, there are female members of certain ethnic groups (e.g., Amazigh of Morocco, Chinese of Indonesia) who stand up against the Islamist orthodoxy and its violent repercussions on women. These efforts might not be based on Islamic values, but they have significant implications for the ever-evolving discussion of the relevance of Islamic teachings in contemporary settings. Lailatul Fitriyah See also: Islam: Education; Feminism; Reform; Shari‘a; Women’s Organizations Further Reading Ahmad, Maryam, and James Deshaw Rae. “Women, Islam, and Peacemaking in the Arab Spring.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 27, no. 3 (2015): 312–19. El-Bushra, Judy. “Feminism, Gender, and Women’s Peace Activism.” Development and Change 38, no. 1 (2007): 131–47. Hayward, Susan. “Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, edited by Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little, 307–32. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Sharoni, Simona. “Gender and Conflict Transformation in Israel/Palestine.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 13, no. 4 (2012): 113–28.

PILGRIMAGE The Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca is obligatory for every able Muslim woman and man once in her or his lifetime. The Qur’an and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad make clear that every able-bodied Muslim is required to perform the spiritual journey of what is called the greater pilgrimage or the hajj. “Hence, [O Muhammad,] proclaim thou unto all people the duty of pilgrimage: they will come unto thee on foot and on every fast mount, coming from every far-away point [on earth]” (Qur’an 22:27).



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A Muslim begins his or her hajj experience by entering into a state of spiritual purity called ihram. This begins with making an intention and donning clothing specifically for the hajj experience. While for a man the ihram clothing consists of two pieces of white unstitched cloths that wrap around the body, for a woman ihram clothing consists of any loose-fitting garments that cover her body and hair. Her face is not to be covered. Neither of the genders are to wear any cologne or perfumes, cut their hair or fingernails, engage in sexual intimacy with their spouses, hold arms, or hunt animals. This type of spiritual purity works to increase the egalitarian ideal that the hajj experience aims to bring upon the Muslim devotees who are to come strictly for worshipping God and answering the call for pilgrimage to Mecca. By eliminating all forms of class-defining elements placed on the human body, the goal is to create worship space where a queen will worship among the poor and the underprivileged will worship among the elites. Women who follow in the footsteps of the Prophet and the mothers of the believers, or the Prophet’s wives, come from all over the world to perform the pilgrimage. As guests of God, these women earn the glorious title of hajjah, a female who has been cleansed of all sin through her pilgrimage to Mecca. Pilgrimage to Mecca can be made any time of the year; however, only when performed during the appointed 10 days of the Muslim lunar calendar does she meet her obligatory requirement of the hajj or the greater pilgrimage. Any other time of the year would be considered the lesser pilgrimage, umrah. The Prophet Muhammad performed the hajj with thousands of fellow Muslims, taking with him his wives and daughter Fatima as well as many other women from the Muslim community at that time. They performed the same rites and rituals as he did. Their gender did not act as a barrier between themselves and the spiritual connection made through their pilgrimage. When one of his wives, Aisha bint Abu Bakr, began to weep during the journey because she worried her menses would keep her from performing the pilgrimage, he comforted her with the assurance that she “can do all that the pilgrims do, in terms of the many rituals and prayers, except go round the temple” (Ibn Ishaq 2004, 649). In other words, her spirituality would not be defined by her physical state. Muslim women today follow the same example as the Prophet and his wives by continuing to perform the hajj and the umrah. The hajj has proven to be one of the most egalitarian experiences that Islam has to offer. As Muslims believe that God has made the hajj obligatory on men and women alike, a Muslim woman embarks on her spiritual journey even if it displeases her family, so long as she is free from dependents such as young children and has the sustenance and security she needs to perform hajj safely. During the hajj, the egalitarian experience is further promoted by the fact that all people performing hajj are gathered together without any barriers while making their circumambulations around the Kaaba, Islam’s most sacred mosque positioned at the center of the hajj experience. Poor, rich, male, female, king, peasant—all move in a circular motion around what is sometimes thought of as the central point of the world. A Muslim woman finds herself empowered by the movement of the masses, her gender ideally lost in movement, and her consciousness focused on the one and only God, the creator of the universe, Allah.

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A Muslim woman honored with the title hajjah is celebrated by her family, friends, and community. As would be expected, women come back and share their experiences in numerous ways. Today, women write blogs, publish books, and share their experience on television. Sana Tayyen See also: Islam: Coverings; Education; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Ibn Ishaq. The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. Translated by Alfred Guillaume. Karachi, Pakistan: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mehdi, Anisa, dir. Inside Mecca. National Geographic, 2003. http://www.anisamehdi.com​ /projects/insidemecca/default.html. Sayeed, Asma. “Women and the Hajj.” In The Hajj: Pilgrimage in Islam, edited by Eric Tagliacozzo and Shawkat M. Toorawa, 65–86. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

P O LY G A M Y Islam explicitly addresses the topic of polygamy (limited to polygyny, a man with more than one wife), permitting the practice provided that certain conditions are met and maintained. Prior to Islam, in Arabia, men could marry an unrestricted number of wives. With the advent of Islam, the Qur’an limited the number of times a man could marry simultaneously to four, provided he could treat them equally and justly. The verse permitting polygamy in the Qur’an states: “And if you fear that you will not be able to deal justly with the orphans, then marry women of your choice, two, or three, or four; but if ye fear that ye shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then marry only one, or (a captive) that your right hand possess, that will be more suitable, to prevent you from doing injustice” (4:3). During the period of Islam’s development, there were various social problems that persisted in society, including a large number of destitute peoples, particularly during times of war. The three types of destitute peoples outlined in the verse are orphans, women, and captives. In the early seventh century, due to battle and warfare, men had high mortality rates and lower life expectancies. This verse was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad after the battle of Uhud, when the Muslim community was left with a surplus of women, as many were widowed after their husbands died on the battlefield; their treatment was to be governed by principles of the greatest humanity and equity. Polygamy was introduced as a way of fixing the gender imbalance at the time and solving a social problem, as women and children largely depended on men for economic survival. The Qur’an states that having one wife is the preferred form of marriage, but a man could have up to four wives—specifically during times of war—to ensure that widows and single women are cared for and that they are economically protected. The practice of polygamy, however, is only permitted under specific conditions that must first be fulfilled. The verse was revealed primarily as a pragmatic solution to a social ill, specifically war and its resultant poverty. Among the three types of destitute peoples



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during times of war, the most vulnerable are the orphans. Orphans have valuable property attached to their name, and strict conditions and restrictions are specified when dealing with them and their property. The Qur’an mentions that if a man is not able to take responsibility for an orphan and cannot fulfill that condition, only then can he marry multiple women as a secondary option. Furthermore, although technically a husband may take on another wife without the consent of the first, to deal justly with all wives, it is within the rights of the wife to ask her husband to seek counsel and consent from her before he takes on other wives. Most importantly, if a man feels he cannot deal justly and equally with all his wives, providing financially and emotionally for their needs, he should only take one wife. Finally, the verse allows a man to marry a captive woman, which had relevance in the context of the tribal environment of seventh-century Arabia. In such instances, the requirements of remaining just and equal between all wives is still necessary. The Qur’an clearly outlines the conditions upon which polygamy is allowed, and only if a man is able to fulfill the conditions can he follow through with the marriage. The Qur’an further says: “And you will never be able to be fair and just between wives, even if you should strive (to do so). But do not incline completely (toward one) and leave another hanging. And if you amend (your affairs) and fear Allah— then indeed, Allah is oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful” (4:129). In this verse, it is made clear that a man will not be able to deal justly and equally among his wives, and thus marrying one woman is the preferred form of marriage in the Qur’an. However, it is also made clear that if a man has several wives, he should treat them fairly and equally—to not show favoritism toward one and leave another hanging. Thus, in Islam, polygamy safeguards the interests of women in society by forcing men to take financial and emotional responsibility for their actions. Many countries in the world today, however, practice polygamy unjustly and against religious conditions, which often causes a distorted view of the practice to persist. For those who practice it, most of their marriages do not fulfill the conditions upon which polygamy is justified in the Qur’an, which was originally revealed as a way of solving a social issue. Today, Muslim women also tend to be unaware of their rights in a polygamous marriage, while men are usually ignorant of their responsibilities. Some women are forced to accept their husbands adopting another wife. Other times, women are given to a husband who is already married and are unfairly treated and discriminated against. Some men wrongfully abuse this practice by marrying multiple wives for self-serving purposes that often leave the women “in a state of neglect, emotional distress, and without the comfort that Islamic marriage is supposed to provide” (Grant 2012). These examples clearly go against and stray from the Qur’anic verse that calls upon men to deal justly with their wives and for them to provide protection and happiness to their spouses. Farhana Rahman See also: Islam: Islam in the Middle East; Marriage and Divorce; Prophet’s Wives; Qur’an and Hadith; Shari‘a

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Further Reading Grant, Zahra. “Why Is Polygamy Allowed in Islam? How Is It Best Practiced?” Patheos, September 5, 2012. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/altmuslim/2012/09/why​-is​-polygamy​​ -allowed-in-islam-how-is-it-best-practiced/. Tucker, Judith E. Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

PROPHET’S WIVES The Prophet Muhammad married 11 women over the course of his life. Muslims refer to them as Ummahat al-Mu’minin or “Mothers of the Believers,” which is derived from the Qur’an: “The Prophet is closer to the believers than their selves, and his wives are (as) their mothers” (33:6). The wives of the Prophet in chronological order are Khadija bint Khuwaylid, Sawdah bint Zam’ah, Aisha bint Abu Bakr, Hafsah bint ‘Umar, Zaynab bint Khuzaymah, Umm Salamah Hind bint Abi Umayyah, Zaynab bint Jahsh, Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith, Umm Habibah Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan, Safiyyah bint Huyayy, and Maymunah bint al-Harith. The Prophet’s wives are regarded with respect and veneration in Islamic societies, and many aspects of Islam regarding women were delivered through their agency. The Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija bint Khuwaylid, holds the honor of being the first person to embrace Islam. Khadija was the rock upon which the Prophet spread his message of Islam and built his family. From the Quraysh tribe of Mecca, Khadija inherited her father’s great business sense and vast wealth, successfully leading the family business after his death. Muhammad was 25 and Khadija was 40 when they married, and they had six children together. Khadija provided support and companionship during the Prophet’s first revelations from Allah. As the message of Islam was spread, she gave up her worldly goods and put herself in the face of danger to support him. Khadija was well respected and revered as a woman of great moral virtue. With her wealth and position, she single-handedly helped the Prophet pursue his message, and she devoted her entire fortune to helping him establish the religion of Islam. Khadija was the Prophet’s only wife during their marriage. After Khadija’s death, the Prophet married 10 other women. Aisha bint Abu Bakr was the daughter of Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, the Prophet’s closest companion and the first caliph (successor of the Prophet) of Islam. The youngest of the Prophet’s wives, Aisha was a remarkable woman known for her lively personality and piety. Aisha is believed to have been the Prophet’s most beloved wife after Khadija. She was extremely scholarly and inquisitive, and her contribution to the spread of the Prophet’s message was instrumental in shaping the sunna (teachings of the Prophet). Many of the hadith are attributed to her on matters relating to the Prophet’s private life as well as on topics such as pilgrimage, inheritance, and eschatology, among others, and many of the Prophet’s companions would seek her help in resolving difficult legal problems. Umm Salamah Hind bint Abi Umayyah was married to the Prophet when she became widowed after the death of her husband, Abu Salamah, one of the companions of the Prophet. She accompanied the Prophet and his followers during an attempted pilgrimage to Mecca during which the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah was



Purdah

signed, establishing relations between the Muslim community and the Quraysh of Mecca. Her advice and counsel to the Prophet proved crucial during those very critical days. The Prophet conversed with his wives on various religious matters, often seeking their advice and opinions. As a result, companions of the Prophet also came to the Prophet’s wives for their knowledge. Through numerous hadiths reported by the Prophet’s wives, matters regarding marital affairs and the family life of the Prophet came to be seen as exemplary models and were significant in shaping the sunna (teachings of the Prophet) and in preserving the religion. Farhana Rahman See also: Islam: Ideal Woman; Islam in the Middle East; Marriage and Divorce; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Smith, Bianca. “Stealing Women, Stealing Men: Co-Creating Cultures of Polygamy in a Pesantren Community in Eastern Indonesia.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 15, no. 1 (2014): 118–35.

PURDAH Purdah, derived from the Persian word meaning “curtain,” is a religious and social practice that is often associated with Islam. In many cases, purdah predates Islam and is found in many cultures and groups in the Middle East and South Asia. In Muslim South Asia, purdah is a form of physical segregation of sexes and includes the practice of women covering their bodies to conceal their shape from the view of men. Culturally, purdah takes on various meanings and approaches, while in Islam, purdah is associated with the concept of hijab. Islam strongly emphasizes the concepts of decency and modesty with regard to dress and character. The Qur’an says: “O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their outer garments over their bodies. That is better that they should be known and not abused. And Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful” (33:59). This verse was revealed for women of the Prophet’s household as well as all believing Muslim women. Muslim women are obligated to cover themselves with their outer garments when walking in public as a sign of modesty. These outer garments could be a long gown or cloak covering the whole body and the neck and bosom. It is emphasized as a symbol of respect, piety, and dignity; is seen as a positive practice that liberates women; and is used as a way to protect women from harm and molestation. The wisdom behind purdah or hijab for women in Islam is for women to be treated equally and on the same footing as men. When a woman covers herself, it is an act of faith, and she places herself on a level that allows her to be judged by her intellect, faith, and personality rather than simply on physical beauty. In Islam, the rules of modesty, however, apply to both men and women—both sexes are expected to act modestly in character and speech when speaking to members of the opposite sex. The Qur’an says: “Say to the believing men that they

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should lower their gaze and guard their modesty, that will make for greater purity for them . . . And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof” (24:31). The need for modesty is the same in both men and women, and it concerns both sexes’ “gaze, gait, garments, and genitalia” (Martin et al. 2003). Culturally, purdah manifests itself in various forms in Muslim communities today. The practice of wearing hijab, burka, chador, or dupatta is one form. In Muslim communities in South Asia, purdah is practiced as a type of seclusion of women from the public, particularly from men, by wearing concealing clothing that covers the whole body. Another form of purdah is the concept of seclusion by way of high walls, curtains, and screens within the home to limit intermingling with outside men; only women and close male family members are allowed to see women outside the folds of purdah. While it is predominantly Muslim communities in South Asia that practice purdah, it is also commonly found among various Hindu communities, where a fold of the sari is drawn over the face in the presence of men. Many women today who practice purdah view it as liberating, empowering, and a symbol for greater agency of Muslim women. Forms of purdah such as veils and head coverings have improved mobility and have empowered women in rural Bangladesh, for example, to exercise their rights to access the public space for education and economic independence. Rural Bangladeshi women who wear the burka are found to have higher “social participation and visibility,” which increases women’s status in society (Feldman and McCarthy 1983). For many Muslim women in the West who are navigating various intersectional identities, those who wear the hijab find it empowering as a way of bringing them closer to God and of taking back control of their bodies, and they use it as a way to carve out a space for themselves in male-dominated societies and public spaces. While Islam prescribes purdah and hijab as a sign of modesty, respect, and protection, in contemporary times, purdah has taken cultural meanings wherein men, particularly in rural communities, have misinterpreted it as a way of restricting women’s freedom of movement and limiting women’s access to education, employment, and resources. In some countries, such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, purdah and similar types of veiling have been strictly enforced in a way that reinforces women’s subordination. In these countries, “[in] its most conservative form, the forms of purdah extend to the tone and pitch of voice used . . . and the practice of eye avoidance,” where conversations with men involve restrictions on how high the pitch and tone of a woman’s voice can go and restrictions from looking directly at men (Chowdhury 1993). Farhana Rahman See also: Islam: Coverings; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Chowdhury, Tasneem. “Segregation of Women in Islamic Societies of South Asia and Its Reflection in Rural Housing—Case Study in Bangladesh.” Minimum Cost Housing



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Group, McGill University. 1993. https://www.mcgill.ca/mchg/student/segregation​ /chapter3. Feldman, Shelley, and Florence McCarthy. “Purdah and Changing Patterns of Social Control among Rural Women in Bangladesh.” Journal of Marriage and Family 45, no. 4 (1983): 949–59. Martin, Richard C., Said Amir Arjomand, Marcia Hermansen, Abdulkader Tayob, Rochelle Davis, and John Obert Voll, eds. Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World. New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2003.

QUR'AN AND HADITH The Qur’an (revelations of the Prophet) and hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) deal with women in a comprehensive way, and Islamic teachings are attentive to the needs and rights of women in society. In pre-Islamic Arabia as well as in many societies, civilizations, and religions prior to the spread of Islam, women did not possess any rights or position in society. Women were marginalized and treated as unequal, many Arabs would bury their female children alive, women had no property or dowry rights, and women were treated as chattel and objects of sexual pleasure (Ally 1995). When Islam arose in seventh-century Arabia, it introduced many rights for women. The arrival of the Qur’an changed the status of women in Islamic societies, and such practices as female infanticide were prohibited and abolished. The Prophet Muhammad put a stop to the various cruelties and inequalities women faced, instead preaching kindness toward women, as he told the Muslims: “Fear Allah in respect of women” (Sahih Muslim 1218) and “The best of you is the one who is best towards his womenfolk” (Sunan al-Tirmidhi 1162). At the time of revelation, the teachings of the Qur’an were revolutionary. Islam gave women honor and regarded men and women as being of the same essence created from a single soul. The Qur’an says: “O mankind! Reverence your Guardian-Lord, who created you from a single person, created, of like nature, his mate, and from this pair scattered (like seeds) countless men and women. Reverence, Allah, through Whom you demand your mutual (rights), and reverence the wombs (that bore you), for Allah ever watches over you” (4:1). This verse provides an important reminder for all Muslims to appreciate and have reverence for women—specifically, for the mother who bore them and the wife through whom men enter parentage. In one tradition, the Prophet mentions the great honor of being in the service of the female as mother, as he said: “Remain in your mother’s service, because Paradise is under her feet.” The status of mothers, and consequently that of women, is thus elevated in Islam. And the Qur’an makes clear the dignity of women in their ability to create life through the womb. It is also emphasized in the Qur’an and hadith that there is no difference between men and women with regard to their relationship to Allah. The Qur’an says: “And for women are rights over men similar to those of men over women” (2:228). The Qur’an, in addressing the believers, often uses the expression “believing men and women” to emphasize the “equality of men and women in regard to their respective duties, rights, virtues and merits” (Doi n.d.).

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Throughout the Qur’an and teachings of the Prophet, women are given status and authority to make important decisions and contracts in their own name. The Qur’an and hadith clearly state that women are granted the right to participate in major decision making on any matter regarding religious or worldly affairs. Women have the right to inherit property and are equally qualified with their male counterparts to engage in financial dealings and property ownership. They are also able to buy, sell, and undertake any financial transaction without the need for guardianship and without any restrictions or limitations. This right applies to her whether she remains single or if she gets married; in the case of marriage, her possessions and property do not transfer to her husband (Ally 1995). With regards to inheritance, the Qur’an abolished the practice whereby inheritance went to only the oldest male heir. Instead, a woman can inherit from her father, her husband, and her childless brother (Ally 1995). The Qur’an says: “From what is left by parents and those nearest related there is a share for men and a share for women, whether the property be small or large, a determinate share” (4:7). The Qur’an and hadith regard women as the spiritual and intellectual equals of men and have given women dignity, deference, and economic independence (da Costa 2002). However, while rights for women are clearly outlined in the Qur’an and hadith, they are not always afforded to women in Muslim societies as a result of misconstrued interpretations of the scriptures. Many important women have been mentioned in the stories and teachings discussed in the Qur’an as a way of teaching the roles of women as wives, mothers, leaders, and models of faith. A significant figure is Maryam, the mother of Prophet Isa (Jesus), and the only woman identified by name in the Qur’an. Maryam is praised in the Qur’an and established as an exemplary model for the believers because of her chastity, obedience, and faith. Another woman mentioned in the Qur’an is Asiyah, who represents the ideal of virtue as a teacher and model for Muslim women. The wife of Pharaoh, she is praised in the Qur’an as a woman of faith and virtue despite being married to the evil pharaoh. In the hadith, Asiyah is mentioned as being one of the “celestial wives”—an honor shared with the Prophet’s wives and Maryam (Stowasser 1994). Farhana Rahman See also: Islam: Coverings; Hawwa; Honor; Marriage and Divorce; Maryam; Prophet’s Wives; Qur’an and Hadith; Reform; Shari‘a Further Reading Ally, Shabir. Common Questions People Ask about Islam. Toronto: Al Attique International Islamic Publications, 1995. Da Costa, Yusuf. The Honour of Women in Islam. Washington, DC: Islamic Supreme Council of America, 2002. Doi, Abdur Rahman. “Women in the Quran and the Sunnah.” Islam’s Women: Jewels of Islam, n.d. http://www.islamswomen.com/articles/women_in_quran_and_sunnah.php. Sahih Muslim, Hadith Number 1218. Stowasser, Barbara F. 1994. Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press. Sunan al-Tirmidhi, Hadith Number 1162.



Reform

REFORM The concepts of reform (‘is.la-h. ) and renewal (tajdı-d) are not foreign to Islamic discourse and have been a part of Islamic history since the beginning. Scholars of Islam will cite a sound hadith assuring Muslims that their religion will receive at the head of every century a mujadid or one who renews the Islamic teachings according to the Qur’an and the sunna, the way of the Prophet Muhammad: “Allah will raise for this community at the end of every hundred years the one who will renovate (renew) its religion for it” (Abu Dawud 37:4278). This revival and renewal that are at the foundation of reform movements throughout the Islamic world inherently support the notion that reform is an inevitable characteristic of a living Islam. Today, issues regarding Muslim women are at the forefront of reform movements in Islamic societies all over the globe. Muslim women are viewed under an equal spiritual lens such that in the sight of God, gender plays no role in discrimination. A woman is not inherently better or worse than any man except by her deeds and belief in God. This egalitarianism is supported by numerous verses in the Qur’an, including the following one: Verily, for all men and women who have surrendered themselves unto God, and all believing men and believing women, and all truly devout men and truly devout women, and all men and women who are true to their word, and all men and women who are patient in adversity, and all men and women who humble themselves [before God], and all men and women who give in charity, and all self-denying men and self-denying women, and all men and women who are mindful of their chastity, and all men and women who remember God unceasingly: for [all of] them has God readied forgiveness of sins and a mighty reward. (33:35)

Hence, under this spiritual lens, few to no reform movements take place. However, under the lens of the practical world of daily living under shari‘a or Islamic law and jurisprudence, many women and supporters of women point to certain areas that call for reform. As Islamic jurisprudence is recognized as a judicial system in which human reason uses divine texts for human purposes, Muslims recognize Islamic law as a human endeavor, thus having the capacity for error and reform. With that recognition, Muslims will differ as to how much error and reform is possible. This differentiation is what creates a vast amount of voices debating reform and women throughout the Muslim world. Further, many of the laws in Muslim-populated countries that pertain to women are not necessarily drawn from shari‘a but rather are a mix of cultural customs and religious teachings. Issues targeted by Muslim women’s reform movements are diverse; however, a good number of these movements center on a woman’s rights in marriage and divorce. Hence, questions range from those about a woman’s right to education, empowerment, and her own mobility without a guardian to the following: How does a woman negotiate her marriage contract? What responsibilities does she have as a wife and mother? What say does a Muslim woman have in regard to polygyny concerning her own husband? Not only do religious pressures play a role in governing a woman’s response to these questions but so, too, do social, cultural, and political pressures. Thus, reform movements deal with not only religious texts

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but also with understanding the sociopolitical and cultural structures that support what women’s reform movements consider misogynistic or outdated rules governing a woman’s position in society. These movements aim to reform religious texts, government, and society in general, a complicated interwoven web of factors. Since issues at the heart of reform movements around the globe are embedded in a complicated web of factors, numerous methods are employed by a variety of groups. Issues of reform and the movements that surround them are not monolithic. For example, a movement in Iran that aims to advance women’s empowerment during divorce works with Iranian religious lawmakers to update Islamic jurisprudence on the evolving value of a woman’s mahr (bridal gift) that she receives from her husband upon marriage. Mahr is realized not only as a woman’s gift in marriage but also as a tool for economic empowerment should her husband divorce her. Thus, the method of reform employed by an Iranian women’s movement has been to recognize shari‘a by enhancing the value of the bridal gift as a protective measure for Muslim women in Iran. They work with the Iranian lawmakers instead of trying to get rid of or radically change Islamic law. Another movement in Fes, Morocco, has aimed to change marriage and divorce laws known as mudawana amid political and social protest to their activism. These activists recognize that current mudawana laws, although religiously based, no longer fit the current capitalist environment that replaced the old cultural and tribal social structures that it once benefitted. The activists have sought to empower women with a judicial divorce and restrict men’s unilateral freedom to divorce their wives. They argue that during the tribal era of Moroccan culture, social structures were in place to protect women from men who may take advantage of the power to divorce and to abuse or harm their wives. Since the country has transitioned to a capitalist era, the tribal protective structures have diminished and with it the social structures that once protected women from male empowerment. The activists work by lobbying Moroccan government to reform mudawana laws and to educate and support women through counseling centers that aim to empower women. These activists are educated Moroccan women, and those who protest their reform movement often see them as Western sympathizers who aim to westernize Moroccan culture away from their traditional Islamic roots. Yet, the reformists point toward the issues as complex tribal customs dressed in immutable divine law and interconnected with the effects of globalization: women’s illiteracy, low education level, and economic dependence, or feminization of poverty. Western countries are also involved in what some have called a “gender jihad” (see Wadud 2006). American Muslim women scholars have combined their scholarship, spirituality, and activism into rereading Islamic texts by creating exegetical interpretations that are more inclusive of women. These scholars argue that, historically, Islamic scholarship of the Qur’an and hadith have been androcentric since the majority of the scholars are male. In their feminist critique, these scholars aim to bring about change for Muslim women by providing new grounding in Islamic traditions and texts that they believe have been lost to a male-dominated enterprise of Islamic scholars. Further, these scholars aim to reform what they believe is a tradition of misogyny. They argue that the Qur’an and the Prophet are inherently



Saints, Sufi

egalitarian in nature and that it is the male voices that have created a system of male superiority. Scholars have taken the academic stage to write books and academic articles promoting the need for rereading, reconstruction, and reinterpretation of the tradition. The reformist scholarship produced includes Leila Ahmed’s foundational book in gender studies, Women and Gender in Islam (1993), Amina Wadud’s Quran and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1992), and Kecia Ali’s Sexual Ethics and Islam: Feminist Reflections on Quran, Hadith, and Jurisprudence (2006). Finally, reform movements in places like Saudi Arabia are taking place on a cultural and social platform. Scholars argue that certain restrictions placed on Muslim women in Saudi Arabia are either derived from a very strict interpretation of religious texts that are historically non-normative or do not derive from Islamic sources at all and are more cultural restrictions rather than Islamic ones. Rulings that don’t allow women to drive, attempts at absolute segregation of the sexes, tremendous obstacles in gaining economic independence for women, and the enforcement of the face veil derive more from this type of interpretive activity than Islam itself. Hence, the method of reform for Muslim women essentially rests in reforming cultural attitudes toward women rather than rereading, reinterpreting, or eliminating Islamic sources. Sana Tayyen See also: Islam: Feminism; Islam in the Middle East; Marriage and Divorce; Polygamy; Qur’an and Hadith; Reform; Shari‘a Further Reading Gorney, Cynthia. “The Changing Face of Saudi Women.” National Geographic, February 2016. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/saudi-arabia-women-text. Kassam, Zayn R., ed. Women and Islam. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Ramadan, Tariq. Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

SAINTS, SUFI Female Muslim saints and mystics are commonly known as Sufi women. The term Sufi originates from several possible sources, all related to the idea of spiritual simplicity. Sufi women can be found from the early periods of Islam to the present. Although they have existed in a context of traditional Islamic practice and gender roles, they embody a type of authentic spiritual power that often challenges the more typical understanding of female piety and the conventional patriarchal authority structures prevalent in Muslim cultures and mainstream orthodoxy. In addition, Islamic spirituality has developed an interpretation of gender distinct from conventional understandings of gender in Muslim societies. Souls are considered female in relation to God, in terms of their receptivity to the divine power of creativity and revelation. However, those individuals who have asserted themselves on the spiritual path, seeking proximity to the Divine, are considered men of God, regardless of their physical gender.

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The most renowned among Sufi women is Rabiah al-Adawiyah, who was born in the early eighth century CE (or second century of the Islamic Hijri calendar) in Basra, located in modern-day Iraq. Her early years were marked with tragedy and suffering, having been orphaned at a young age and sold into slavery. However, her all-consuming love for God transcended her worldly trials and became evident even to her master, who freed her to devote herself to a life of worship. Although she received marriage proposals from notable figures, she preferred a life of celibacy, viewing marriage as a distraction. Humble and unassuming, she nonetheless possessed a strength of character and spiritual insight that made others seek her guidance. As Rabiah’s fame spread, she was challenged by religious leaders to provide a basis for her “boast” of authority. Unintimidated by their challenge, she simply replied that she made no boasts whatsoever, instead striving to be “nothing” for the sake of Allah. On another occasion, she was asked by a fellow Sufi for spiritual advice, and she gently counseled him that his love of reciting religious traditions (hadith) was a source of spiritual pride and distraction from the vision of the Beloved himself. She reminded another fellow Sufi that his emphasis on asceticism and his constant efforts to give up the temporal world indicated that he was preoccupied with it, thus missing the primary task of worshipping God for his sake alone. Rabiah came to symbolize the concept of disinterested love, a spiritual orientation that focused on love of God without secondary attachments, not even for fear of hell nor hope of heaven. The influence of Rabiah not only swept through the Islamic world but also reached as far as medieval Europe, reflected in literary images of a woman consumed with mystical love running through the streets, carrying a bucket of water to dowse the flames of hell and a torch to burn heaven. Another Sufi woman of renown is Omm Ali (a.k.a. Fatimah of Balkh, d. 854), who was the daughter of a wealthy notable. She married a fellow Sufi (Ahmad ibn Khadhruya) and spent her wealth on the poor. Omm Ali also studied under the famous mystic Bayazid Bistami, until one day he remarked on the henna pattern on her hands. She rebuked him, reminding him that before this point, there had been no reference to her gender, but now that he had started to notice her hands, all further communication between them must cease. Tohfah, from the ninth century, was a minstrel slave girl so overwhelmed with ecstatic love for the Divine that she was thought mad and sent to an asylum. A fellow Sufi (Sari Saqati of Baghdad) purchased her freedom. Together they performed the lesser pilgrimage, and she died in front of the Kabbah in Mecca. Princess Zobayda was both a Sufi and the daughter of Fath Ali Shah, of the Qajar dynasty that ruled Iran between 1797 and 1834. The princess was renowned for her mystical poetry, her intense worship, and her endowment of charitable institutions. Fatima bint al-Muthanna of 12th-century Cordoba, was a teacher of the famous mystical philosopher Ibn al-Arabi and retained the visage of youth even in her old age. Sayyidah Nafisah of Cairo (d. 824) was renowned for her miraculous prayers, knowledge of traditions, and night vigils, as well as for granting refuge to political prisoners.



Shari‘a

The aforementioned examples are a small selection from the hundreds of important female saints and mystics of the Muslim world. Whether princess or slave, teacher or minstrel, gnostic, patron, or protector, all these women were considered men on the path to God, blessing the world with the luminosity of their souls and the strength of their spirits. Barbara Lois Helms See also: Christianity: Mystics; Islam: Education; Sufism; Judaism: Kabbalah Further Reading Helms, Barbara Lois. “Raˉbi‘ ah as Mystic, Muslim and Woman.” In The Annual Review of Women in World Religions, Vol. 3, edited by Katherine K. Young and Arvind Sharma, 1–87. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Murata, Sachiko. The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. Nurbakhsh, Javad. Sufi Women. New York: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi, 1990. Schimmel, Annemarie. My Soul Is a Woman: The Feminine in Islam. New York: Continuum, 1997.

SHARI‘A Islamic law, shari‘a, which literally means a path or road, is a religious legal system concerned with multiple aspects of Muslim life. According to Islamic belief, shari‘a is the path of God, and when Muslims follow shari‘a, they are following the will and law of God. Islamic law is practical in nature and does not, for the most part, include aspects of faith or theology. A Muslim woman’s interests in shari‘a take her through a range of topics, including individual and communal obligations and prohibitions. Under the rubric of Islamic law, jurisprudence or fiqh is the interpretive legal lens used to evaluate Islamic sources of the Qur’an and sunna (Islamic scriptures) on matters that include aspects of religious, societal, and civil life. Islamic jurisprudence regulates ritual worship and purification; familial, social, and business transactions; criminal and constitutional laws; and civic life. As women play roles in all these categories, they are affected by Islamic law in ways that are particular to their gender. A Muslim woman living under Islamic jurisprudence learns that the Islamic legal system is pluralistic in nature yet unified under principles of Qur’anic and prophetic guidelines. The pluralism of Islamic law is found in both Sunni schools of law and Shi‘a schools of law, each according to the structure of their recognized authoritative voices. A Muslim woman can play multiple roles within the Islamic legal system. She can be one who implements Islamic law, one who teaches the law, and/or one who not only teaches and implements but also one who reaches the level of a faqiha or Muslim woman jurist. In this capacity, she may have the highest authoritative status in the legalization process of Islamic law. Islamic legal history is known for many of its women jurist scholars, dating all the way back to the Prophet Muhammad’s wife, Aisha bint Abu Bakr, in the seventh century CE. Muslim women jurists

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would teach male students and debate with male scholars on key matters regarding questions of fiqh and hadith (prophetic sayings), inside and outside of the mosques. One such woman, Umm al-Darda, was a seventh-century female jurist and scholar of Islam who taught in Damascus in the Great Umayyad Mosque. She is said to have taught the caliph Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan. Other famous female Islamic jurists include 11th-century Fatimah bint Abi ‘Ali al-Daqaq al-Naysaburiyyah and 14th-century Umm Zaynab Fatimah bin ‘Abbas al-Baghdadiyah. Women have rights under Islamic law in areas of education, inheritance, marriage, parentage, wealth, and business. A Muslim woman can exercise her rights regardless of her relationship to her husband or father. She is the sole owner of her wealth, and her rights under Islamic law protect her authority in how she wants to use her wealth, obtain an education, enter a marriage bond, and conduct her business affairs. However, as there are rights in Islamic law pertaining to women as well as men, there are restrictions placed on both genders in matters pertaining to familial obligations. Such restrictions include a woman’s responsibility for raising children, being her husband’s partner whether sexual or domestic, and maintaining amicable relations with her husband and parents. Further, under Islamic law, a Muslim woman, as recognized by the multiple schools of fiqh law, is tasked with covering her body in public and maintaining modest dress. One major part of Islamic law that strongly affects Muslim women’s lives is the institution of marriage. Islamic law regulates the types of marriages that are lawful in Islam, the contract between a husband and wife, the bridal gift given to a Muslim woman upon her consent to marriage, and her rights to divorce. There are differences in marriage laws between Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims. Shi‘a Muslim women have the right to engage in what is known as temporary marriage unions called zawaj al-mut’a. Sunni Muslim women do not. One example where the complexity of Islamic law manifests itself pertaining to marriage is in the case of polygamy. This aspect of marriage is highly sensitive and is influenced not only by prohibitions and restrictions from the Qur’an and sunna but also by cultural and social norms. Although polygamy is not practiced widely within modern Muslim societies and is not encouraged in the Qur’an, Muslim men are given the right to marry up to four women at a time, while Muslim women are to practice complete monogamy. The complexity of the right to polygamy becomes apparent when jurists acknowledge a legal nuance where Islamic law grants a Muslim woman the right to stipulate in her marriage contract anything that does not infringe on the rights of another. Such restrictions could include that her husband must remain monogamous throughout their marriage. Failure on the part of the husband to abide by her stipulations will result in the dissolution of the contract and the voiding of the marriage; in other words, she is granted a divorce. Muslim women throughout the world practice Islamic law in their daily lives. Islamic law is seen as empowering to these women as it grants them many privileges, such as the right to property, inheritance, education, marriage and divorce, and engagement in politics and leadership, as well as the right to teach men and women. However, although Islamic law is seen as a positive force in women’s lives by many, it is also viewed critically by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. There are



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groups who want to eliminate Islamic law as they see it to be an outdated form of governance that no longer applies to the modern world as a legal system. They focus on aspects of law that deal with gender roles, adultery, and capital punishment. There are other reformers who see Islamic law as in need of updating rather than rendering it completely invalid. For these reformers, issues such as legal marriage age, gender roles, and types of legal penalties should be reformed to fit a modern Muslim society. There are Muslim women on all sides of the debate and spectrum regarding the positive and negative aspects of Islamic law. Sana Tayyen See also: Islam: Coverings; Education; Honor; Marriage and Divorce; Polygamy; Qur’an and Hadith Further Reading Khaled Abou El Fadl. “In Recognition of Women.” May 2, 2016. http://www.scholarofthehouse.org/inreofwobykh.html. Nasir, Jamal J. The Status of Women Under Islamic Law and Modern Islamic Legislation. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008. Tucker, Judith E. Women, Family, and Gender in Islamic Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

SUFISM Sufism is the mystical side of Islam, in which practitioners strive for spiritual intimacy with God through self-denial and devotion. Sufism is believed to have its origin in the Arabic word suf (wool), as the early ascetics of Islam (Sufis) are said to have donned coarse woolen garments to symbolize denial of a materialistic and comfortable life. The term Sufi may also have its roots in safa (purity), focusing on purity of mind and heart, or suffah (bench), a reference to the People of Bench, the close companions of Prophet Muhammad who led a very pious and austere life. Sufism or tasawwasuf started as a mystical movement that focused on inner self and esoteric knowledge. Women have played an important role in the development of Sufism from the beginning. Khadija, wife of Prophet Muhammad, is considered by Sufi scholars to be the first female Sufi. There have also been female Sufis who lived the life of ascetics apart from society, such as Rabiya (717–801 CE), while others lived in the world and fostered mystical practices as benefactors. Some of the renowned male Sufis were influenced by female Sufis, who were their teachers, students, and spiritual friends. The most impressive among such women is Fatima of Nishapur (d. 849). She consorted with great mystics like Bayazid Bistami and Dhun Nun Misri and often guided her husband, Ahmad Khidruya Khidrya, with her knowledge of spiritual and practical matters. Another woman mystic, simply referred to as wife of al-Qushayri (fifth century), is known for her knowledge on prophetic traditions. She lived for some 90 years and is believed to have been the highest authority among other devout intellects of her time. Two other women mystics are known through the writings of Ibn Arabi (1165–1240 CE), Shams of Marchena and Fatimah of Cordova.

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Within Islamic society, women have been subject to gender bias and stereotyping, and the attitude of male Sufis toward women has been ambivalent. Some compared woman to the lower self or nafs, an embodiment of the world and its temptations (Schimmel 1975, 428). Many Sufi poets have presented woman as an enchantress who tries to capture the pure soul into the trap of worldly affairs. On the other hand, Sufis were also aware of positive aspects of women. Ibn Arabi writes, “God cannot be seen apart from matter, and He is seen more perfectly in human materia than in any other, and more perfectly in woman than in man” (Jawad 2012, 11). Today the world acknowledges the direct and indirect contributions of women Sufis to intellectual traditions in mystical Islam (the tradition of documenting mystical experiences by Sufis or their disciples). Among the most renowned Sufi women, Rabiya al-Adawiyya’s (717–801 CE) name is recorded as the earliest Sufi mystic to have expressed the relationship with the Divine in a language that spoke of the Divine as a beloved and worshipped as a lover. Sold to slavery as a child, Rabiya was forced to lead a life of utter distress, but eventually her extreme devotion and love for God led to her freedom. Rabiya’s vision of altruistic love (mahabbah) and mystical intimacy (uns) are expressed in beautiful prayers and poems attributed to her by Farid-ud-Din Attar, a later Sufi saint and poet. Other saintly women Sufis lived in the eighth century, including Maryam of Basra and Rihana, who were known to have devoted themselves to Sufi practices. Annemarie Schimmel (1975, 426) writes about them as “the enthusiastic (alwaliha), and many others who were known as ‘ever weeping, fearful, and who make others weep’ they might even become blind from constant weeping, so that their hearts’ eyes might see better.” Ironically, these women are lesser known, and many of them remain undocumented. The culture in which Sufism was earlier practiced was an oral more than a written one, and women in particular tended to write less due to familial responsibilities. They received fewer opportunities for education. Nevertheless, there have been a few women who wrote of their mystical experiences in songs, letters, poems, journals, and critical works. Many such works are now being translated for larger audiences. The works of some notable women Sufi writers are Aisha of Damascus’s famous commentary of Khwaja ‘Abdallah Ansari’s Station on the Way (Manazel as-sa’erin) entitled Veiled Hints within the Stations of the Saints (Al-esharat al-Khafiysfi’l-manazel al-auliya); Jahanara, daughter of Shah Jahan (1592–1666), the Mughal emperor of India, who wrote an account of her spiritual journey in a volume entitled Risila-iSahibiyya; the biography of Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti titled Mu’nis al- Arwah; and Hayati Kermani, belonging to the Nimutallahi order, wrote a divan expressing her love for the Divine. Women saints have existed throughout the Islamic world, though unfortunately very few names have been documented in official records. Fortunately, some of these women’s spiritual experiences were documented by relatives, friends, or students. A good example is Umm Abdallah, an early Sufi woman whose spiritual journey was documented by her husband, ninth-century Sufi scholar and mystic Ali al-Hakim-Tirmidhi. Abdallah is hailed as a Sufi dreamer; deep mystic



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knowledge came to her in her dreams, through symbols and visitations, on a regular basis. In Sufism, dreams play a very important role. They are believed to be symbolic representations of spiritual dimensions, belonging to the alam-al-mithal or world of imagination. Umm Abdullah’s dreams brought her new knowledge and teachings and were documented by her husband, Tirmidhi. Tirmidhi did not have a formal teacher, and it is believed his wife, Umm Abdallah, began having dreams that answered his queries on a regular basis. Today, women Sufis work to continue the mystical tradition in Islam in different ways, teaching and sharing their spiritual knowledge around the world. Some of these women act as a bridge between East and West. For example, Farzaneh Milani (b. 1947) works as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and is a Sufi poet. Murshida Vera Corda (1913–2002), another well-known Sufi, belongs to the North American Chisti line. She helped establish the first alternative Sufi school for young children in the 1960s. The school emphasizes the use of spiritual principles in raising and educating children. Aliaa and Aisha R. Rafea are sisters who share the path of Sufism. Aliaa is currently a faculty member at Ain Shams University of Cairo and is working on how awareness of our spiritual essence can improve our lives on all levels, both in the individual and in society as a whole. Aisha is a well-established writer who “focuses on sharing with readers the awareness that human beings need to open to the nurturing of the Divine within to be able to discern the teachings written on their own souls, rather than those written merely on paper” (Helminski 2003, 196). She also serves as coleader of a women’s group at the Egyptian Society for Spiritual and Cultural Research. Another renowned woman Sufi is Sayedeh Nahid Angha, founder of the International Association of Sufism (1983), which has a department dedicated to Sufi women, created to “introduce, disseminate, honor and acknowledge, with Divine Guidance, the contribution and service of Sufi women to the world civilization” (Helminski 2003, 244). Sayedeh is an author and translator of many books on Sufism and has taught Sufism and philosophy for more than 25 years. Similarly, women from diverse backgrounds like Michaela Ozelsel (b. 1949, German), Noor-un-NisaInayat Khan (1914–1944, British), Sachiko Murata (b. 1943, Chinese), and Irina Tweedie (1907–1999, Russian) have contributed to the continuation of Sufism. In spite of gender bias and stereotyping, women Sufis have left an indelible impression on mystical Islam. Today, Sufism is in decline due to a combination of factors. Fundamentalists, like the Wahhabis who insist on a rigid, externally observant, narrow interpretation of Islam, often assert that Sufism is a perversion of Islam. Within the strict legal traditions they impose, Sufism is difficult to sustain. Another factor is the rejection of mystical Islam by secular modernists, who see it as a medieval superstition. Finally, modern Sufi practitioners who wish to legitimate their own perspective discredit other versions as pseudo-Sufism, particularly in cases of groups that deemphasize Islamic practices and identity. In spite of this, Sufism has attracted followers from the West of both Jewish and Christian origin as well as Zoroastrians, Hindus, and Buddhists in the East. For

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example, Noble Laureate and British feminist writer Doris Lessing (1919–2013), Turkish women’s rights activist and writer Cemâlnur Sargut (b. 1952), Chinese professor Sachiko Murata (b. 1943), and many others have acknowledged the impact of Sufism on their lives. Shahida See also: Christianity: Mystics; Islam: Education; Islam in the Middle East; Islam in the United States; Prophet’s Wives; Saints, Sufi; Judaism: Kabbalah Further Reading Helminski, Camille Adams. Women of Sufism. Boston: Shambhala, 2003. Ibn Arabi. Sufis of Andulasia. Translated by R. J. W Austin. Gloucestershire, UK: Beshara, 1988. Jawad, Haifaa. Towards Building a British Islam: New Muslims’ Perspective. London: Continuum, 2012. Nurbakhsh. Sufi Women. New York: Khaniqahi-Nimatullahi, 1990. Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimension of Islam. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

W O M E N ’ S O R G A N I Z AT I O N S Muslim organizations can be traced back historically and can be found throughout the entire globe in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority countries. These organizations are diverse, serving a wide range of goals and objectives, such as practical and theological religious programs, educational and professional development, political establishments, social and health care programs, and political and religious reform. As Islamic law does not restrict a woman’s religious or secular education, ability to run an organization, or involvement in politics and government, Muslim women at all levels of religiosity are highly involved in all such establishments. They have developed all kinds of Muslim women’s organizations, which are operated by women and for women. Women-only mosques in Islamic societies have existed for hundreds of years, particularly in China, acting as some of the oldest Muslim women’s organizations in the world. These mosques are operated for the purpose of providing worship space for Muslim women only as well as places for educating women in Islamic sciences. Dating back to 1820, Wangjia Hutong Women’s Mosque is the oldest surviving women’s mosque in China. Here, women learn the Qur’an and are led by a female imam. There are women-only mosques in many parts of the world, including the United States. The Women’s Mosque of America in Los Angeles, California, opened in 2015 as a space for women to actively engage in Islamic prayer services. At this mosque, women have led Friday prayer service, a service that has traditionally been led by male imams. Religious or Islamic academic institutions are located throughout the world today. Many were founded by women scholars whose goals are to educate Muslim women in subjects like Arabic, Qur’an, shari‘a or Islamic law, the prophetic tradition, and spirituality. By focusing on women’s religious education, these



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organizations seek to empower Muslim women and strengthen women’s roles in the family and in society. Al-Huda International, a Sunni Muslim women’s organization based and founded in Pakistan by Dr. Farhat Hashmi, is one such organization. Al-Huda is unique in its approach to religious scholarship. Educated at an elite Western university, Dr. Hashmi grounds her students’ education in the primary sources of the Qur’an and sunna (tradition of the Prophet Muhammad), helping them gain agency in their understanding of their religion. The popularity of Al-Huda International has grown beyond Pakistan and now has a base in Mississauga, Canada, educating Muslim women throughout the world via their online classes. Many Muslim women’s organizations are formed for the sake of protecting Muslim women’s human rights in Muslim-majority countries. These organizations function on both a local level, working with local governments and communities, and on a global level, working with state actors as nongovernmental organizations. Some of the issues they deal with are marriage and divorce laws, female circumcision, and education rights for women. These groups work to reform social attitudes by educating the local populace and empowering women by working to alter government laws that do not benefit women in modernity. They work with religious and government leaders to help focus laws so that they are both religiously sound and socially beneficial to women in society. In the case of Morocco, a Muslim-majority country, the Najia Belghazi Center operates as a nongovernmental organization and on a volunteer basis. Its aim is to empower women and inform them of their rights in times of divorce. Teaching women the laws allows them the opportunity to navigate those laws and protect themselves from what many modernists would cite as unfair and outdated laws; outdated laws weaken women instead of helping them heal from divorce. In the United States, Muslim women have created organizations that also seek to empower Muslim women’s identities by engaging with the Qur’an and prophetic tradition and on all things pertaining to women. They seek to give an Islamic perspective on issues such as Muslim women’s dress, sexuality, gender equity, violence, and the media. A good example is the Muslim Women’s League, located in Los Angeles, California, a nonprofit organization that aims to strengthen the role of Muslim women by educating them on important issues, including the history of Muslim women in education, the rights and equality of Muslim women, and health matters of concern to Muslim women. Another group that works to empower Muslim women is KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights. Operating out of Washington, D.C., KARAMAH, an Arabic word entailing human dignity, “seeks to create a global network of advocates for the rights of Muslim women” (KARAMAH n.p.). It was founded in 1993 by Dr. Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor and Islamic scholar at the University of Richmond. KARAMAH is distinct among other human rights organizations as it is largely made up of Muslim women lawyers who advocate both human rights and Islamic law. Sana Tayyen

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See also: Islam: Coverings, Education; Feminism; Honor; Marriage and Divorce, Qur’an and Hadith; Reform; Shari‘a Further Reading KARAMAH. “Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights.” KARAMAH. http://karamah​ .org/about/what-we-do. Newcomb, Rachel. “Failures of Solidarity, Failures of the Nation-State: Nongovernmental Organizations and Moroccan Women’s Activism.” In Zayn R. Kassam, ed. Women and Islam, 43–59. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010. NPR. “Female Imams Blaze Trail Amid China’s Muslims.” NPR, July 21, 2010. http://www​ .npr.org/2010/07/21/128628514/female-imams-blaze-trail-amid-chinas-muslims. Shaikh, Khanum. “Gender, Religious Agency, and the Subject of Al-Huda International.” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2011): 62–90. “Women’s Mosque of America 2016.” Women’s Mosque of America. Accessed August 22, 2016. http://womensmosque.com/.

Jainism

INTRODUCTION Jainism arose in India in fifth century BCE and is based on the teachings of Mahavira, whom Jains believe to be the 24th Tirthankara (one who teaches the path to liberation and establishes a community to perpetuate the teaching). There are two main branches of Jainism: the Svetambaras and the Digambaras. Despite its long history, Jainism remains relatively small, with about 5 million followers, and is not widespread outside of India. Jainism shares many similarities with Hinduism, including the concepts of karma, reincarnation, and moksha, or liberation from rebirth. Jains believe that karma is the cause of each jiva, energy or life force (soul or spirit), being born into a body over and over again. The circumstances of an individual’s birth—including whether one is born male or female—are also seen as the result of karma. This endless cycle is understood to be a form of suffering, an entrapment or kind of crust covering over the life force. In its pure state, the jiva is pure bliss, perception, consciousness, and power. In the embodied state, its purity and power are obscured. The way to liberation is to remove karmic accumulation. Letting go of what one likes and dislikes is seen as a necessity, since karmic matter is attracted to the passions. Strategies involve developing equanimity and detachment through fasting, giving charity, meditating, and other techniques. While Jains respect all life and see all humans as capable of journeying toward liberation, Digambaras believe that women cannot attain moksha until they achieve rebirth as men. Jain ascetic practices are stringent. Nuns and monks are celibate. Digambara monks wear no clothes, but female Digambara monastics are barred from this practice. Female and male monastics practice nonviolence, nonattachment, and nonpossession, and try to avoid all harm. Ahimsa, to do no harm in practice (words and deeds) and intent (thought), is important for avoiding karmic accumulation. To avoid causing harm, extreme care must be taken since living beings are everywhere. The air we breathe contains microorganisms, the paths we walk contain insects, and the food we eat contains lives. Extreme asceticism, constant vigilance, and compassion for all life are essential for Jain monastics. Jain women monastics engage in these practices, as discussed in the article “Monastics and Nuns.” For Jain laywomen, the goal is to attain a better rebirth by avoiding bad karma and accumulating good. Jain laywomen may practice nonviolence, chastity (sex only within the marriage), fidelity, honesty, nonstealing, and nonattachment to possessions. They may marry, raise children, support the family and community, worship, and perform rituals. Laywomen may also practice meditation, daily devotions, and pilgrimages. For discussion of laywomen’s practices, see “Laywomen” by Susan de-Gaia.

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Other Jain women’s religious practices are discussed in “Rituals” and include women’s worship in temples and home shrines, pilgrimages, feasts, fasts, and festivals. Jain women perform devotions to deities, Jinas (tirthankaras), mothers of tirthankaras, saints, and sometimes to respected monks. Female divinities are found in Jainism, as related in “Female Deities” by Semontee Mitra. General Bibliography—Jainism Balbir, Nalini. “Women and Jainism in India.” In Women in Indian Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma, 70-107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Cort, John. “Medieval Jaina Goddess Traditions.” Numen 34, no. 2 (1987): 235–55. Jaini, P. S. The Jaina Path of Purification. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Jaini, P. S. Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Kelting, M. Whitney. Heroic Wives Rituals, Stories and the Virtues of Jain Wifehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Kelting, Mary Whitney. Singing to the Jinas: Jain Laywomen, Man.d.al. Singing, and the Negotiations of Jain Devotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sethi, Manisha. “Chastity and Desire: Representing Women in Jainism.” South Asian History and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 42–59. Sethi, Manisha. Escaping the World: Women Renouncers among Jains. New Delhi: Routledge, 2012. Sharma, Arvind, ed. Women in Indian Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Vallely, Anne. “Women and Jainism in North America.” In Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, edited by Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether, 688–93. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.

FEMALE DEITIES Jain Goddesses rose to prominence during the medieval era (8th to 13th century CE) as a part of the devotional bhakti movement. Many Jain Goddesses are the same as Hindu Goddesses, but they are not mere incorporations of Hindu deities into Jain traditions; instead, they are cardinal to Jain religious beliefs and practices. Jain Goddesses are believed to reside in three realms: urdhvaloka, the upper realms; tiryagloka, the middle realm; and adholoka, the lower realm. The upper realm has two Goddesses, Saraswati and Lakshmi. The middle realm has a group of 16 Tantric Goddesses called the vidyadevis, who do not have individual personalities. In the lower realm are the yaksis. Goddess Saraswati is the Goddess of Knowledge and Learning. She is mentioned in several early Jain texts, including the Angas. Saraswati presides over the teachings of tirthankaras, or srutas, and is also known as Srutadevata. She is worshipped every year by the Svetambaras on the fifth day of the fortnight of the lunar month of Kartik (October–November) and by the Digambaras on the fifth day of Jaishtha (April–May). Sri Lakshmi, Goddess of Wealth and Prosperity, also holds an important place in the life of Jains, the majority of whom work in businesses. Lakshmi is also known as the Occupational Goddess. She is worshipped annually during Diwali (October–November), the Festival of Lights, when merchants close their old accounts and open new ones (beginning a new fiscal year).



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The 16 Tantric Goddesses, vidyadevis, of the middle realm, are mentioned in many early Jain texts. They are discussed as having magical powers, and one can obtain that power by meditation and ascetic practices. They are depicted as Goddesses who can aid worldly gains but cannot lead or guide one toward liberation. Therefore, the use of these occult powers, the vidyas, was highly criticized in the earliest periods of Jainism. However, a stark change in tone toward vidyadevis developed in texts like Angavijja, compiled in the fourth century CE, and the beginning of the Jain Purana traditions (first through fifth century CE). The occult powers were no longer criticized, and the Jain tradition came to be influenced by Tantra. By the time of Vasudevahindi (ca. 500–700 CE), the status of vidyadevis had changed from one of occult powers to Goddesses. The lower realm consists of the most important Goddesses of the Jain tradition, the yaksis, also known as yaksinis and sasanadevatas. Their rise and recognition in Jainism was quite late, and most of them are simply attendant deities of the 24 tirthankaras. Ambika, Padmavati, Cakresvari, and Jvalamalini, among other yaksis, have gained some importance. The yaksis’ main function is to preside over the pilgrimage sites associated with different tirthankaras and other liberated Jain leaders. Jain female deities are never worshipped to attain liberation; rather they are worshipped to assist Jain devotees in their worldly affairs. South Asian studies scholar John Cort (1987, 252) states, “The aim of the Jaina worship of the goddess should be seen as falling within the broader purview of what it means to be religious . . . yet these aims are of a different order from the ultimate religious aim of liberation.” Semontee Mitra See also: Hinduism: Lakshmi; Saraswati; Tantra Further Reading Cort, John. “Medieval Jaina Goddess Traditions.” Numen 34, no. 2 (1987): 235–55.

JINA Female Jinas, which literally means “conquerors,” or the ones who reestablish Jain teachings in the world and found anew the fourfold structure of Jain society, are rare. The Svetambaras (literally “white-clad,” referring to the simple white clothing worn by ascetics) sect believes that only one of the 24 Jinas of this world age (avasarpini) was born as female, while the other sect, the Digambaras (literally “sky-clad,” referring to the fact that monks of the order go about naked), reject this. Theologically, both sects believe that all 24 Jinas in any world age must be born as male; the reason being that one who possesses the correct Jain understanding of reality (samyaktva) cannot be born in a female body. Since it is inconceivable that a Jina would be born without a correct understanding of reality, the Jina must be born as male. The Svetambaras attest to a singular extraordinary exception to this rule; they believe that the 19th Jina of the present world age was a woman named Malli. According to the Svetambaras, three lives preceding her final birth as a would-be Jina, the soul of Malli lived as a king named Maha- bala, who, along with seven friends, renounced the world and became a Jain monk. As part of their practice,

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the friends undertook occasional fasts, agreeing among themselves to the limitations of each fast. Maha-bala, though, had a natural proclivity toward deceit. Feigning sickness, the king refused meals and, in the process, accumulated more days of fasting than the rest of his cohort. Maha-bala’s conduct as a monk was otherwise faultless, and his ascetic exertion was enough to put him on the path to eventual Jinahood. But the negative karmic effect of Maha-bala’s deceit necessarily had to come to fruition, and after spending time as a deity in heaven, Maha-bala was reborn as the would-be Jina princess Malli. Both Svetambaras and Digambaras believe that deceit and trickery (ma-ya-) are the primary causes of female rebirth. The seven friends with whom Maha-bala originally renounced the world were also reborn at this time as princes of neighboring kingdoms, each seeking Malli’s hand in marriage. The princes’ pursuit of Malli eventually brought them to war with each other, and Malli, sickened both by being seen as a sexual object and being the cause of such violence, renounced the world. She is believed to have achieved omniscience (kevalajña-na) on the very same day as her renunciation. The Digambaras deny the veracity of the miraculous Svetambara account of Malli, arguing instead that, like the other 23 Jinas of the present world age, the 19th was a male named Mallina-tha. Even among Svetambaras, most icons of Malli depict her as having a male body; there is only one extant icon of Malli as female. Currently in the Lucknow Museum and dated to the ninth century CE, it features developed breasts and a hair braid (ven·i) down its back. Unfortunately, the head of the statue is missing. Gregory M. Clines See also: Jainism: Monastics and Nuns Further Reading Dundas, Paul. The Jains. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Jaini, Padmanabh S. Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Shah, Umakant P. Jaina-Ru-pa-Man·d.an·a: Bha-g 1. New Delhi: Abhinav, 1987.

L AY W O M E N A Jain is someone who venerates the Jinas, beings who have conquered the passions (desires and aversions) and achieved liberation from worldly existence (without liberation, the soul continues to be reborn again and again). According to Jain belief, humans are souls trapped in the material world by karma, which is attracted to the passions and then sticks to the soul, weighing it down so that it cannot be free. To be liberated requires letting go of the passions, which can only be achieved through extreme ascetic practices. As celibacy is a requirement of those on the path to liberation, the Jain community is divided into celibate monastics and noncelibate laypersons. The community as a whole, including nuns, monks, laywomen, and laymen, is one of mutual dependence, however, with nuns and monks depending on the laity for food and financial support and the laity looking



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to nuns and monks for blessings and sacred teachings. Giving alms to nuns and monks is an important function of Jain laywomen. They may also donate funds for devotional services and for the building, maintenance, and decoration of temples. Laywomen, while not dedicated to liberation in the present life, may earn good karma and merit through virtue and religious practice. Spiritually, laywomen strive to be virtuous within the terms of ideal womanhood. These ideals, which include the virtuous woman and the dedicated wife, share similarities with Hindu ideals but are also unique to Jain culture. Like the Hindu ideal of pativrata (dedicated wife), the Jain ideal of a dedicated wife is one who cares for the family and whose spiritual and material support are needed for the health and well-being of husband, in-laws, and children, especially sons. As wives and mothers, Jain laywomen ensure the continuation of the community. Mothers are expected to serve as models of virtue and to teach Jain values and behaviors to the children. Religious practices include veneration of the saints, listening to the teachings of revered monastics, participating in fasts and festivals, and puja worship with deities. Laywomen perform rituals and fasts in self-sacrifice for the good of the family. An important fast is the Ayambil Oli, the fast for the health of one’s husband. In this ritual, fasting and worship are performed in imitation of the mythical woman, Mayanasundari. Mayanasundari was an ideal pativrata and heroine whose great devotion and worship brought health and well-being to the family and community. According to the story, Mayanasundari’s father married her to King Shripala, who was a leper, as punishment. But Mayanasundari became a dedicated wife, performing Ayambil Oli and worshiping the Siddhachakra mandala. This devotion resulted in the miraculous cure of Mayanasundari’s husband and 700 other lepers. Following Mayanasundari and similar role models, Jain wives strive to exhibit moral strength, courage, wisdom, chastity, and fidelity. Susan de-Gaia See also: Hinduism: Festivals; Ideals of Womanhood; Marriage; Jainism: Monastics and Nuns; Ritual Further Reading Kelting, M. Whitney. “Good Wives, Family Protectors: Writing Jain Laywomen’s Memorials.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (September 2003): 637–57.

MONASTICS AND NUNS The two major sects of Jainism, the Svetambaras (literally “white-clad,” referring to the simple white clothing worn by ascetics) and the Digambaras (literally “skyclad,” referring to the fact that monks of the order go about naked), use different terms to refer to their female monastics, the former using the term sa-dhvı-, the feminine form of the Sanskrit word sa-dhu, meaning good, honorable, or righteous, and the latter using the term a-ryika-, which translates to “honorable or noble woman.” The ultimate goal of Jain asceticism is to achieve liberation (moksha) from the world of perpetual rebirth (samsara). This is achieved through stopping new

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karmic residue from attaching to one’s soul (jiva) and destroying the karma that has already attached over innumerable previous lifetimes. New residue is stopped through careful regulation of one’s mind, speech, and action to prevent any acts of violence, performance of which results in the influx of negative karma, and old residue is destroyed through the cultivation of ascetic practice meant to burn away the residue of previously acquired karma. Both sects agree that our current period is in such a bad state that liberation is impossible; monasticism, then, helps to ensure an auspicious future rebirth where liberation will be possible. Communities of female ascetics are attested to in the earliest strata of Jainism. Jain society is divided into a fourfold schematic of monks (sa- dhus), nuns (sa- dhvı-s), laymen (s´ravakas), and laywomen (s´ra- vika- s), and all four of these communities were present and thriving during the lifetime of Maha-vı-ra (d. 425 BCE), the most recent Jina (founder). One source, purportedly from 162 years after Maha-vı-ra but probably later, describes an early community of 36,000 nuns, as compared to only 14,000 monks (Flügel 2006, 314). Central to the conduct of Jain nuns are the five great vows (maha- vratas) taken upon monastic initiation (dı-ks·a- ). These are nonviolence (ahimsa), truth (satya), nonstealing (achaurya or asteya), celibacy (brahmacarya), and nonpossession (aparigraha). The true defining characteristic of nuns, as opposed to a spiritually observant layperson, is the acceptance of the final two of these vows, celibacy and nonpossession, as laypeople are also expected to observe the first three. Nuns in both the Svetambara and Digambara sects wear simple white robes and carry a peacock-tail whisk used for gently sweeping small bugs from one’s path. Svetambara nuns also carry an alms bowl for receiving food from the laity, and some wear a mouth covering (muhpatti), which simultaneously prevents the inadvertent breathing in of small life forms and acts as a symbol of sectarian allegiance. The five great vows are practiced through the five careful actions (samitis): care in motion (ı-rya- samiti), care in speech (bha- s·a- samiti), care in receiving alms and eating (es·an·a- samiti), care in taking and giving (a- da- nasamiti), and care in the act of voiding waste (utsargasamiti). Finally, the day-to-day life of a nun is dictated by six essential duties (a- vas´yaka): equanimity (sa- ma- yika), praise to the Jinas (stuti), homage to one’s teachers (guruvandana), repentance (pratikraman·a), cultivation of disenchantment with the body (ka- yotsarga), and abandonment of certain substances (pratya- khya- na). Nuns in the Svetambara sect of the Jain Religion (Svetambaras sa- dhvı-s) are permitted to take full ascetic vows of monastic initiation, while nuns in the Digambara (Digambara a- ryika- s) are not. This is because of doctrinal disagreements between the two sects that center on larger issues about the inherent impurity of the female body and the ability of women to achieve liberation. Much of this debate centers on the question of whether or not any proper ascetic, male or female, should be allowed to wear clothes. The Digambaras argue that clothing is a form of possession that should be given up; retaining clothing is an improper sign of shame (lajja- ). Since, according to belief, women’s bodies are impure and may incite improper sexual desire in men—and, subsequently, a fear within women of being sexually assaulted by men—women must wear clothes and cannot be full monastics (Jaini



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1991, 14). Alternatively, Svetambaras do not consider clothing to be a possession but rather a necessary element of monastic life. Because both male and female Svetambara ascetics wear clothing, there is no reason to deny women full monastic vows and the theoretical opportunity to achieve liberation. Svetambaras and Digambaras also have different rules as to when in her lifetime a woman may be allowed to take initiation. Digambaras believe that anyone, male or female, must be an adult to take initiation, while different Svetambara sects have allowed children as young as six or eight years old to become ascetics. In theory, both sects agree that initiation should be taken at a time that would cause the least amount of pain and suffering for one’s family. Jain nuns are public figures. While the term monastic might conjure an idea of a contemplative life, removed from the public, Jain nuns spend much of their time wandering on foot between towns, constantly interacting with lay devotees. Nuns are proscribed from spending too much time in any one place; most spend less than two weeks in any one town. The exception to this is the four-month monsoon season, a time of spring growth that makes leading a peripatetic life of nonviolence impossible. Both female and male ascetics spend this time in a single town or city, usually having been invited by the lay community of that area. It is difficult to pinpoint specific numbers of female Jain monastics in India today. The most recent, trustworthy data contains information for both Svetambara and Digambara communities only up until 1999. Among Svetambaras, the total number of sa- dhvı-s in 1999 among all subsects was 8,601, up from 6,796 in 1987 (Flügel 2006, 361–62). Reasons for renunciation of secular life are manifold; the desire to acquire more advanced religious knowledge, to help the community, to escape a bad marriage, and to escape the hardships of widowhood have all been given as motivations for taking ascetic initiation. Also worthy of note is that Svetambara sa- dhvı-s far outnumber male sadhus. Among the largest Svetambara subsect, the image-worshipping Mu-rtipu-jakas, in 1999 there were 5,354 sa- dhvı-s to only 1,489 sadhus (Flügel 2006, 362). The picture of the much smaller Digambara sect is different. While the number of a- ryika- s grew from 136 in 1987 to 350 in 1999, the number of Digambara male ascetics (munis) outnumbers the female ones; compared to the 350 a- ryika- s in 1999, there were 610 munis (Flügel 2006, 361–62). Even with respect to groups in which there exist more nuns than monks, the two sexes do not hold equal social status; there persists among lay Jain communities a sense that the opportunity to interact with a monk provides more merit than a similar interaction with a nun. Even among many Svetambara communities, the most senior nun is hierarchically situated below, and is expected to pay proper deference to, even the most junior monk of a lineage. Gregory M. Clines See also: Hinduism: Renunciation; Jainism: Jina; Laywomen; Ritual Further Reading Dundas, Paul. The Jains. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

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Flügel, Peter. “Demographic Trends in Jaina Monasticism.” Studies in Jaina History and Culture: Disputes and Dialogues, edited by Peter Flügel, 312–97. London: Routledge, 2006. Jaini, Padmanabh S. Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Vallely, Anne. Guardians of the Transcendent: An Ethnography of a Jain Ascetic Community. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

RITUAL Jain religious beliefs focus on self, action, and rebirth. Moksha (liberation from the body) is the only goal of human existence, including that of women, and according to Jainism, this goal may be attained by following the prescribed path. The two sects of Jainism, the Svetambaras and Digambaras, both allow the initiation of nuns, and among the Svetambaras nuns outnumber monks by a ratio of approximately three to one. Nuns in the Svetambara (“white-clad”) sect wear a white robe and a white piece of cloth to cover the mouth to prevent the inhalation and annihilation of microbes and insects. They also carry a broom with which they sweep the ground in front of them as they walk so as to clear away insects and other living beings that would be hurt or killed by being stepped on. According to the Digambara (“sky-clad”) sect, women cannot achieve nirvana (salvation) because they cannot be free from earthly attachments, and women are inherently himsic (harmful). This comes from a belief that menstrual blood kills microorganisms living in the female body. The Jain nuns of both sects practice mendicancy, extreme austerity, and detachment. Despite the fact that Jain nuns are often women of great learning and spiritual attainment, they have lower status than monks. In Digambara Jainism, nuns, who wear robes, accept the necessity of being reborn as men before they can advance significantly on the ascetic path. Rituals are part of everyday life for women in Jainism. All Jains are encouraged to go to a temple daily and perform puja to worship the Jinas (Great Teachers), except for Sthanakvasins, who pray and meditate at home. Ashtaprakari Puja is done by paying homage with eight articles in the prescribed way: pure water, sandalwood, uncooked rice, flowers, dry coconut, lamp, incense sticks, and dry and green fruits. An aarti plate is prepared by women, and prayers are performed in a prescribed manner by women and men who wave a lamp in a rotation before icons. Prayers are performed in repentance of sins and to gain self-control through self-study and sitting meditation for 48 minutes. One of the most important Jain daily prayers is the Namaskara Sutra, which praises the five great beings of Jainism. This prayer is not in worship of any particular individual; instead, it is for worshipping the virtues of the arihantas, the siddhas, the acharyas, the upadhyayas, and the sadhus. In daily worship, there are also two categories of ritual: one takes place in the cella (foundation) of the temple and requires a perfect physical and mental purity, since it involves contact with the image, which is washed or anointed with a paste of sandalwood and flowers. Because women are considered impure, they are not allowed to wash the image, but they may enter the main hall except during their



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menstrual period. Women are also advised not to read the sacred books or even to touch them during this period. Worship during festivals is also very important, such as the fasting ceremony, Oli, celebrated for nine days twice a year (in March–April and September– October). The most significant time of the Jain ritual year, however, is the four-month period, late July to early November, when monks and nuns abandon the wandering life and live in the midst of lay communities. For Svetambaras, the single most important festival is Paryushana, at which time they fast. The span of the fast can last from 1 day to 30 days or even more. In the Digambara sect, sravakas (laypersons) do not take food and/or water (boiled) more than once a Jain women carry coconut and green fruit to a temday when observing fasts, while ple in Rajasthan, India, for puja (worship). (Rene those observing a fast within the Drouyer/Dreamstime.com) Svetambara sect survive on boiled water, which is consumed only between sunrise and sunset. Fasts may differ in form, such as a full fast, even without water, or partial fast with restriction on the type of food. For laywomen, abstaining from food during fasts is considered one of the most important expressions of female religiosity. Breaking a fast always involves a group celebration or a feast of some kind, which contributes to social cohesion. The most important religious festival for Jains is Mahavir Jayanti, the birthday of Mahavira, the 24th and last tirthankara (Teaching God), celebrated either in March or April. The idol of Mahavira is carried on a chariot in a procession called rath yatra. Women participate in large numbers, reciting bhajans (religious rhymes) after giving ceremonial baths to the statues of Mahavira; this is called the abhisheka. People visit temples dedicated to Mahavira to meditate and offer prayers. Lectures by monks and nuns are arranged in temples to preach the path of virtue as prescribed. During the day, the community engages in a charitable act, such as collecting donations to save cows from slaughter or to help feed the poor. Ancient Jain temples across India typically see a high volume of practitioners come to pay their respects and join in the celebrations. On the full-moon day of the month of Kartik (October–November), at the same time that Hindus celebrate Diwali (the Festival of Lights), Jains light lamps to commemorate Mahavira’s final liberation.

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Women also organize special puja as a social activity where they gather together in mandals, chant, worship, and perform. The correct and sincere use of gestures is considered an important expression of faith. Women may also sing, even composing their own songs. Jain laywomen may go on pilgrimage. Parasnath Hill, Rajgir, Girnar hills, and Mounts Abu and Antariksha Parshvanatha are some important ancient pilgrimage sites. Sites often mark principal events in the lives of tirthankaras. Women who are unable to go on pilgrimage can worship at local temples. Asha Mukherjee See also: Hinduism: Festivals; Pilgrimage; Jainism: Jina; Laywomen; Monastics and Nuns Further Reading Balbir, Nalini. “Women and Jainism in India.” In Women in Indian Religions, edited by Arvind Sharma, 70–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Jaini, Padmanabh S. Gender and Salvation, Jaina Debates on Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Misra, Rajlakshmi. “The Jains in Urban Setting [The Ascetic and the Laity among the Jains of Mysore City].” Bulletin of the Anthropological Survey of India 21, nos. 1/2 (January​/ June 1972): 1–68.

Judaism

INTRODUCTION Judaism is one of the oldest world religions, with roots going back to the second millennium BCE. Articles in this section demonstrate the great diversity of Jewish women’s experience and practice that result from the long history and widespread migration of Jewish peoples. Women’s roles in different movements and groups within Judaism are discussed in the entries “Hasidism,” “Kabbala,” and “Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms.” In “American Denominations,” Susan Roth Breitzer discusses women in denominational Judaism, including Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Orthodox Judaisms. Additional articles relate regional or period distinctions, including “Israel,” “Judaism in Europe,” “Ancient Judaism,” and “Modern and Contemporary Judaism.” As in all societies and cultures, gender constructions and expectations within Judaism affect women. The entry “Sex and Gender” highlights views of gender and sexuality particular to Judaism, with attention to differences between movements. Other articles give attention to women’s roles at home and at work, including “Marriage and Divorce,” “Women and Work,” and “Shabbat.” Women’s roles in many areas of life are specified by Jewish law (halachah), while some may be determined by the needs of the family. For example, Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men devote their lives to religious study, which often leaves women to provide for the family. As a result, many Jewish women seek higher education in order to obtain better-paying jobs (see “Education”). Jewish women contribute to and participate in the spiritual life of their communities in significant ways. A number of entries discuss specifics of women’s participation in worship, ritual, and religious leadership. An important role for women found in all Jewish movements is lighting the candles on the Sabbath. The entry “Shabbat (Sabbath)” relates this and other functions women perform for the Sabbath, while “Festivals and Holy Days” relates women’s participation in other holidays, such as Rosh Hashanah, Sukkoth, and Chanukah. Various obligations for Jewish women are related in “Mitzvah.” “Synagogue” explores women’s changing roles in the synagogues over time. At one time, many religious functions were limited to men, but this is changing. Girls today can officially begin to participate by taking the bat mitzvah (a coming​ -of-age ritual), which was traditionally only for boys (called bar mitzvah). The first bat mitzvah was held in 1922. See “Bat Mitzvah” for more on this. Also, in most movements today, women can seek ordination. The entry “Rabbis” tells of the first female rabbis in the various movements. More on women’s ordination can be

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found in “American Denominations,” “Feminist and Women’s Movements,” and “Judaism in the United States.” A very recent change within Judaism is the creation of the office of priestess or kohenet (see “Priestesses”). Midrash includes a tradition of oral and written interpretations of Jewish sacred texts. In “Midrash,” Sandy Eisenberg Sasso writes, “Midrash is a body of literature written by men over a period of time. But midrash is also a process—a way of interpreting sacred text. For Judaism to be the heritage of women as well as men, it would need to hear the voices of women as they dwelled in the text and became part of the conversation.” Sasso relates how feminists developed ways for women to contribute to this ancient tradition that has been so dominated by men. Jewish identity is more than religious; it is linked to particular ethnicities and includes specific rules about how food is to be prepared and with whom it can be shared. The entry “Food” discusses women’s roles in food preparation and dietary requirements. Jewish ethnic identity is also retained through legal and ritual requirements that limit intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, despite Jewish people having often lived within diverse populations. See “Marriage and Divorce” for more on this. The history of Jewish people has often been a history of conquest, captivity, and transregional movement. Jews have been a people beset by prejudice and violence. As Rochelle G. Saidel discusses in “Holocaust,” these experiences have had a unique impact on Jewish women. As with other forms of racism, prejudice combines with sexism in the minds of those who perpetrate hatred and violence against the women of a particular race. Anti-Semites are no exception. Thus, Jewish women have experienced unique forms of prejudice and violence. Yet, they overcome, resist, and continually renew. On women’s resistance, see “Feminist and Women’s Movements” and “Peacemaking.” General Bibliography—Judaism Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998. Berrin, Susan. Celebrating the New Moon: A Rosh Chodesh Anthology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. Biale, Rachel. Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance for Today. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Bronner, Leila Leah. Stories of Biblical Motherhood: Maternal Power in the Hebrew Bible. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. Broyde, Michael J., and Michael Ausubel, eds. Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Diner, Hasia, and Beverly Lieff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Frankel, Ellen. The Five Books of Miriam. New York: Putnam, 1996. Golinkin, David. “The Participation of Jewish Women in Public Rituals and Torah Study 1845–2010.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 21 (2011): 46–66. Gottlieb, Lynn. She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism. San Francisco: Harper One, 1995.



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Greenberg, Blu. On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1994. Grenn-Scott, Deborah. Lilith’s Fire: Reclaiming our Sacred Lifeforce. San Mateo, CA: Lilith Institute, 2000. Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious. Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. Grossman, Susan, and Rivka Haut, eds. Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakhah, and Contemporary Realities. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Hammer, Jill. Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2001. Hamori, Esther. Women’s Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Ilan, Tal. Silencing the Queen: The Literary Histories of Shelamzion and Other Jewish Women. Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. Israel-Cohen, Yael. “Jewish Modern Orthodox Women, Active Resistance and Synagogue Ritual.” Contemporary Jewry 32, no. 1 (2012) 3–25. Jacoby, Tami Amanda. Women in Zones of Conflict: Power and Resistance in Israel. England: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Koltuv, Barbara Black. The Book of Lilith. Lake Worth, FL: Nicolas-Hays, 1986. Labovitz, Gail. “The Scholarly Life—The Laboring Wife: Gender, Torah, and the Family Economy in Rabbinic Culture.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 13 (2007): 8–48. Meyers, Carol. Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Novick, Rabbi Leah. On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism’s Divine Feminine. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Reiter, Yitzhak. “Feminists in the Temple of Orthodoxy: The Struggle of the Woman of the Wall to Change the Status Quo.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 34 (Winter 2016): 79–107. Remember the Women Institute. Women in History with Emphasis on Holocaust. 2018. www.rememberwomen.org. Ross, Tamar. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. Sered, Susan Starr. Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wasserfall, Rahel, ed. Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1999. Wegner, Judith Romney Wegner. Chattel or Person?: The Status of Women in the Mishnah. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Winkler, Gershon. They Called Her Rebbe. New York: Judaica, 1991.

A M E R I C A N D E N O M I N AT I O N S : 1 8 5 0 T O P R E S E N T Gender and feminism have both played significant roles in the formation and history of American Jewish denominations. The Jewish denominations, commonly referred to as movements or streams, in turn, have shaped and reshaped Jewish

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gender relations as well as Jewish feminism or antifeminism. Although there was a significant expansion of women’s presence and roles in predenominational American Jewish religious life, serious discussion of women’s place within Judaism began with the formation of Jewish denominations in the United States, beginning with the Reform movement in the 1840s. Reform and the Limits of Equality

Although the Reform movement began in Germany, it would make the largest impact in the United States. From the beginning, the Reform movement emphasized complete equality of the sexes, although in practice there initially was no impetus to bring women into religious leadership, and the Reform movement’s shifting most of the ritual responsibility to the rabbi made ritual equality largely a nonissue at first. Even secular leadership and participation was largely limited to women’s auxiliaries and “sisterhoods of personal service” that offered women the opportunity to perform society-changing volunteer work under the auspices of a Judaized version of the progressive era Social Gospel (Sarna 2004, 143, 196). Reform’s most immediate effects on women’s place in Judaism was the introduction of mixed seating and elimination of the mechitzah (partition separating women and men), along with the elimination of many home and private rituals, such as kashrut and mikvah, that had traditionally been women’s domain. And the immediate Reform solution to the gender-excluding nature of the bar mitzvah was to replace it with a confirmation ceremony for both boys and girls. It was not until many decades later, when the bar mitzvah was reintroduced in response to parental demand, that the bat mitzvah would become part of Reform Judaism (Joselit 2002). Women’s self-education also became central to the sisterhood movements, to facilitate their assigned role in raising the next Jewish generation at a time when most non-Orthodox American Jewish women had little formal Jewish education, along with synagogue housekeeping that included serving refreshments at the receptions following services. This kind of segregated voluntary participation continued into the 20th century, even as sisterhood activity shifted to educational and synagogue-assisting activities as social services were increasingly professionalized. But when it came to professional religious leadership, although Martha Neumark became the first of many women to study at Hebrew Union College—the Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in 1920, and Paula Ackerman, a rabbi’s wife, briefly served as a de facto congregational rabbi after her husband’s death, there was no sustained impetus to ordain women until the resurgence of feminism in the 1960s, facilitating the ordination of HUC-JIR’s first female rabbi, Sally Priesand, in 1972 (Diner and Benderly 2002). Modern Orthodoxy and the Woman Question

Like Reform, the Modern Orthodox movement began in Germany. Its founding father, Samson Raphael Hirsch, pioneered an incorporation of modern thought into theology and practice that included a modernist apologetic approach to women’s



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perceived inferior place in Judaism, including the pioneering idea that women had fewer mitzvot and ritual roles because they were spiritually superior to men (rather than the Talmudic-era assumption of inferior), an ideology that both grew out of and fit in with the larger Victorian Cult of True Womanhood. This was not to say that modern Orthodoxy remained unresponsive to outside perceptions of women’s place within Orthodox Judaism, beginning with the changes in synagogue seating from largely closed-off women’s balconies to separate women’s sections on the main sanctuary floor (Gurock 2009). The post–Civil War “third wave” of Jewish immigration both increased an Orthodox presence and demonstrated the promises and limitations of Orthodox observance in the United States. Eastern European Jewish women played key roles in maintaining a home-centered Judaism that worked around the compromises with Shabbat-unfriendly work schedules and, when needed, taking to the streets to protest price gouging and fraud in the kosher meat industry. The middle decades of the 20th century, and especially the post–World War II era, saw the rapid expansion of women’s religious education within Orthodoxy. The combination of the increase in formal Jewish education for women and girls and the rise of American feminism in the second half of the 20th century created an almost paradoxical expansion and contraction of women’s roles and place within Orthodox Judaism. While an increasing conservatism that emphasized modesty and banned women’s singing on the Talmudic basis that “a woman’s voice is her nakedness” served to curtail the expansion of women’s ritual roles in and out of the synagogue, the continued acceptance and mandating of formal female Jewish education (sometimes including Talmud study) made the issue of expanding women’s roles short of formal religious leadership increasingly acceptable. Although expansion of women’s life-cycle ceremonies other than marriage was initially opposed on the basis of imitating the liberal movements, Ashkenazic Orthodoxy has gradually sanctioned changes, most notably in the acceptance of the bat mitzvah, although the bat mitzvah takes place at the age of 12 rather than 13 and is much more limited in ritual scope than the bar mitzvah. The issues that education, ritual, and public recognition have generated in recent decades have infiltrated the Orthodox world to the point that even in the ultra-Orthodox world, apologetics regarding the centrality of women’s traditional roles and increased attention on halachically acceptable ways of expanding women’s religious lives, especially in education and programming, reflect an unprecedented awareness of the issues that the feminist movement has raised. Ultra-Orthodox outreach movements, most famously Chabad-Lubavitch, have furthermore harnessed these trends to attract less religious (and more feminist-oriented) women back to the fold. Although increased conservatism based on the concept that “All of the Glory of the King’s daughter is on the inside” has placed limits on women’s leadership, it has facilitated the time-honored leadership of rabbis’ wives, who have traditionally taught and counseled women within the Orthodox community. Challenges to move beyond these limitations, including the creation of expanded prayer opportunities and paths to de facto women’s rabbinic ordination have come primarily through the more liberal Open Orthodox fringe, and these developments

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are controversial, even in mainstream Centrist Orthodoxy. And although the organized feminist movement has made its way into Orthodox Judaism over the last several decades and coalesced into the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance through the activism of women such as Blu Greenberg and Rivka Haut, the priorities of Orthodox Jewish feminists have historically been different from those of their non-Orthodox sisters, with a halachically sound resolution to the crisis of the agunot (divorced women whose husbands refuse to grant them the religious divorce that will enable them to remarry) remaining the first priority. In addition, with commitment to Torah and halachah remaining defining factors, Orthodox Jewish feminists prioritize expanded educational and leadership opportunities for women above the more halachically problematic ritual equality (Gurock 2009). Shifting Emphases of the Conservative Movement

The Conservative movement, founded as a middle ground between strict Orthodoxy and Reform assimilation for Americanizing Eastern European Jewish immigrants, would end up playing a similarly mediatory role in advancing women’s equality in Jewish life. At first the movement made change on a very limited basis, but by the end of the 20th century, the pace of change had accelerated to place Conservative Judaism at the forefront of an effort to create a traditional and egalitarian Judaism. This expansion of women’s roles began modestly with the general incorporation of mixed seating and with changes in the traditional Jewish marriage and divorce procedures that guaranteed a woman a divorce even if her husband refused to issue the traditional get. The Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law (CJL) also oversaw the gradual incorporation of egalitarian practice into religious services, which included calling women to the Torah, by ruling in favor of its permissibility but leaving its incorporation in practice to individual rabbis and synagogues, with results ranging from forbidding it to permitting it on a limited basis (primarily for special occasions) to the eventual majority practice of complete egalitarianism. The CJL ruling in favor of counting women in the

Halachah Halachah, commonly translated as Jewish Law, consists of Jewish law and jurisprudence but means much more than the term law would imply. Halachah has its origins in the laws and commandments laid down in the Hebrew Bible, referred to as the Written Law. Over the centuries, the Written Law was interpreted and developed into an all-encompassing system of ritual, practical, and ethical laws that retained the name the Oral Law long after it was written down. Over the centuries, rabbis interpreted the primary sources and occasionally created works that attempted to systematize the law. Halachah has also been influenced by local custom, and with some distinctions, halachic rulings have taken on a sanctity similar to biblical law. For centuries, halachah was synonymous with normative Judaism, but this began to change in the 19th and 20th centuries with the Reform and Conservative movements.



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prayer quorum was similarly controversial, and some synagogues maintained allmale minyanim at least as alternatives into the closing decades of the 20th century (Fishman 1993, 151–54). The Conservative movement would take a similarly gradualist approach to egalitarianism when it came to coming-of-age ceremonies for girls. Although the Conservative mainstream initially did not accept the bat mitzvah ceremony pioneered by Mordecai Kaplan, the breakaway founder of the Reconstructionist movement, by the 1950s, Conservative synagogues were incorporating the bat mitzvah ceremony ahead of the Reform movement because it provided an acceptable alternative to the too-Christian-like confirmation. Until the last decades of the 20th century, however, the movement made distinctions between the bar and bat mitzvah, which included assigning the latter to Friday night rather than Saturday morning (Joselit 2002). But the issue that would cause the greatest split in the movement was the ordination of women as rabbis, beginning in 1985 with the ordination of Rabbi Amy Eilberg. This decision, regarded as a major break in the Conservative movement’s halachic underpinnings, led to the founding of a breakaway movement, the Union for Traditional Judaism, which sought to reemphasize the halachic nature of the Conservative movement. But the number of ordained Conservative women rabbis increased over the decades, although they, like their Reform sisters, would face ongoing challenges when it came to congregational hiring, pay, and working conditions. Unlike in the Reform movement, however, nominal Conservative fidelity to halachah meant that some of the religious ceremonies these rabbis performed would not be equally recognized as religiously valid (Fishman 1993). Reconstructionism Reconstructs Gender Distinctions

The Reconstructionist movement, the youngest movement in American Judaism, stood out in its pioneering commitment to egalitarianism in practice and in theory. Though it remained the smallest of the movements, its influence would spread well beyond American Judaism. Following the approach of its founder, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, of maintaining tradition but reconstructing it, the Reconstructionist movement’s approach to gender in many ways began with the historic bat mitzvah of the founder’s daughter. Over time, Reconstructionism’s approach to gender would include a traditional yet more egalitarian approach to ritual and observance. When the Reconstructionist movement opened its own rabbinical school in 1968, it included female rabbinical students, paving the way for the ordination of the first woman Reconstructionist rabbi, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, not long after the ordination of Sally Priesand by the Reform movement. Denominations and Beyond

Since the beginning of denominationalism in American Judaism, women’s roles in all streams of Judaism have dramatically expanded, even as the basis has shifted from Americanization and modernization to inclusion for inclusion’s sake. The landscape has been further complicated by the late 20th- to early 21st-century

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development of postdenominationalism that began with the Jewish Renewal and Chavurah movement and continues with the rise of the independent minyan movement, most of which feature traditional services with egalitarian participation. This latest trend has culminated in the founding of the group Yeshivat Mechon Hadar, which requires strict observance in a completely egalitarian setting and which in turn is reshaping the place of gender and tradition in American Jewish life (Kaunfer 2010, 120). Susan Roth Breitzer See also: Judaism: Bat Mitzvah; Education; Hasidism; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Mitzvah; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Rabbis; Sex and Gender; Synagogue Further Reading Diner, Hasia, and Beverly Lieff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. New York: Free Press, 1993. Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Hartman, Tova. Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007. Joselit, Jenna Weissman. The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. Kaunfer, Elie. Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Creating Vibrant Jewish Communities. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2010. Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

ANCIENT JUDAISM Our knowledge of ancient Judaism primarily consists of texts and archaeological artifacts from the sixth century BCE to the sixth century CE. However, the faith actually began several centuries earlier and is reflected in ancient oral traditions that are preserved in the biblical book of Genesis and much of the Jewish scriptures (Hebrew Bible). The earliest biblical books describe a religion based on the Jerusalem temple and its precursor, a tent shrine known as the Tabernacle (Tent of Meeting). We know relatively little about Jewish women for much of antiquity, since their roles in religion and society were limited. Two biblical books named after women, Ruth and Esther, are stories scholars consider fictional tales. Women in books included in the Apocrypha, found in some versions of the Bible, contain several books named after women, such as Judith and Susanna. The women in these books are also fictional, although their stories offer some insights concerning how men limited the participation of women in religious and daily life. Ancient Jewish literature often contains negative portrayals of women. The biblical book of Proverbs includes a highly favorable description of a woman known as Lady Wisdom and describes her role in creation and her wisdom. However, the author contrasts this exemplary woman with her adversary, known as Lady



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Folly, to represent the opposing virtues. Similar stereotypes are known from the postbiblical period in the Dead Sea Scroll text known as “The Wiles of the Wicked Woman,” which expands the image of Lady Folly to describe a foreign seductress to warn men of the dangers of women. Another Dead Sea Scroll reveals that the community responsible for these texts sought to exclude women from the Passover celebration, a major holiday in Judaism to the present. We know little about the actual participation of women in ancient Jewish rituals. Because scripture restricts the priesthood to men, women consequently had little role in public religion. Although the book of Exodus (38:8) mentions women who served in the Tabernacle, their role appears to have been confined to the maintenance of the sanctuary and not to the performance of any religious rituals there. The Jerusalem Temple was divided into several courts through which one had to pass to approach the sacred altar where the sacrifices were conducted. Women were restricted to the Court of Women and were not allowed to proceed to the inner court and that sacred altar, which were limited to male worshippers and male priests. In the postbiblical period, Judaism became regulated by other texts, such as the Mishnah and the Talmud, which were written from the third to the sixth century CE. One major section of these writings, known as “Women” (nashim), contains extensive regulations that largely restrict the participation of women in religious and daily life, mainly because of their ritual impurity. Although these works are later in date than scripture, scholars believe they preserve many ancient traditions practiced during the biblical periods. The rabbis in the Mishnah and the Talmud place many restrictions on women and even ban them from offering testimony in court. The first century CE author Josephus also mentions this prohibition, which suggests that women were largely marginalized in ancient Jewish society. Archaeological discoveries of documents from caves where refugees hid in times of trouble during the anti-Roman revolts of the first and second centuries CE provide some insight concerning the lives of ancient Jewish women. Whereas documents found with male skeletons largely relate to military matters, those uncovered with female remains tend to be legal documents. This indicates that women, unlike men, needed to provide proof of ownership of their property, their inheritance, and adoptions, to assert their legal rights. Although it has been argued that synagogue inscriptions that mention “mothers” provide evidence for female religious leaders, such titles are clearly honorific since they were also given to children. The major religious role that women played in ancient Judaism took place in the home, especially in food preparation and the rearing of children. Because Judaism is a faith that revolves around the concept of ritual purity, women had to ensure that food was prepared according to Jewish laws and that children received a rudimentary education in the Jewish faith to observe religious rituals and holidays. This would have required some degree of religious education, suggesting that women did receive some sort of training in these matters. The rights of women in the home nevertheless were precarious as only men had the authority to issue a divorce (Deuteronomy 24:1–4). The Mishnah contains an entire section devoted to women’s marriage contracts (kettubbot), but scholars are uncertain how many of

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the rights in these documents existed in earlier periods. Although the first century BCE Jewish philosopher Philo (Specual Laws 31) describes how Jewish women should be confined to their homes, there was one notable exception. From 76 to 67 BCE, a woman named Shelamzion (Salome) Alexandra ruled as queen in Jerusalem, selected her son as high priest, and passed some religious laws that favored women. Kenneth Atkinson See also: Judaism: Education; Hebrew Bible; Marriage and Divorce; Synagogue Further Reading Atkinson, Kenneth. Queen Salome: Jerusalem’s Warrior Monarch of the First Century B.C.E. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Baskin, Judith R., ed. Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Ilan, Tal. Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996. Kraemer, Ross Shepard. Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco-Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Levine, Amy-Jill, ed. “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco Roman World. Atlanta: Scholars, 1991. Taitz, Emily, Sondra Henry, and Cheryl Tallan. The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E. 1900 C.E. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. Wassen, Cecilia. Women in the Damascus Document. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. 2005.

ART Throughout history, Jewish women have made numerous and diverse contributions to the visual arts. The work of Jewish women is not always easily visible as women often changed their names, and the subject matter of their art is not always thematically connected to Judaism. Which women should be categorized as Jewish artists is also a contested topic. Some say that a woman must be religious, others say she must have the proper Jewish lineage, while others instead assert that there must be something uniquely Jewish about her art. Jewish women’s artistic production was greatly influenced by several seismic historical events, including the emancipation proclamations that granted Jews rights, the creation of new Jewish denominations, immigration, the Holocaust, and the feminist movement. The art produced by Jewish women was often heavily influenced by the prevailing artistic and social movements of the time as well as the specific cultural traditions of the country in which they resided. Throughout history, the creation of art has played an important role in the spiritual, communal, and personal lives of Jewish women, and to this day, many Jewish women create art affected by their intersecting identities and use their art as tools of commemoration, celebration, and challenge. The art produced by Jews in biblical times was primarily decorative art used to adorn the places of worship. The first mention of artists is in Exodus 31, when artisans are instructed to create artistic designs to beautify the tent that would



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house the ark of the covenant. The artisans listed are all men, and many scholars believe that women would not typically have held this role, while others believe it is possible that they could have been artisans in certain circumstances. There is no commandment in the Bible directly forbidding women’s participation in the arts, but because of their social and religious duties as homemakers, their opportunities for such training or work would have been limited. Despite the lack of preserved art created by Jewish women in biblical times, the women who lived during these times became a formidable part of art history as depictions of them were used extensively by Jewish women throughout the following centuries. During the Renaissance period, Jewish women often had a degree of legal and social independence unknown to their Christian counterparts, especially in Italy; however, men still often tried to dissuade women in the community from literacy, religious study, and the arts. The arts during this time became more closely related to Christian arts, particularly in the production of illuminated manuscripts, but currently there is little evidence to indicate women’s direct participation in formal fine arts. Women’s artistry was, for centuries, likely centered on the home. This could be folk art, the art of kosher cooking, or creating some of the ceremonial objects that would be used within the family. Starting with France in 1791, many European governments passed emancipation declarations that gave Jews the right to be citizens and engage more fully in secular society. This, along with the development of new, more progressive denominations of Judaism, greatly affected many Jewish women artists by making it permissible to be both a Jew and an active participant in secular society, including the mainstream art world, but few women were able to work as professional artists because of their sex and Jewish identity. Even in the 19th century, it was not tremendously common for Jewish women to succeed as professional artists, but there certainly were some women who made significant artistic contributions. Many Jewish women involved in the arts were supported and inspired by their participation in various salons, inspired by salons that began in Paris. Drawing from the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, the Jewish salon movement began in Berlin in the late 18th century and was primarily spearheaded by young Jewish women. These women were educated and came from well-off families. They were seeking opportunities for intellectual and cultural development outside of the traditional Jewish communities, including, at times, opportunities as artists. In these salons, women were able to freely discuss topics that had previously been viewed as suitable for men alone, including philosophy, theology, literature, politics, and art. These salons provided an important space for Jewish women to congregate and share ideas and work while also opening the door for greater integration in secular society. Outside of Germany, Jewish women were also becoming more intertwined with secular society, and this allowed many Jewish women greater opportunities for work in the arts. Rebecca Solomon was one of the first well-documented female Jewish artists. Solomon was born in 1832 and painted domestic scenes inspired by her life in Victorian England that demonstrated a keen awareness of inequality in society. She maintained close ties to the Jewish community in London while still

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studying art at a variety of secular institutions. She participated in the art movements of her time while still holding fast to her female and Jewish perspectives in her work. Katherine M. Cohen was a sculptor born in 1859 in Philadelphia who also managed to remain deeply connected to her Jewish identity and participate in the mainstream art world. She worked in the United States and in Europe, and, in 1893, Cohen spoke at the Chicago World’s Fair about the situation of the arts in the United States that required artists to travel to Europe to receive serious training. Her work was traditional in style but often reflected her Jewish identity in choice of subject. These women were the exception rather than the rule, as it wasn’t until the 20th century that Jewish women became involved in the arts in a large-scale way. This was primarily due to the way in which both their Jewish and female identities had previously prevented them from accessing many opportunities for artistic training or work. The social changes of the 20th century, however, opened up the path for female Jewish artists to flourish and influenced the work that they produced. Many Jewish artists in the early 20th century, such as Florine Stettheimer and Theresa Bernstein, did not often paint Jewish subjects, instead preferring more mainstream subject matter. There was not a singular Jewish style, but later in the 20th century, experiences of the Holocaust and immigration as well as participation in social movements like Zionism and feminism, did lead to the prevalence of more distinct themes throughout the work of Jewish women. Chana Orloff (1888–1968) was one artist from this era touched by many of these themes. She was born in Ukraine and then, because of the pogroms, immigrated to Palestine with her family. Later she studied art and worked in France, many other European countries, and the United States, while always maintaining close ties to Israel. Orloff worked in marble, stone, bronze, and wood and focused primarily on themes of womanhood and motherhood. Though she trained and worked in many secular circles, throughout her life she associated with many other Jewish artists and produced many pieces of art in honor of Jews or for Jewish communities. She was one of the core members of the early artistic community in British Mandate Palestine and created art inspired by her Zionism, her cross-cultural experiences, and her identity as a Jewish woman. The Holocaust was the systematic slaughter of Europe’s Jews. This indescribable genocide was a gendered experience, as Jewish women had different experiences than men both inside and outside of the camps. Following the Holocaust, many Jewish women used their art to tell their personal stories, mourn for their loved ones, and at times grapple with their faith in the face of monumental suffering. Even during the Holocaust, women created art, often to create a sense of normalcy or to show the unique fate of women in the camps. One such woman was Malva Schaleck (1882–1944), a Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia who produced many paintings while imprisoned in Theresienstadt. Some of her pieces show typical communal life in the women’s quarters, but through the seemingly normal activities portrayed, she also simultaneously communicates the hopelessness of camp life. Art was not simply a pastime for Jewish women during the Holocaust;



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it was a tool of survival and a way to bear witness. To this day, the Holocaust is a theme that affects the art of many Jewish women, as art comes from life, and it is an event that still shapes the lives of Jewish women in visible and invisible ways. Mass immigration, specifically to the United States, is another movement that greatly influenced Jewish women’s art. For many artists, at first, the desire or pressure to assimilate was strong, and many women did not clearly present their Jewish identities in their artistic lives. The Holocaust, however, led to more women reasserting their Jewish identity prominently in their art as a response to the persecution. Ruth Gikow (1915–1982) depicted historical events such as the Tenement Fire of 1939 and created other figurative paintings, but following the Holocaust, her art became more focused on biblical themes and explicitly Jewish subject matter. Jewish women were also greatly involved in abstract art. Beverly Pepper (b. 1922) and Eva Hesse (1936–1970) both created innovative abstract works and at times drew on their own personal experiences of Jewish identity through the inclusion of Hebrew text or images relating to their own personal experiences, such as Hesse’s identity as a Jewish refugee. Other abstract artists, such as Lee Krasner, chose not to incorporate Jewish imagery or biblical references into their art. The only visible sign of Krasner’s Judaism in her art was her tendency to paint from right to left, a lingering habit from her Orthodox, Hebrew-language upbringing. In the contemporary era, Jewish women have continued to assert themselves in every medium and style of art. Miriam Schapiro (1923–2015) was one of the leaders of the feminist art movement and founded Womanhouse, a feminist art space. She also invented “femmage”: collages created from objects that women created or loved, crafted together through traditionally feminine techniques, like sewing and quilting. Judy Chicago creates paintings, installation art, and sculptures that focus on women’s experiences that have been neglected by historians. She specifically draws on many Jewish themes, including in her glass installation piece Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light. Roz Chast (b. 1954) works as a popular staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Other artists draw from the Bible, like in Ruth Weisberg’s piece “Sisters and Brothers,” she explores disruptive family relationships between Leah and Rachel and Isaac and Esau to show the modern relevance of the Bible. Other artists are expanding women’s participation in religion, like Shoshana Gugenheim’s project “Women of the Book,” a collection of 54 artworks, each representing one of the 54 weekly Torah portions. The intersecting identities of Jewish women has both constrained their artistic opportunities at times and inspired their art in countless ways. Jewish women are not a homogeneous group, and their art does not follow any single pattern, but throughout history, Jewish women have represented their individual identities through art and made significant contributions to the history of the visual arts through their work. Hannah Sachs See also: Judaism: Education; Holocaust; Israel; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States

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Further Reading Amishai-Maisels, Ziva, and Gannit Ankori. “Art in the United States.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women’s Archive. March 1, 2009. https://​ jwa​.org/encyclopedia/article/art-in-united-states. Levin, Gail. “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Identity, Radical Politics and Feminist Art in the United States.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4, no. 2 (2005): 205–32. Reinharz, Shulamit. “A Survey of the First Century of Jewish Women Artists: The Impact of Four Upheavals.” Thesis, Brandeis University, 2010. Rosenberg, Pnina. “Art during the Holocaust.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women’s Archive. March 1, 2009. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia​ /article/art-during-holocaust.

B AT M I T Z VA H Bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ritual for Jewish girls, means literally “daughter of a religious obligation.” It is the process by which a Jewish girl becomes a Jewish adult in her community. It is a process rather than a single act. A contemporary bat mitzvah is likely to start any time up to a year before the actual bat mitzvah date. The extended time allows the girl and her whole family to take part in her transformation into a Jewish adult. The coming-of-age ritual for Jewish girls is a relatively recent innovation in Jewish practice. The first bat mitzvah occurred in 1922 in New York City when Judith Kaplan Eisenstein became a bat mitzvah at the insistence of her father, Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement. However, some decades before that, the 19th-century sage, Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, mentioned bat mitzvah in his legal code, Ben Ish Hai. He asserted that the day a girl assumes the responsibility of the mitzvot in the adult Jewish community is a day of celebration. He suggested, if parents can afford it, they buy her a new dress. Then she could immediately perform a mitzvah (commandment, religious obligation) by saying the sheheheyanu (blessing made over something new) and concentrating on her new obligation to observe the mitzvot. Different Jewish denominations have dealt with the institution of bat mitzvah as part of synagogue life in varying ways. The Reform movement deemphasized the bar mitzvah (the coming-of-age ritual for boys) early on in favor of the confirmation ceremony, which boys and girls participated in equally at the conclusion of their Jewish education in the synagogue. Orthodoxy adhered to traditional roles in the synagogue for both boys and girls coming of age, which meant that far into the 20th century, only boys celebrated their entry into Jewish adulthood. Although the Conservative movement adopted bat mitzvah first in the 1950s, the majority of synagogues did not practice it. Later, acceptance of the Jewish girls’ coming-of-age ceremony became so widespread in Conservative Judaism that older women who had never had the chance previously became bat mitzvah, often in groups sponsored by their synagogue. Their focus was on Jewish literacy and proficiency in synagogue skills. They learned Hebrew, to chant from the Torah, to lead prayers, and to give learned talks on the Torah. By the 1970s and 1980s, when Jewish feminism was taking hold in all the movements, including Modern Orthodoxy (a branch of Orthodoxy affirming the



Divorce

coexistence of Torah knowledge and secular scholarship), most girls in the United States were becoming bat mitzvah. There have been two distinct approaches to the content of the bat mitzvah process and ceremony. They illustrate a tension in Jewish feminism between replicating what Jewish men have done for centuries, only this time with women, and changing what men have always done, taking into account sensibilities and perspectives that are unique to Jewish women and girls. There are now ongoing groups in schools and synagogues and ritual baths for Jewish girls preparing for bat mitzvah. Often these groups include mothers or other older female relatives as well as friends. Some groups of girls who have been preparing alongside other girls who are a year away from their bat mitzvah have decided to make quilts with their own symbols and images to use on the bimah (raised platform in the synagogue from which the Torah is read) at the time of their bat mitzvah ceremony. Others, often mothers, have celebrated an upcoming bat mitzvah with a gathering of female relatives and friends of all ages. These women and girls give blessings to the bat mitzvah girl, based on the stories of biblical women and the girl’s own ancestors. Some mothers have made challah-baking parties for their daughter’s upcoming bat mitzvah, inviting the girl’s friends and relatives to participate in this mitzvah, which is one of the short list of mitzvot linked to females. The trend toward innovation and change in bat mitzvah continues for both girls and women. The blank slate that lack of recorded ritual, history, and practice gives Jewish females has been an unexpected gift. There have been virtually no limits to the creativity, ingenuity, and resourcefulness women and girls have shown regarding coming of age in their Jewish communities. Penina Adelman See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Mitzvah; Modern and Contemporary Judaisms Further Reading Adelman, Penina, Ali Feldman, and Shulamit Reinharz. The JGirl’s Guide: The Young Jewish Woman’s Handbook for Coming of Age. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005. Cohen-Kiener, R. Andrea. “Participation by the Author in Challah-Baking Ceremony for Rabbi Kiener’s Daughter.” Unpublished notes used by permission of the author. Hartford, Connecticut, 1998. Elwell, R. Sue Levi. “Bat Mitzvah: Preparing Girls for Womanhood in a Changing Judaism.” Unpublished paper used by permission of the author. Hyman, Paula E. “Bat Mitzvah: American Jewish Women.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women’s Archive. March 1, 2009. http://jwa.org​ /encyclopedia/article/bat-mitzvah-american-jewish-women. Prell, Riv-Ellen. Women Remaking Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007.

DIVORCE See Marriage and Divorce

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E D U C AT I O N The Hebrew Bible tells us little of the education of women (and of men), but as the women are described as active outside the home in specialized capacities (e.g., midwives, musicians), there must have been opportunities for more specialized training for women in ancient Judaism. When it came to religious instruction, women were excluded from most forms of participation in worship in the Temple in Jerusalem. When synagogues emerged, however, women had more access to them, and some held positions of leadership, especially in the diaspora. This testifies to a level of education comparable to men who were active in the synagogues. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the rabbinic tradition became the dominant form of Judaism. There were circles that were more positive to the inclusion of women in formal education, as recorded in comments attributed to the study house of Shammai and in the text called Tosefta, which can be seen as a parallel to the Mishnah but without the same legal standing. These voices were, however, marginalized by the tradition codified in the Talmud, which excluded women from formal education and positions of leadership. From antiquity until the modern era, Jewish women have often been the enablers of education; through their work, they have enabled their male relatives to dedicate a large portion of their time to study. This function has also been an important way of piety for Jewish women. In a sense, this continues today. Since the ideal for Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men is lifelong study in a yeshiva (religious academy), the women often provide the main income for the family. To be attractive on the labor market, this means that Haredi women increasingly pursue higher education, mainly in Haredi teachers’ colleges. During the Middle Ages, the lives of Jewish women to a large extent depended on the non-Jewish context. Jews living under Islam generally followed the customs of their Muslim neighbors, which meant Jewish women there had less access to public space than Jewish women living in Christian lands. It seems, however, that many medieval Jewish women, both in Muslim and in Christian regions, were literate. There are occasional sources that testify to learned Jewish women in Muslim lands (e.g., poets, teachers). Other professions where women were active were in working with textiles, especially embroidery, and as midwives and healers, which must have required training. Similar patterns can be seen in Christian lands. While most Jewish boys learned Hebrew from a tender age to be able to study the traditional texts, few women attained such a level of proficiency. However, some women, often women from rabbinical families, did become proficient, and we know of certain women whose knowledge in halacha was held in high esteem and of those who served as prayer leaders for women. Sources also testify to the fact that some Ashkenazi Jewish women chose to follow religious practices only obligatory for men, which shows that they had both knowledge of and a feeling of inclusion when it came to the religious traditions. Generally, however, the education of women focused on domestic skills and the religious aspects of those.



Education

Jewish women during the Middle Ages and the early modern era were to a large degree literate in the vernaculars, the national languages of the various regions, and/or Jewish languages like Yiddish and Ladino. This also meant that when the invention of the printing press made it possible to publish larger quantities of books, there was an interest in literature especially in Yiddish. As a result, there was a great increase in publication of books in Yiddish during the 16th century and onward, both religious literature and other works, especially aimed at female readers. Women were also active in the publishing process in various capacities. When it comes to religious studies, until modern times, Jewish women have generally been excluded. According to the Talmud, men are required to teach their sons Torah (Jewish traditional texts, BT Kiddushin 29a). Women are exempt— mothers from teaching their children Torah and women generally from studying Torah. Some of the ancient rabbis even prohibited teaching women Torah (Mishnah Sotah 3:4). During the Middle Ages, however, it is clear that some rabbis tried to find interpretations that would enable women to study Torah, saying, for example, that what was prohibited was merely the teaching of the Oral Torah (the Talmud), not the Written (the five books of Moses that have a special status among the books of the Hebrew Bible). In general, Jewish women did not have access to religious studies beyond the basics until the appearance of Reform Judaism in the 19th century, and then only gradually. It was not until the 1970s that the first women were ordained as rabbis and cantors. Gradually, more conservative parts of Judaism have followed suit, although the idea of women rabbis is still generally rejected within Orthodoxy. In the last century and a half, Jewish women have gradually increased their level of participation in the study of traditional Jewish texts on every level, from primary school to university professors. A development from the first decade of the 21st century is the training of yo‘atzot halacha: women, usually Orthodox, who are specialists in giving advice on the halacha on sexual purity. This focus on sexuality as a specialization, an area that mainly concerns women and their bodies, can be seen in part as a response to the fact that in rabbinic literature as a whole, the texts were written by men, for men, dealing with matters that mainly concerned men. Apart from those women who study Jewish studies to acquire a profession, there has also been a marked increase in women from all branches of Judaism who study traditional texts without such aspiration. This is, for instance, shown by the establishment of institutions of Talmud study for Orthodox women comparable to the all-male yeshiva but usually referred to as midrashoth or battei midrash. When European universities opened for women, Jewish women were overrepresented in the first generations of women students in relation to the percentage of Jews in the population, at least in Germany and Austria. They also aimed higher than their contemporary non-Jewish female students. Whereas most non-Jewish female university students of the first generations became teachers, many of the Jewish women became physicians, scientists, social scientists, academics, and lawyers. Jewish women in the Muslim world were to a large extent uneducated and often illiterate until the appearance of modern Jewish and non-Jewish schools in

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the mid-19th century. Some rabbis opposed the education of women, fearing that these educated women might promote change in the Jewish community. After the mass migration of Jews from Muslim countries to Israel, a national census in 1961 showed that a large portion of the women from this group were completely or partially illiterate, leading to massive educational campaigns. Similarly, when most of the Ethiopian Jews emigrated to Israel in the 1980s, within a few decades this led to an improvement of the level of education of the women in the group. Lena Roos See also: Christianity: Education; Islam: Education; Judaism: Ancient Judaism; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Hebrew Bible; Judaism in Europe; Midrash; Rabbis Further Reading Ben Chaim-Rafael, Lior. “Ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, and Secular Women in College.” In Jewry between Tradition and Secularism: Europe and Israel Compared, edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael, Thomas Gergely, and Yosef Gorni, 151–72. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2006. Feuchtwanger, Ruti. “Knowledge versus Status: Discursive Struggle in Women’s Batei Midrash.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 18 (2009): 166–86. Ganzel, Tova, and Deena Rachel Zimmerman. “Women as Halakhic Professionals: The Role of the Yo‘atzot Halakhah.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 22 (2011): 162–71. Labovitz, Gail. “The Scholarly Life—The Laboring Wife: Gender, Torah, and the Family Economy in Rabbinic Culture.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 13 (2007): 8–48. Rosenberg, Esti. “The World of Women’s Torah Learning—Developments, Directions and Objectives: A Report from the Field.” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought 45, no. 1 (2012): 13–36. Schely-Newman, Esther. “Eradicating Ignorance: A Gendered Literacy Campaign.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 22 (2011): 15–31.

EVE See Lilith FEMINIST AND WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS The age of Enlightenment in Europe spurred on many women’s movements in the quest for equality. Although there is some evidence of Jewish women advocating for increased rights in society and with regards to religious obligations during earlier periods, it was during the Enlightenment that more organized Jewish movements emerged. Influential Jewish feminist and women’s movements developed in both Germany and the United States during the later 19th century. The Juedischer Fraauenbund (League of Jewish Women, JFB) was founded in Germany in 1904 by Bertha Pappenheim (1859–1936) and eventually claimed 20 percent of all German Jewish women as members. The organization’s goals bridged



Feminist and Women’s Movements

Jewish identity with feminist objectives to expand women’s roles in the Jewish community, increase educational opportunities, and further German women’s feminist agenda (Kaplan 1976). The JFB and other German feminist groups saw the social problems of the industrial age and feminist goals as interrelated. As such, the JFB pursued social work as a central part of its agenda. The group also reflected a transformation of German Jewish middle-class women’s attitudes during the interwar years. Upon the organization’s founding, it worked to combat anti-Semitism, but it was not until 1917 that this goal was included in its statutes. In addition, during the war years, the JFB pushed for women’s suffrage within the Jewish community and supported the Zionist movement to which it had previously objected. In other words, the JFB began to emphasize specifically Jewish matters (Steer 2015). Although there were many Jewish women who participated in German feminist groups, Pappenheim was devoted to working solely within the Jewish community. Supporting welfare projects became a central platform of her work. In 20th-century Germany, girls attended high school, but many universities did not accept women, supporting society’s belief that a woman’s priority was to marry. To rectify this, Pappenheim convinced Jewish middle-class women to adopt women’s causes to include advocating for education and care of unwed mothers and Jewish prostitutes. She believed in the power of social work rather than direct charity and felt that “feminism could reinvigorate Judaism” (Kaplan 1976, 43). Another area that intrigued Pappenheim was that of a woman’s illegitimacy, whether due to her unmarried status or as an aguna, an abandoned wife who could not prove her husband’s death or could not obtain a Jewish divorce (Edinger 1958). When widespread pogroms erupted in Russia in 1905, Pappenheim brought orphaned children to Germany and sent teachers and social workers, many of whom emerged out of her orphanages, to work in Galicia. One of the JFB’s main projects was to end white slavery, as Germany served as a transit point for women from Eastern Europe. Impoverished Jewish women from Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire were lured into prostitution through marriage proposals or job offers. The JFB worked with other women’s organizations to combat trafficking. The JFB also faulted adherence to traditional Jewish views regarding women’s education and legal status for leading impoverished women into prostitution. Orthodox women were rarely educated and therefore completely dependent on parents or a future spouse for their livelihood. This led the organizations to educate women and provide vocational training, especially in Eastern Europe (Kaplan 1976). Another area of the JFB’s interest was women’s suffrage in the Jewish community. According to the Prussian Law of 1847, Jewish communities were considered autonomous in areas of cultural and religious life and had established a representative council along with an executive council to make decisions. However, only men could vote and participate in these bodies. Despite the fact that German women did not get the right to vote until 1919, the JFB pushed for an expanded role for women in decision making. After women were granted suffrage in Germany, women achieved greater positions in these decision-making bodies. Similar to other German women’s movements, when Nazis ascended to power, the JFB lost much of its feminist leaning. The JFB accentuated its Jewish identity as a response

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to the growing anti-Semitism. Eventually, the JFB, along with other Jewish organizations, struggled to survive (Kaplan 1976). In the United States, from the 1890s, Jewish women formed groups and also participated in other American associations. After forming sisterhoods in synagogues as part of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), women began to gain acceptance into nondenominational women’s organizations, such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Although Jewish women participated in many peace organizations, the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) attracted the most members, and several chapters were led by Jewish women. Many Jewish women opted to engage in peace activism through Jewish movements, reflecting the significance they placed on their religious identity. The NCJW was founded in 1893 in the United States by mostly middle- and upperclass German Jewish women in response to the unequal representation of women in the Parliament of Religions, one of the first interfaith gatherings in Chicago. Many members of the NCJW believed that the peace movement was an issue that women, not just Jewish ones, supported (Klapper 2010, 643–45). A key goal of the NCJW was to Americanize Jewish immigrants. Although this was an important objective for the organization, members used this Americanization work to expand the role of their organization in the public sphere. They also championed philanthropy and educating American women on Judaism and a Jewish identity. For the women of the NCJW, becoming Americanized did not mean losing all aspects of a Jewish identity. For the NCJW, Americanization of Jewish women meant learning American women’s values of caring for children and home. But unlike some other non-Jewish Americanization groups, NCJW believed that women should become citizens and learn civics (Korelitz 1995). After the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote, in 1920, the NCJW enhanced its program to teach women civics as a route to Jewish Americanization. The philanthropic goal dealt mostly with the challenges facing Jewish immigrant girls and women. As time progressed, Jewish women became very involved and forged strong relationships with the American peace movement. But the interwar period and the rise of Hitler complicated the Jewish members’ relations with the peace movement. Silence with regards to the rise of Nazism and growing anti-Semitism led Jewish women to question their place in these organizations. Whereas many Jewish women viewed their role in peace movements as a path to Americanization, “the response to Nazism directed Jewish women’s paths to Americanization away from universalist ideals of peace and toward the particular protection of Jewish rights” (Klapper 2010, 638). This led Jewish women to modify their goals from universal peace to Jewish identity. The issue of gender ideology, on the other hand, played a unifying role for many women by cutting across the cleavages of ethnicity, religion, and class, “but only when those involved could successfully prioritize gender over all other identity claims” (Klapper 2010, 640). There were two distinct paths that Jewish women followed with regard to the peace movement. Some participated in the general peace movement, and others worked through Jewish women’s groups committed, in part, to peace activism.



Feminist and Women’s Movements

The NCJW was also courted by the birth control movement as the organization was looking to increase support for its cause. Although working-class Jewish women, like their middle-class counterparts, were interested in peace movements, their activism in other areas, such as labor unions and socialism, precluded vigorous participation in peace activism. By the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism, the WILPF and Jewish members diverged as to the objectives of their organization. Many Jewish members supported a German boycott, while the WILPF believed that would be a step toward war and viewed the Jewish issue as minor in comparison to maintaining peace (Klapper 2010). By the end of World War II, when the tragic scale of the Holocaust emerged, peace as a main objective of the NCJW receded into the background. The American Jewish Congress supported a boycott of German goods from 1933 to 1941 with the Women’s Division of the American Jewish Committee performing most of the daily administration of the boycott agenda. With women’s traditional role as the primary shopper in a household, they would have more knowledge of consumer goods that could potentially affect the boycott. The Women’s Division was founded in 1933 by Louise Waterman Wise, whose husband, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, founded the American Jewish Congress in 1918. With Hitler’s rise to power and the increasing discrimination against Jews in Europe, Louise Wise felt compelled to increase women’s participation in fighting Nazism. Due to the situation of European Jews in the interwar and early war years, American women acquired new roles as community organizers and activists. They also concentrated on refugee aid through the American Jewish Congress’s refugee committee. Along with the legislative committee, women became more politically active by advocating the admission of 10,000 German Jewish children into the United States in 1939 (Sheramy 2001). The Women’s Division concentrated their efforts in their neighborhoods and community to combat anti-Semitism and handed out literature combating the anti-Semitic oratory of Father Coughlin, a preacher. Another important Jewish women’s organization was Hadassah, the American Women’s Zionist Organization founded in 1912, which became one of the largest American Zionist organizations by the 1930s. While in Amsterdam in 1935, Hadassah’s founder, feminist Henrietta Szold (1860–1945), met with Pappenheim during a Youth Aliyah convention, a project whose mission was to rescue children from Europe and bring them to Palestine. Szold, like Pappenheim, was devoted to social work and women’s education (Edinger 1958). Like the JFB, Hitler’s ascent to power led Hadassah to expand its activities from the traditional feminist philanthropic realm to extensive work for the Zionist endeavor, particularly in health care and welfare. Szold arrived in Palestine in 1921 to establish medical facilities and clinics that would benefit all inhabitants of Palestine, both Arab and Jew. Along with its numerous clinics, Hadassah established a nursing school in the 1920s, training local women to work in their respective communities. By 1928, Hadassah also started programs in schools where children received vaccinations and physical exams and, when needed, were sent to Hadassah clinics for medical treatment. Aside from Hadassah’s medical and social contributions, the movement branched out from these traditionally feminist areas to become a strong voice with regard to Jewish-Arab relations and “broke through the limitations on women’s roles” (Segev

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2013, 135). Hadassah continues to play a strong role in Israel and as the largest women’s organization in the United States. The American feminist and women’s movement in the 1960s led to a profound reassessment of women’s roles in society and affected the Jewish feminist movement significantly by pointing out the inequalities in Jewish life. Betty Friedan argued in her famous book The Feminist Mystique (1963) that women had been trapped in their roles as wives and mothers and were unable to pursue their professional aspirations. Although in the past, women did work and participate in philanthropy and social activism, the women’s movement pushed to make a life outside the home mainstream and culturally acceptable. Jewish women spearheaded this movement primarily because many, such as Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug, were highly educated, but their focus was not necessarily intertwined with their Jewish identity. The American Jewish feminist movement, on the other hand, significantly affected American Jewish life by trying to restructure the patriarchic family structure and alter women’s roles in religious life. With regard to family, women delayed marriage for education and work opportunities and had fewer children than in the past. In Jewish life, as family is the focus of the community, significant readjustments were required with regard to child care and domestic chores. The dual-career home became the norm in the American Jewish community (Fishman 1989). Furthermore, given their new status outside the home, women demanded more equality within religious practice. In 1970, evolving out of Jewish study groups called Havurah, Jewish women created the group Ezrat Nashim (“women’s help” or a reference to the women’s section in synagogue) in New York, which raised the issue of women’s equality at the 1972 Conservative Rabbinical Assembly convention. They pushed for greater roles in the synagogue coupled with the ordination of female rabbis and cantors. The Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative movements have accepted female rabbis, while the Orthodox movement has not. Women in the Orthodox movement, however, have pushed for greater leadership roles and increased religious study. Although one reaction has been to cling tenaciously to a stringently conservative interpretation of halachic law, other more moderate Orthodox rabbis have explored options to increase women’s role in religious life. In addition, Jewish feminists pushed for the creation of new ceremonies that could grant girls and women a more central role in Jewish life. For example, when boys are born, they have a circumcision ceremony (brit milah) to welcome them into the community of Jews. Jewish feminists created the baby-naming ceremony for girls to announce their arrival and solidify their place in the Jewish community. The feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s transformed American Jewish society by forcing some Jewish feminists to explore the limitations and inequalities within their own communities. Ruth Margolies Beitler See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Education; Holocaust; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Peacemaking; Women and Work



Festivals and Holy Days

Further Reading Edinger, Dora. “Bertha Pappenheim: A German-Jewish Feminist.” Jewish Social Studies 20 (July 1958): 180–86. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. “The Impact of Feminism on American Jewish Life.” American Jewish Year Book 89 (1989): 3–62. Kaplan, Marion A. “German-Jewish Feminism in the Twentieth Century.” Jewish Social Studies 38 (Winter 1976): 39–53. Klapper, Melissa R. “Those by Whose Side We Have Labored: American Jewish Women and the Peace Movement between the Wars.” Journal of American History 97 (December 2010): 636–58. Korelitz, Seth. “‘A Magnificent Piece of Work’: The Americanization Work of the National Council of Jewish Women.” American Jewish History 83 (June 1995): 177–203. Segev, Zohar. “From Philanthropy to Shaping a State: Hadassah and Ben-Gurion, 1937–1947.” Israel Studies 18 (Fall 2013): 133–57. Sheramy, Rona. “‘There Are Times When Silence Is a Sin’: The Women’s Division of the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement.” American Jewish History 89 (March 2001): 105–21. Sochen, June. “Both the Dove and the Serpent: Hadassah’s Work in 1920s Palestine.” Judaism 52 (Winter 2003): 71–83. Steer, Martina. “Nation, Religion, Gender: The Triple Challenge of Middle-Class German-Jewish Women in World War I.” Central European History 48 (2015): 176–98.

F E S T I VA L S A N D H O LY D AY S Jewish women observe festivals and holy days throughout the year, from the weekly Sabbath to the monthly Rosh Chodesh and the many annual holidays. The Jewish feminist movement has resulted in an egalitarian shift in women’s observance of festivals and holy days in most non-Orthodox movements. Jewish women have also developed their own liturgies and rituals to observe festivals and holy days. Women’s holiday observances are a mixture of traditional practices, communal customs, and ritual innovations. Today, the liberal and progressive Jewish movements recognize women as equal participants in all the ritual activities for festivals and holy days. In the Orthodox tradition, however, there are a few commandments that men are required to keep from which women are exempted. From the Orthodox tradition’s perspective, the women’s sphere is the household, and, thus, their observance of holidays is often focused on the family and household preparations instead of the male-dominated synagogue activities. Women’s observance of the Sabbath, which lasts from sundown Friday to just after sundown on Saturday, may include the Sabbath synagogue services and household activities. Among non-Orthodox movements, women enjoy equality in the synagogue activities, from reading the Torah to leading the service. The household is the traditional center of women’s observance of the Sabbath. According to the Babylonian Talmud, women have two specific commandments to keep on the Sabbath. First, women are responsible for Hadlakat Ner, the lighting of the Sabbath candles, before sunset to begin the Sabbath. Second, women perform challah,

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where the baker removes a portion of the dough from the loaf of challah and burns it as an offering. Women also participate in the kiddush, the sanctification of the cup of wine, and the three festive Sabbath meals. At the conclusion of the Sabbath, women may participate in the habdalah, a short ritual concluding the Sabbath. Jewish feminists have sought to make the household activities more egalitarian. For example, married couples may share in the liturgical activities of the meal instead of continuing to have the husband in charge of the rituals. In the 1970s, one of the first holiday rituals Jewish feminists revitalized was Rosh Chodesh (the new moon festival), celebrated on the first day of each month. Rosh Chodesh was a holy day in the Bible. In the rabbinic tradition, Jewish women did not work on the day but were required to feast. Rosh Chodesh is intended to celebrate Jewish women. Women might celebrate the new moon in a women’s havurah (pl. havurot; a small group gathering) where they gather for prayer, study, and celebration. This celebration has become popular in all wings of Judaism. Jewish women celebrate the New Year, Rosh Hashanah, on the first of Tishri (September or October). One of the hallmark activities is to blow the shofar (a ram’s horn used as a musical horn). Among egalitarian movements, women and men may do so. In Orthodox Judaism, women may keep the commandment to blow the shofar by listening to it and reciting a blessing. Orthodox women are, however, prohibited from blowing the shofar for someone else. During the Days of Awe, when Jews reflect on their previous year and make resolutions for the new year between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), Jewish women may perform the tashlik ritual. In preparation, women might go to a mikvah (ritual bath). Then, they go to a river or other flowing water to perform tashlik, where they symbolically cast off their sins, casting pieces of bread into the water. On the 10th of Tishri, Jewish women observe Yom Kippur. This includes fasting and refraining from work. On the afternoon before the start of the fast, observers are obligated to enjoy a festive meal. Also, on the prior afternoon, women may purify themselves in a mikvah. It is customary to dress in plain white clothes, symbolizing the purity and removal of sin, for Yom Kippur. The synagogue is the locus of practice on Yom Kippur with prayers and communal confession. Services are day-long affairs. Women recite the Kol Nidre prayer at the evening service of Yom Kippur. Following the breaking of the fast, one might enjoy either apple slices or challah, preferably dipped in honey, to remind her of the sweetness to come in the new year. The fall festival of Sukkoth begins on the 15th of Tishri. As Jewish movements have become more egalitarian, Jewish women now celebrate the festival as equals to men. During the seven- or eight-day festival, many families live or spend time in a sukkah, a temporary booth. Eating meals in the sukkah is an important ritual activity. Foods associated with autumn harvests are popular. In the synagogue, Sukkoth prayers involve the shaking of the lulab (a bundle made up of myrtle twigs, willow twigs, and a palm branch) and the ethrog (a citron). Prior to the egalitarian shift among Jewish movements, Jewish women began gathering together to celebrate Sukkoth, including the opportunity to shake the lulab and the ethrog.



Festivals and Holy Days

Women set up their own Sukkoth and enjoyed meals together. Women participated in the traditional practice of inviting biblical guests (ushpizin) into one’s sukkah by inviting biblical women, such as the prophet Miriam, and blessing them. Immediately after Sukkoth, Shemini Atzereth occurs. Sometimes it is combined with Simhath Torah. On Simhath Torah, the preceding year’s reading is concluded and the next year’s reading of the Torah begins. In liberal and progressive wings of Judaism, women celebrate the holiday as equals in their synagogues. The community dances and parades through the synagogue, or even in the streets, with the Torah scrolls. In Orthodox Judaism, women’s participation in the celebration may be limited. Women may be blocked from participating in the parading of the Torah scrolls due to the separation of men and women during prayer. They may be expected to tend to the children celebrating the holiday, providing them with sweets and flags to wave. Women’s hakafoth (circular processions) are an innovation that provide an alternative ritual for orthodox women who wish to participate in dancing with the Torah scroll but are barred from it in their synagogues. Chanukah begins on the 25th of Kislev (usually December). Women celebrate with their families. Women might light the Chanukah candles each night and eat fried foods (such as latkes and fried jelly-filled doughnuts) to remember the rabbinic telling of the Chanukah story of the miraculous oil that was sufficient for one day but lasted eight days in the temple. Tu B’Shevat celebrates the New Year for Trees on the 15th of Shevat (January or February). Women may identify the holiday with the earth’s fruitfulness and generative possibilities. In Israel, this is the beginning of spring and a time to plant trees. Purim occurs on the 14th of Adar (February or March). According to rabbinic tradition, women are obligated to listen to the reading of the megillah, or scroll, of Esther and participate in reciting the blessings; to give charity and food to the poor and gifts of food to friends; and to participate in the Purim feast. The Purim feast is an important part of the merrymaking associated with the holiday. Women, men, and children wear costumes to their Purim parties. Hamantaschen, a threesided filled-pocket cookie, is a popular baked treat associated with Purim. In the non-Orthodox movements, women are able to celebrate Purim in the synagogue as equals to men. In Orthodox Judaism, however, women are often prohibited from reading Esther in the synagogue but permitted to read the scroll in private. For orthodox women, a women’s havurot offers them the innovative opportunity to read from the Esther scroll as a community. Pesach (Passover) occurs on the 15th of Nissan (March or April). Passover is often associated with intense preparation of the home for the holiday. In many Jewish households, men and women share the duties to prepare the home. Hametz, or leaven, needs to be removed from the home. Jewish families remove all the prohibited grain products and leavening from their house. For Ashkenazi Jews, legumes, corn, and rice may also be avoided, although recently there has been an easing of these restrictions. Some men and women scrub their kitchens to ensure no forbidden crumb remains and replace everyday dishes with special dishware used for Passover. The meals for the holiday are based on the family’s cultural background. (Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews differ in their menus for Passover

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due to differing food restrictions.) Some families may bake their own matzah and prepare traditional meat and vegetable dishes and salads. Haroseth is a traditional fruit-and-nut dish eaten at the seder meal. It symbolizes the mortar Jews used to make bricks while enslaved in Egypt. The family gathers to commemorate the holiday with a ritual meal called the Passover Seder; in egalitarian movements, men or women may lead the seder. Women’s participation in the seder is limited in the Orthodox movement. According to rabbinic tradition, women are obligated to listen to the Haggadah (the text that contains the liturgy for the meal) and participate in the seder. The meal recalls the liberation of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The youngest member at the seder, regardless of gender, asks the Four Questions from the seder, which opens the telling. Jewish women have innovated the celebration of Passover. Women’s sedarim use Haggadot (stories about biblical figures, such as Miriam) to add women’s voices to the traditional Passover Seder. Women have also introduced new symbolic foods to the seder plate. For example, Susannah Heschel added the orange to the Passover plate to affirm Jewish lesbians and gay men in the Jewish community. Another innovation is the introduction of Miriam’s cup filled with water from which everyone drinks. The cup commemorates Miriam’s well, which sustained the Israelites as they wandered in the desert. The water is meant to sustain those at the seder in their journey to messianic times. In some women’s sedarim, the door is opened for Miriam instead of Elijah. Following Lag B’Omer (the Counting of the Omer), Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks) occurs on the fifth or sixth of Sivan (May or June). It commemorates God giving Israel the Torah at Mount Sinai. In liberal and progressive movements, women and men may participate in a night study of the Torah at the synagogue; however, due to gender restrictions, most women in Orthodox Judaism do not participate. Women’s groups gather to read and study the Torah in a newer Orthodox ritual practice of Shavuot. Women may also read the scroll of Ruth, which is traditionally read on Shavuot. On the ninth of Tisha (July or August), Jewish women observe Tisha B’Av, a solemn fast day. While fewer Jews observe this fast day, those who do refrain from drinking, sexual relations, washing, and immersing in a mikvah. During the fast, Jews mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, in 586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively, and other tragedies in Jewish history. The biblical scroll of Lamentations is read in the synagogues, and mourning prayers are recited. Women’s groups have developed their own rituals where they share their own stories of personal loss, laments, and dirges. John W. Fadden See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Food; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Rosh Hodesh; Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms; Shabbat (Sabbath) Further Reading Adelman, Penina V. Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women around the Year. Fresh Meadows, NY: Biblio, 1986.



Food

Baskin, Judith R. “Festivals and Holy Days.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women’s Archive. March 1, 2009. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article​ /festivals-and-holy-days. Broner, E. M. Bringing Home the Light: A Jewish Woman’s Handbook of Rituals. San Francisco: Council Oaks Books, 1999. Sered, Susan Starr. Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

FOOD From biblical times to the modern period, women have held the main but not sole responsibility for preparing food in the Jewish household. In the Hebrew Bible, it is usually women who prepare the food (Leviticus 26:26; 1 Samuel 8:13; Ecclesiastes 12:3; Jeremiah 7:18) whereas men slaughtered the meat (Genesis 43:16; Exodus 12:21; 1 Samuel 14:32, 34; 25:11). Due to the intricate Jewish dietary laws, the preparation of food requires a fair amount of religious expertise when it comes to such tasks as “koshering” the meat (drawing out all the remaining blood, mainly by soaking it in salt and water), separating meat and dairy products, and preparing the foods required for the annual religious feasts and Sabbath. There are only three commandments specifically directed to women, and one of them concerns food: challah, the separation and sacrifice of a portion of the dough when baking. Special prayers for the commandment of challah were included in the Seyder tkhines, the standard Yiddish prayer book from the early modern era. In a study of elderly Middle Eastern Jewish women in the 1980s, Susan Starr Sered found that rather than separating between holy and profane, the holy was completely embedded in their everyday life through rituals and religious virtues they connected with cooking. According to them, a righteous woman is one who feeds the hungry. Similar notions have been found among Jewish women elsewhere. In addition to being an area of halachic expertise for women, it has also been one of the few resources they have had control over already in premodern times as well as a reason to leave the home, although rabbinic sources express discomfort with the idea of women going to the market to buy food (Mishna Ketubbot 5:5, 5:9). Food and eating can serve as an example of women’s inclusion and exclusion in traditional Jewish law. Women, just like men, are obliged to recite the blessing after a meal, but if the blessing is to be said in a group or merely privately depends on whether a minimum of three men are present during the meal. If such a group is formed, and women are present, they are required to participate, but the rabbinical commentaries differ on whether three women can and should form such a group among themselves. The connection between Jewish women and food has continued into modern times, and preparing and consuming traditional dishes has been an important way of forming Jewish identity and community. The role of cooking and cookbooks in Jewish identity formation in modernity has been dedicated in various scholarly works (see, for example, Kershenovich 2002 and Weissman Joselit 2002). Food does not merely define Jewish identity but rather Jewish ethnic identity, expressed

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as Yemenite, Indian, Mexican, and Polish Jewish food traditions and others. In this sense, food can be Jewish in that it follows the dietary rules and the celebrations but still corresponds to non-Jewish dietary practices in the area. Rituals around meals also continue to be a creative arena. In the first decade of the 21st century, an all-woman ritual called “amen meals” started developing among Jewish women, from ultra-Orthodox to secular, first in Israel, and from there it spread to Europe and the United States. The core of the meal is the blessing of food and eating it. In connection with this, prayers are said to obtain favors from God, for instance that a family member should be healed from illness or find a job. Lena Roos See also: Judaism: Festivals and Holy Days; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Shabbat (Sabbath) Further Reading Helman, Anat, ed. Jews and Their Foodways. Studies in Contemporary Jewry 28. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Kershenovich, Paulette. “Evoking the Essence of the Divine: The Construction of Identity through Food in the Syrian Jewish Community in Mexico.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 5 (2002): 105–28. Neriya-ben Shahar, Rivka. “‘At “Amen Meals” It’s Me and God’ Religion and Gender: A New Jewish Women’s Ritual.” Contemporary Jewry 35, no. 2 (2015): 153–72. Sered, Susan Starr. “Food and Holiness: Cooking as a Sacred Act among Middle-Eastern Jewish Women.” Anthropological Quarterly 61, no. 3 (1988): 129–39. Weissman Joselit, Jenna. The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture 1880–1950. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.

GODDESSES Archaeology indicates that ancient Israelites knew and worshipped a variety of female divinities, including Asherah, Ashtoret, and Anat. A variety of Goddess figurines, both homemade and mass-produced, have been recovered from Israelite sites dating to the biblical period. The Bible condemns Goddess worship and prescribes the destruction of all Goddess artifacts as well as other physical representations of God. Some scholars believe Goddess worship was a foreign intrusion on ancient Israel and that only in the latter days of the biblical monarchy or the early days of the exile to Babylonia was there a systematic purge of practices related to Goddesses. Judaism as it developed during the first Exile, the Hasmonean period, the second Exile (70 CE), the rabbinic period, and beyond, became a monotheistic tradition that primarily used male names and metaphors for the Divine (such as Adonai, Lord, and melekh or King) in prayer and study. Nevertheless, during the rabbinic period, there appear legends of Shekinah, the divine presence, as a female figure. By the 12th century, Jews who engaged in the practice of Kabbalah (Jewish mystical lore)



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spoke of Shekinah as a bride of God and a mother of the Jewish people. In contemporary times, while most Jews continue to use traditional language for God, there has been a resurgence of interest in the relationship between Judaism and the Goddess (some prefer the term Divine Feminine). Some Jews have revised liturgy to include feminine, gender-neutral, or gender-balanced language for the Divine. Asherah

The Goddess Asherah, Mother of the Deities in the Canaanite pantheon and consort of El, is often depicted flanked by lions or trees. She is frequently represented as a clay pillar form with a head and breasts. The biblical divine name Shaddai, breasted one, often translated as Almighty, may Female figurine, possibly the Goddess Asherah, ca. eighth–seventh century BCE. This type of figurine evoke these breasted images. The tree or pole was Asher- was produced in great numbers in the kingdom of Judah. While the Bible forbids worship of the Godah’s primary symbol in ancient dess, and Jews have long used traditional language for Israel. The Bible mentions and God, there is increasing interest among Jews in reviscondemns the practice of raising ing the language to include feminine, gender-neutral, an Asherah pole in honor of the or gender-balanced language for the Divine. (The Goddess Asherah: “You must not Metropolitan Museum of Art/Gift of Harris D. and set up an Asherah beside the altar H. Dunscombe Colt, 1934) you build to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 16:21). However, the book of Kings indicates that an Asherah pole stood in the first Temple for much of its existence and was part of the official religion (see 2 Kings 21:7, 23:4). Judges 3:7 and other texts report that the Israelites worshipped Asherot (plural). Excavations have revealed oil jars inscribed with the words “sanctified to Asherah” (Kien, 106). The menorah that became a sacred object in the Temple may be related to the Asherah tree or pole. Asherah was also known as Elat (Goddess, the feminine of El, God) and as Qodshu or Holy One. Some scholars believe that the kedeisha (holy woman or priestess) mentioned in biblical texts may have been a devotee of Asherah. It is mentioned in 2 Kings 23 that women wove sacred things for Asherah in the Temple. The queen mother Maacah sets up an “abominable thing” for Asherah (1 Kings 15:13).

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Some scholars, such as William Dever, Johanna Stuckey, and Francesca Stavrakopoulou, have suggested that Israelites understood Asherah as the consort of YHWH. A number of inscriptions suggest this, including three found at Kuntillat-ajrud in the Sinai peninsula (800 BCE), one of which reads: “I have blessed you by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah.” An inscription at Khirbet el-Qom (700 CE) reads: “Blessed be Uriyahu by Yahweh and His Asherah.” Other scholars believe that these inscriptions refer not to Goddess Asherah but to a religious object belonging to YHWH. Anat

Anat, also part of the Canaanite pantheon, was sister and possibly lover to the Storm God Baal. Anat, known as the Maiden, participated in the resurrection of Baal—Anat fought and defeated Mot, the God of Death, probably as an annual calendrical event. An inscription in Beit She’an, an Israelite settlement, reads: “Antit Queen of Heaven and Mistress of all the Gods.” Like Asherah, Anat received the epithet “Holy.” The name Anat appears in biblical names and places, including the city of Anatot and the judge Shamgar ben Anat. Anat may have been the Goddess Jeremiah identified as the Queen of Heaven, whom Israelite women worshipped with cakes and fire rituals: “This word that you have spoken to us in YHWH’s name, we will not listen to you! We will do everything that our mouths have vowed: to offer incense to the Queen of Heaven and pour libations to her, just as we and our ancestors have done” (Jeremiah 44:16–17). The Jews of Elephantine, Egypt, established a temple in the fifth century BCE to serve a Jewish garrison. At Elephantine, Jews worshipped a version of Anat in combination with Yahweh, known as Anatyahu. Another Goddess-Yahweh combination worshipped at Elephantine was Ashimyahu, a name stemming from Ashima, a fate Goddess of southern Israel. Ashtoret

Ashtoret, or Ashtart, was a form of the Love and War Goddess Ishtar of Babylonia. A variety of images of Ashtart appear in the archaeological record of the biblical period. In the Bible, the Israelites are said to forsake Yahweh and worship Ashtarot (plural; Judges 2:13 and 1 Samuel 7:3). Jezebel, queen of the northern kingdom of Israel, establishes priests of Baal and Ashtoret as part of a national religion (1 Kings 18:19). The Bible records that King Solomon followed Ashtart (1 Kings 11:3). In the region of Canaan/Israel/Judea, Ashtart is often depicted sitting on a lion throne. In many plaques in Canaan and Syria, Ashtart is depicted holding snakes, connecting her with creation and rebirth. She is sometimes confused with Asherah. Chochmah

In the book of Proverbs, there is a transitional Goddess figure known as Chochmah or Wisdom. Wisdom is the first of God’s creations: “God created me at the beginning of His way, as the first of the creations of old” (Proverbs 8:22). She is an adviser and confidante for God and also engages in the instruction of humankind.



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She stands at the crossroads, offering her truth to all who pass by: “Does not Wisdom call, and Understanding raise Her voice? At the heights, by the road, at the crossroads she stands” (Proverbs 8:1–2). Textual elements connect Chochmah to earlier Hebrew Goddesses. Proverbs 3:18 describes her as a “Tree of Life to all who hold fast to her, and all who uphold her are happy.” Both the Tree of Life and the word happy (which uses the same Hebrew root as Asherah) connect Chochmah to Goddess Asherah. Chochmah may represent the desire of some Israelites to connect to a Goddess figure even as they embraced Judaism’s monotheistic path. Shekinah in Rabbinic Literature

Rabbinic literature such as the Talmud and Midrash (200–600 CE), inspired by biblical texts about the cloud of glory that marked God’s tangible presence, posited a numinous divine presence that hovered over the Temple. This presence manifested in places where holiness occurred: when individuals and groups prayed and studied, when people visited the sick, when the new moon was blessed, and so on. While many mentions of Shekinah portrayed the divine presence as genderless, some stories about her portrayed her as God’s wife: a personal, feminine manifestation of God’s numinous glory. In this role, Shekinah was a compassionate figure who showed mercy to the Jewish people even when God was angry with them. The Shekinah went with the people into exile, following them around the world. Shekinah in Kabbalistic Literature

Shekinah appears as a major character in the mystical literature of the kabbalists. In Sefer haBahir (12th-century Provence), she appears as the Daughter of God and the Bride of Israel, and in the Zohar (13th-century Spain), she is the feminine aspect of God, consort of the Divine Bridegroom, and the manifestation of divine presence in the physical world. The role of humans is to restore Shekinah to unbroken relationship with her divine consort and thereby perfect and heal the world. Shekinah (also called Malkhut [Kingdom] or Matronita [Lady]) was understood as the embodiment of the Sabbath, the Torah, and the Jewish people (Keneset Yisrael). Sabbath was a time of union between sacred masculine and feminine: “That night is the joy of the Queen with the King and their uniting” (Zohar II, 63b). The kabbalists commonly referred to Shekinah using the names of natural phenomena: Sea, Moon, Earth, Apple Orchard. Jewish Sabbath liturgy came to include a long poem about Shekinah known as Lecha Dodi. Mystics who were later considered heretics, such as Shabbetai Tzvi and Jacob Frank, placed Shekinah at the center of their radical theologies. Shekinah also had a supernal (relating to the sky or heavens) Mother. In the Zohar, the Ima Ila’ah, the supernal Mother is a feminine aspect of the Divine, also known as Binah (understanding). She is the Cosmic Womb, Mother of Souls. She partners with the supernal Father (Abba Ila’ah) to create all things and is the celestial counterpart to Shekinah.

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Modern Jewish Goddess References

With the advent of Jewish feminism and the study of Jewish women’s history, some contemporary Jewish women began to search for feminine images of God. Books like Tikvah Frymer-Kensky’s In the Wake of the Goddesses (1992), Jenny Kien’s Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism (2000), and Lynn Gottlieb’s She Who Dwells Within (1995) explored the relationships among God, Goddess, and women’s imagination of the Divine. Scholars like Asphodel Long, Raphael Patai, Joanna Stuckey, Judith Laura, and Max Dashú have explored the influence of Goddesses on early Jewish history and later Jewish legend. Leah Novick’s On Wings of Shekhinah (2008) and Jill Hammer and Taya Shere’s The Hebrew Priestess (2015) are more recent explorations of this topic. Some Jewish feminist liturgists have sought to keep contemporary images of the Divine Feminine separate from Goddess imagery, using language like God-She rather than Goddess. Others have embraced the possibility of using the language of Goddess in Jewish liturgy, and Jewish women poets like Rachel Adler and Alicia Ostriker have also provided new language about God. Still other Jews have chosen to join contemporary Goddess movements within American culture—the Wiccan theologian Starhawk, formerly Miriam Simos, is an example. A few modern Jewish prayer books, such as Siddur Shaar Zahav, Siddur Birkat Shalom, the Romemu Siddur, the Book of Blessings, the P’nai Or Siddur, and Siddur haKohanot: The Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook, have experimented with feminine language for God, and some have used the term Goddess. Rabbi Jill Hammer See also: Ancient Religions: Inanna; Christianity: Mystics; Sophia; Judaism: Ancient Judaism; Hebrew Bible; Kabbalah; Priestesses; Spirituality: Drumming; Goddess Spirituality; Radical Women’s Spirituality Further Reading Anthonioz, Stephanie. “Astarte in the Bible and Her Relation to Asherah.” In Transformation of a Goddess, edited by David Sugimoto, 125–39. Fribourg, Switzerland: Academic Press, 2002.Dever, William G. “Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillat-Ajrud.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 255 (1984): 21–27. Dever, William G. Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. Falk, Marcia. The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Hammer, Jill, and Taya Shere. Siddur haKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook, 2nd ed. New York: Kohenet Institute, 2016. Kien, Jenny. Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism. Parkland, FL: Universal Publisher, 2000. Long, Asphodel. “Asherah, the Tree of Life, and the Menorah: Continuity of a Goddess Symbol in Judaism?” First Sophia Feminist Fellowship Theology Lecture, College of St. Mark and St. John, Plymouth, England, December 4, 1996. Wilson, Ellie. “Anat: Autonomous Goddess of Ugarit.” Presented at Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, Dallas, Texas, November 1993. Available at https:// heartwellproductions.wordpress.com/anat-autonomous-goddess-of-ugarit/.



Hasidism

HASIDISM An expression of Haredi (Orthodox) Judaism, Hasidism (derived from hasidut, or “piety,” and often labeled Hasidic or Chasidic Judaism) arose in 18th-century eastern Europe as a spiritual revival movement under the founding of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), known to followers as the Ba’al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) or simply the Besht. Following his death, the Ba’al Shem Tov’s teachings, which follow Lurianic Kabbalah in stressing the joyful affirmation of the mitzvahs and the capacity to engage even the most mundane aspects of everyday living as an expression of worship, became systematized in “courts” or “dynasties” headed by individual rebbes (a rabbi/religious leader of a Hasidic sect). Although not uniform in practice, Hasidism maintains conventional gender roles, believing that traditional Jewish law, which is timeless and not affected by change within secular society, determines religious, cultural, and legal constraints on women and men. Theologically, Kabbalah enhances this belief by understanding that a spiritually fulfilling life results from a balance between the masculine and feminine qualities of God, qualities that find worldly expression in the harmony found in heterosexual marriage. A gender-based division of labor dictates the daily experience of the Hasidic family—positioned as different yet complementary, husbands and fathers, echoing the broader role of the rebbe within Hasidic communities, serve as the head of the household and supervisor in all religious matters; wives and mothers, conversely, are expected to maintain the house while ensuring that children adhere to prescribed religious tenets. Modesty laws dictate daily appearance, and strict rules of interaction limit women’s access to education and positions of community influence. While set apart, women nevertheless play a vital role within the maintenance of Hasidic communities and, within certain movements, emerge as a force for empowering the voice of women. Within a broad global diaspora, including concentrated populations in the United States (particularly Brooklyn), contemporary Hasidism, while often appearing homogenous within the public imaginary, consists of a range of expressions that adapt the teachings of the Besht to social, political, and economic contingencies. From Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim (meaning “pious ones”) to the Satmar and Breslov sects, Hasidic Judaism is ultimately marked by its insularity, a reality achieved by the active prevention of broad-scale assimilation through the maintenance of specific codes of modesty and adherence to distinctive gender norms both within the family and in the broader Hasidic community. Believing that the secular values of a host culture disrupt the sacred condition of living out one’s faith, such close-knit communities, which are marked publicly through specific codes of dress, public expressions of prayer/faith, and (often) the use of Yiddish, are designed to create uncontaminated spaces and uncorrupted conditions to make everyday life an expression of devotion. Within this structure, education becomes tantamount, not only in reifying the means to secure religious space through codes of modest dress or adherence to speaking in Yiddish but also particularly for Hasidic boys, who are expected to carry on the teachings of the Besht by acting as Hasidic scholars or rabbis. However, although evidence exists to support the practice of rebbetzins (female spiritual

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leaders), the place of women within Hasidic Judaism has been restricted; left out of secular and religious education through most of Hasidism’s history, women and girls were expected to only obtain basic literacy for daily and sacred life. Hasidic women find their identity and actions predetermined by a strict reading of the Torah, adherence to the vast corpus of rabbinic literature and interpretations, and acceptance of gendered norms and customs that emerge directly from Kabbalistic understandings, the Besht’s teachings, and the general structure of Hasidic courts, which expect reverence to the absolute authority of the male rebbe. The overlaps between gender, education, and community involvement are maintained through the family-centered nature of Hasidic life—boys and girls attend separate schools, with young men studying the Torah in a yeshiva (a Jewish institution that focuses on the study of traditional religious texts) often until marriage, at which point Hasidic men continue their Torah studies in a kollel, an institution commonly restricted only to married men and designed for advanced study. With secular education limited to high school or some vocational training, Hasidic women are ultimately expected to serve the needs of their devout husbands, children, and broader community. Prior to marriage, however, and often during early or late years of marriage in which children may not be present, women often work as family breadwinners, serving as teachers in Hasidic schools or secretaries in Hasidic-owned small business, often in an effort to support men’s capacity to maintain religious study or to help support their children’s yeshiva tuition. Within the household, Hasidic families and communities adhere to strict readings of God’s commandments when it comes to marriage and the perception of gender-delineated roles. Understood as a male-female contractual bond ordained by God (Deuteronomy 24:1), marriage is viewed as the means to complete one’s soul, a view solidified further in the traditional expectation that marriage fulfills the commandment to have children (Genesis 1:28). Women thus become the means by which men “complete” themselves and, while marital harmony (shalom bayit) produces an expectation for a man to honor and love his wife, Hasidic communities ultimately restrict women’s roles to that of future spouses or mothers. Marriages, as a consequence, are arranged through the aid of family, friends, and members of the community who act as shadchans, or marriage brokers. Within this structure, laws of family purity (Taharat HaMishipacha) become tantamount as both a prerequisite of marriage as well as the means to secure a functioning home reflective of God’s immanent will. Demonstrated generally by a prohibition on birth control, as Hasidic families are expected to strive for children, purity laws emerge more directly in relation to the menstrual niddah laws, which are connected more to marital life than a simple association with the female body. Part of Hasidic Judaism’s observation of the laws of tzniut (modesty), the practice of niddah, which prohibits physical contact between wives and husbands during menstruation, includes monthly visits to the mikvah (ritual immersion bath required after menstruation) and works to solidify the values of humility and modesty within and outside the household. Hasidic customs of modesty, which prohibit coprayer, coeducation, or mixed social events, emerge most prominently in dress and approved behavior. Derived



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from Haredi literature that connects tzniut directly to restrictions on acceptable levels of exposed skin, Hasidim are most commonly marked by their distinct codes of acceptable clothing designed, particularly for women, to deflect attention (sexual or otherwise). Thus, in responding to perceptions of cleanliness through piety, Hasidic Judaism expanded the purity of the family/household directly into the broader secular community, often secured through requirements for modest dress and restricting public encounters between men and women. While men are commonly adorned by beards, zizith fringes, a shtreimel (or fur hat), and a long black coat (a bekishe) often made of silk or polyester, modesty standards demand women remain as concealed as possible, which includes the biblical practice of covering their hair following marriage as both a sign of humility and modesty as well as a public indicator of one’s marital status. Derived from halachah (Jewish law) concerning tzniut, Hasidic women wear long, conservative skirts with stockings that cover the entirety of one’s legs, shirts with sleeves reaching past the elbow and necklines that remain covered, and, for married Hasidic women, the use of a sheitel (wig), a shpitzel (a partial wig), or a tichel (headscarf) while in public to prevent anyone but their husband from seeing them in a natural light. The observation of tzniut extends to a general (though not absolute) custom among married Hasidic women of shaving off all their hair and wearing a small scarf on top of the wig to prevent the wig itself from being viewed in an immodest way. While it is significant to understand the ways in which Hasidism maintains and manages traditional gender norms, we must also recognize the essential role women assume within Hasidic communities, particularly as these communities adapt to modern times. In fact, as a direct result of the gender segregation that emerges from the Besht’s teachings regarding rigorous adherence to traditions within an emotional observance of the mitzvot (commandments), a culture of strong women has emerged, particularly within the Lubavitch Hasidic movement. Also known as Chabad, the Lubavitch movement has gained greater visibility through deliberate recruitment directed at nonobservant Jews and concerted efforts to provide greater educational opportunities and religious functions for Lubavitch women. Within an eight-year period, from 1951 to 1959, the Lubavitch rebbe approved the founding of an all-girls school system (Beth Rivkah), the development of a Lubavitch women’s organization (N’shei uBnos Chabad), two community publications run by and for women (Di Yiddishe Heim and the N’shei Chabad newsletter), and annual conventions aimed at Lubavitch women activists spread throughout North America. Within this context, Hasidic women serve as vital agents of faith and family life. Through publications, public speaking engagements, and heightened roles in education, Hasidic women assume the task of helping transmit faith and belief from generation to generation, a role that has empowered women to act as agents of change to help Hasidic communities adapt to their evolving secular environments. At the same time, a series of memoirs and academic studies published over the past decade points to the growing empowerment that leads Hasidic women to leave their communities, often at the cost of full shunning. From memoirs like Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (2012) to studies such as Lynn Davidman’s Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic

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Jews (2014), Hasidic women (and men) struggle against the everyday angst and frustration produced by living within an insular community. Highlighting also the fears, dangers, and freedoms experienced by those who leave, these texts, when read against and within the frames of Hasidism generally and movements like the Lubavitch more specifically, capture the dynamic and adaptive realities directing religious positions and Jewish identity. Morgan Shipley See also: Christianity: Mystics; Judaism: Education; Kabbalah; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Mitzvah; Sex and Gender; Women and Work; Islam: Saints, Sufi; Sufism Further Reading Davidman, Lynn. Becoming Un-Orthodox: Stories of Ex-Hasidic Jews. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Elior, Rachel. The Mystical Origins of Hasidism. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006. Fader, Ayala. Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Harris, Lis. Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family. New York: Touchstone, 1985. Morris, Bonnie. “Agents or Victims of Religious Ideology?” In New World Hasidim: Ethnographic Studies of Hasidic Jews in America, edited by Janet Belcove-Shalin, 161–80. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Zakutinsky, Rivka, and Yaffa Leba Gottlieb. Around Sarah’s Table: Ten Hasidic Women Share Their Stories of Life, Faith, and Tradition. New York: Free Press, 2011.

HEBREW BIBLE The Hebrew Bible contains numerous representations of women and their religious practices as well as feminine images of the Divine. Some women are praised; others are viewed as threats. Women have an active religious life in the Hebrew Bible. Metaphors for the relationship between God and Israel rely on women. The religious landscape of the Hebrew Bible includes Goddesses, and the God of the Hebrew Bible has feminine characteristics. In the Hebrew Bible, women’s roles are often related to the family. Women are mothers and wives, daughters and brides. Some women are notably unmarried and without living fathers, such as the daughters of Zelophehad who gain an inheritance (Numbers 27:7). Other women are without living husbands; widows are mentioned throughout the Hebrew Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, women’s primary social role is mother. For example, in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the matriarchs (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah) are praised in their role as mothers. They birthed and nurtured their children. Mothers provided food and clothing for their family and initially educated their children. Mothers looked out for their children’s best interests. While motherhood is praised, wives who were barren carry a stigma in the Hebrew Bible. Sarah, Rebecca, and Rachel all overcame barrenness thanks to God opening their wombs.



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Women are also primarily wives of men in the Hebrew Bible. As wives, they were expected to show loving obedience and loyalty to their husband and his household. Husbands and wives were partners in creating and strengthening their families. The Song of Songs, a collection of love poetry in the Hebrew Bible, captures the mutual love and desire between a bride and a groom. The wisdom poem in Proverbs 31:10–31 portrays the ideal wife as a woman of valor who is trustworthy, does her husband good, and manages the household, allowing her husband to succeed in life. This image of the wife is one of an active, economic partner in the marriage. The Hebrew Bible treats the foreign woman ambiguously. On the one hand, the foreign wife is viewed as a threat to the religious sensibilities (resulting in idolatry and worship of foreign deities), familial loyalties, and national loyalties. Three examples will suffice. First, Numbers 25 reports Israelite men led into idolatry after they have sex with the women of Moab. Second, Queen Jezebel, the foreign wife of King Ahab, was blamed for Israel supporting the worship of Baal (1 Kings 16:31–33; 18:4, 19; 19:1–2). Third, Nehemiah 13 reports an episode in which the Persian-period men of the Jerusalem community divorced their foreign wives because of their threat. On the other hand, in the book of Ruth, the foreigner Ruth is commended for her adoption of Israel’s God as her God. Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi and Israel’s God results in her marriage and her place as a mother in the line of King David. The Hebrew Bible is often silent about specific religious practices for women. Nonetheless, the mention of women during the public religious activities of the people of Israel suggests that women were presumed to be included in public activities unless explicitly excluded. Women sang public laments. Two specific women-focused rituals are mentioned in the book of Judges. First, Judges 11:39– 40 reports an annual custom that Israelite women offered a four-day lament in remembrance of Jephthah’s daughter. Second, Judges 21:19–21 narrates a harvest festival at Shiloh during which young women would dance in the vineyards. Unfortunately, the narratives offer little for understanding the ritual activities of the women. The Hebrew Bible narrates women visiting sanctuaries and performing ritual acts while there. For example, in 1 Samuel 1, Hannah visited the sanctuary at Shiloh with her husband, his other wife, and his sons and daughters. The family shared a ritual meal from the sacrificed portions. Hannah offered entreaty to the Lord, requesting a child, and vowed her child would be a Nazirite. Afterward, she had a son named Samuel. The next year, Hannah did not join her husband to visit Shiloh’s sanctuary. Instead, she went up to Shiloh with her son after weaning him, with her own offerings, including Samuel, whom she loaned back to the Lord for as long as he lived. Hannah provides an example of women making vows at sanctuaries in the Hebrew Bible. Women’s vows to the Lord occurred frequently enough that Numbers 30 allowed men to regulate women’s vow making. For a daughter, her father could negate her vow upon hearing it. For a wife, her husband could nullify the vow when he heard about it.

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Women were prophets in the Hebrew Bible. In the exodus-wilderness narrative, Miriam was a prophet and one of the leaders of the Israelites leaving Egypt. Miriam also led the women in dance and song, praising the Lord for victory over Egypt (Exodus 15:20–21). Later, but before the monarchy, Deborah was a prophet and a judge whom Israelites visited for judgment (Judges 4:5). Toward the end of the kingdom of Judah, Huldah prophesied disaster for Judah, and her prophetic status served to legitimate the scroll discovered during the temple’s remodel under King Josiah (2 Kings 22). Finally, after the return from exile, Noadiah was a prophet (Nehemiah 6:14). Women’s religious activities in the Hebrew Bible are sometimes connected to practices the Hebrew Bible’s writers criticized. First, women were mediums (see 1 Samuel 28:3–25), but Leviticus 19–20 prohibits mediums. Second, women were involved in the ancestral rites of the dead, possessing the related household statues (Genesis 31:19; 1 Samuel 19:13). Third, women participated in non-Yahwistic worship. For example, Queen Jezebel supported the worship of Baal (1 Kings 16:31–33; 18:4; 19; 19:1–2). In another example, women worshipped the Queen of Heaven by offering bread cakes and libations to her (Jeremiah 44). Fourth, women worked in the temple in Jerusalem and at other sanctuaries doing things that King Josiah’s reforms sought to cease (2 Kings 23). Women spun cloth for Goddess Asherah. Women were also among the “sacred prostitutes” at sanctuaries. The book of Leviticus singles out two female-specific issues of ritual impurity that, in theory, affected women’s participation in religion in the Hebrew Bible. First, women’s menstruation rendered them impure for seven days, after which they offered two turtle doves to the priest for an atonement sacrifice for their unclean discharge (Leviticus 15:19–30). The second case of ritual impurity regarded childbirth. The length of a woman’s impurity and the period of her purification depended on if her child was a boy or a girl. A woman who birthed a son was impure for seven days and then had a 33-day purification length; for a daughter, this was doubled. At the end of her purification, the woman brought the required animals to the priest for sacrifices to render her ritually clean (Leviticus 12). When the prophets of the Hebrew Bible sought to describe the covenant relationship between Yahweh and Israel, especially when accusing Israel of turning away from their God and worshiping other deities, they often used the metaphor of marriage (Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel). Yahweh was the loyal husband, while apostate Israel was an adulteress or a prostitute. The metaphor is problematic to modern readers given the violence occurring in the relationship (see Weems 1995). Yet the metaphor also suggests that unlike a human husband who may divorce his wife, Yahweh and Israel will reconcile. The metaphor allowed the prophets to explain the demand of loving obedience in Yahweh and Israel’s relationship (Frymer-Kensky 1992, 144–47). In the Hebrew Bible, some people in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah worshiped female divinities. First, Goddess Asherah was part of worship in ancient Israel and Judah. She was associated with the forces of vegetation and nourishment and was represented by a stylized tree (called an asherah). While the writers of the Hebrew Bible objected to her worship in preference to Yahweh alone, archaeological



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evidence suggests Asherah was Yahweh’s consort. Second, the Queen of the Heavens was another deity worshipped in Judah during the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. She was associated with fertility and war and had astral characteristics. As the writers of the Hebrew Bible desired to present the God of Israel as the one and unique God, Yahweh acquired some of the attributes traditionally associated with Goddesses in the ancient Near East (Frymer-Kensky 1992, 5). First, the God of the Hebrew Bible took over a traditional Goddess role in regard to childbirth, allowing Yahweh to open and close women’s wombs. Second, in the Hebrew Bible, God is presented as a mother figure who births, cares for, and provides for Israel as her children. Last, in Proverbs 1–9, divine wisdom is personified in the imagery of Woman-Wisdom. This personified wisdom is viewed as part of Yahweh’s creation and therefore not a threat to monotheism (Frymer-Kensky 1992, 179–81). John W. Fadden See also: Christianity: Sophia; Judaism: Ancient Judaism; Goddesses; Marriage and Divorce; Sex and Gender Further Reading Brenner, Athalya. The Israelite Woman: Social Role and Literary Type in Biblical Narrative. Sheffield, UK: Journal for the Study of the Old Testament (JSOT) Press, 1985. Bronner, Leila Leah. Stories of Biblical Motherhood: Maternal Power in the Hebrew Bible. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2004. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. New York: Free Press, 1992. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of Their Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 2002. Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978. Trible, Phyllis. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Weems, Renita J. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995.

HOLOCAUST Religion played a basic role in Jewish women’s and men’s experience of the Holocaust, because all members of the Jewish faith were targeted by the Nazis for persecution and then extinction. However, within this global victimhood, women faced specific gender-based advantages and disadvantages. A clear advantage was related to the fact that male Jewish babies were ritually circumcised on the eighth day after birth and thus easily identifiable as Jews. Women were more easily able to pass as non-Jews, to hide, and even to carry out heroic acts of resistance. Among the disadvantages for women, especially devastating for observant women, was vulnerability to various forms of sexual violence and humiliation. Despite the fact that women faced a unique set of challenges and sometimes benefits as women during the Holocaust, for decades the gendered aspect of their experiences was ignored. Women’s studies and Holocaust studies both began in

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the 1960s, but it took until the 1980s to initiate bringing these two areas of study together to better understand women’s experiences as women and to reclaim the lost voices of female victims. Since then, feminist Holocaust scholars have been shedding light on life-and-death dilemmas faced by women during the Holocaust, painting vivid portraits of their struggles to survive, vulnerability, sexual humiliation, hopes and fears, faith, friendships, and resilience. Women’s memoirs were published soon after the Holocaust, but the analytic history books and Holocaust exhibitions that followed were written without considering women’s experiences as women. The theme and trajectory were the destruction of European Jewry as a whole, written mainly by male historians and portrayed in male-dominated institutions from the earliest days. The representations did not account for the fact that men’s and women’s experiences were not the same. This began to change in 1983, when the first public event to address women, gender, and the Holocaust was held at Stern College in New York City. Entitled Women Surviving Holocaust, the meeting was organized by Esther Katz and Joan Ringelheim. Nevertheless, most Holocaust scholars in the United States and Israel continued to keep gender, including sexual abuse, out of the Holocaust discourse. However, in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, feminist Holocaust scholars such as Ringelheim, Myrna Goldenberg, and others began to offer evidence that women suffered differently (not more or less) than men. The anthology Different Voices: Women and the Holocaust, edited by Carol Rittner and John K. Roth and published in 1992, was the first book on the subject. They raised the questions: Where were women during the Holocaust? How do women’s experiences compare to men’s? In 1995, at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Dalia Ofer, a professor of contemporary Jewry and Holocaust studies there, and Lenore Weitzman, an American sociology professor, organized a seminar on women and the Holocaust. The seminar papers were published in 1998 as a book, Women in the Holocaust, edited by Ofer and Weitzman. The editors began their introduction on the defensive: “Why women? Should a book on the Holocaust—which targeted all Jews for annihilation irrespective of their sex or age or any other social characteristic—focus on women?” Other scholars also published books on women and the Holocaust in 1998–1999 (some are included in Further Reading, below). While Holocaust memoirs by women, some available soon after World War II, had continued to proliferate, these were the first analytical books about women’s experiences. Others soon followed. The first plenary session about women at a major Holocaust conference took place at the Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust in 1999, and since then there have been workshops, plenaries, and panels about women and the Holocaust at conferences in the United States, Israel, Great Britain, and a number of European countries. The subject is now considered legitimate among most scholars, although it is still not presented sufficiently in most permanent museum exhibitions. One horrific women’s experience in the context of the Final Solution was that upon arrival at an extermination camp such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, mothers, not



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fathers, were generally sent to be gassed with their children. Another factor that distinguished women’s suffering from men’s relates to biological differences. Women’s specific biological considerations included menstruation (and its cessation), weaker body strength for slave labor, pregnancy, forced sterilization, and abortion. All these issues, plus more vulnerability to sexual abuse, were unique to women. On the positive side, there are records and artifacts demonstrating that women more often than men gave each other comforting gifts under almost impossible circumstances. And women had the homemaking skills imposed by the patriarchal society they lived in: they knew better how to share and prepare food and how to care for weaker women and children. One extraordinary concentration camp phenomenon was discussing recipes and creating clandestine tiny cookbooks— women’s way of remembering the lives they had before. Various memoirs attest that women, like men, tried their best to observe Jewish holidays in concentration camps. In the collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, there is even a small prayer book, handwritten from memory, using the feminine form for Hebrew verbs. However, even as these women’s specific experiences are finally being acknowledged, the issue of rape and sexual abuse has remained the last frontier in the Holocaust narrative. This is a paradox, because sexual violence began to be mentioned in some early memoirs, documentary films, literature, and reports right after the Holocaust; then it all but disappeared. By the beginning of the 21st century, some academic papers began to be presented on sexual violence. This led to the publication of Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust (Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds., 2010), the first book dedicated to addressing the issue. Since then, there have been sessions and plenaries at various international Holocaust studies and Jewish studies conferences, most organized by Remember the Women Institute. Sexual violence during the Holocaust included rape by Germans and Nazi collaborators and even by other Jews and so-called righteous gentiles. The sites included ghettos, hiding places, concentration camps, partisan compounds, and killing fields. Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners in concentration camps sometimes took advantage of women by compelling them to provide sex for food or other commodities needed for survival. And in camp bordellos or private dwellings of Nazi officers, women were forced into sexual slavery. Even the entry process into camps and having to stand naked for Appells (roll calls) were sexually violating. This was especially traumatic for religious women, for whom public nudity was forbidden and shocking. Despite the fact that all these incidences took place, rape and sexual violence were not considered as crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg and other post-Holocaust trials. Most evidence of sexual violence is found in survivors’ testimonies rather than in official records. By its very nature, throughout history, sexual violation has not been accompanied by official documentation. During wartime, when laws governing civil societies fall to the wayside, such documentation is especially rare. However, there is a solid core of testimonies and memoirs by victims and witnesses that serves as evidence, documentation, and proof. Although the Nazis kept meticulous

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records, including for their official brothels, there are virtually no official Nazi records of rape and sexual abuse of Jewish women. The lack of documents and the fact that nothing prevented a Nazi from murdering his victim after a rape have made it too easy for some Holocaust historians to discount and discredit allegations of rape and other forms of sexual violence against Jewish women. To compound this, even when survivors disclose sexual violation in their memoirs, such allusions are often covert and offered without detail, echoing their modesty or shame. Nazi laws against Rassenschande (sexual relations between “Aryans” and “non-Aryans”) have prompted some historians to conclude that Jewish women were not raped. This faulty reasoning does not account for the persistence of rape in countries that had no laws against it (e.g., Ukrainian guards outside of Germany). And Nazi guards and officers could rape with impunity; if accused of Rassenschande, they could simply deny it and murder the victim. The Rassenschande law itself is gray, as it is basically about consensual sex. Women’s experiences have been introduced into the Holocaust narrative in a number of ways, in addition to memoirs, scholarly books, and conferences. While most Holocaust museums have not yet adequately addressed this in permanent exhibits, a number of temporary exhibitions have done so. For example, the Florida Holocaust Museum and the Vancouver Holocaust Center have both presented exhibits on Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp. Using the arts to integrate women’s stories into Holocaust history is another way to raise awareness. Art exhibitions, theater presentations, film, literature, and music all contribute to the inclusion of women’s history. A further way to understand the vast complexity of women’s experiences in general is to individualize them with specific women’s stories. For example, a number of male musicians who perished at Terezin are now remembered in concerts by world-class musicians, but female musician Ilse Weber is less well known. Born in Ostrava in 1907, she wrote poetry and children’s books and produced programs for the radio in Prague. She, too, composed music, often accompanying herself on the guitar, singing her poems to original melodies. Hannah Szenes is famous as one of the parachutists from British Mandate Palestine, but Haviva Reick’s story is almost forgotten. She was part of the same parachutist program, entered Slovakia to help save downed Allied airmen and local Jewish community members, and was murdered there by the Nazis. New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia is famous, but his less-famous sister, Gemma LaGuardia Gluck, survived Ravensbrück and wrote an important memoir. These are but a few of many relatively unknown women’s stories worthy of research and insertion into the mainstream history of the Holocaust. Rochelle G. Saidel See also: Judaism: Art; Education; Feminism and Women’s Movements; Israel; Judaism in Europe; Peacemaking; Performance; Sex and Gender Further Reading Baumel-Schwartz, Judith Tydor. Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1998.



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Gluck, Gemma LaGuardia, and Rochelle G. Saidel, eds. Fiorello’s Sister: Gemma LaGuardia Gluck’s Story. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Gurewitsch, Brana, ed. Mothers, Sisters, Resisters: Oral Histories of Women Who Survived the Holocaust. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998. Kaplan Marion. Between Dignity and Despair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Ofer, Tehila, and Zeev Ofer. Haviva Reick: A Kibbutz Pioneer’s Mission and Fall behind Nazi Lines. n.p.: Fawns, 2014. Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth, eds. Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide. Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2012. Saidel, Rochelle. The Jewish Women of Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Saidel, Rochelle, and Karen Shulman, eds. Women, Theatre, and the Holocaust: A Resource Handbook. http://www.rememberwomen.org/Projects/women-theatre-holocaust.html. “Spots of Light.” Yad Vashem. http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/spots_of_light​ /dita_kurschner.asp. Weber, Ilse, and Michal Schwartz. Dancing on a Powderkeg. New York: Bunim and Bannigan, 2017.

ISRAEL Although Israel is viewed as egalitarian with prominent women participating in high-level political positions and in the military, women have struggled to gain equality with men in most realms of society. In Israel, about 33 percent of people consider themselves traditional Jews “who incorporate that which they consider religious or holy into the regular pattern of their otherwise modern (secular) lives,” fewer than 20 percent consider themselves religious (either Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox), and the remainder are secular (Yadgar 2006, 355–56). Despite the fact that Israel is a democracy with freedom of religion, issues of personal status are controlled by the religious authorities, including marriage and divorce. Religious control of family law is a remnant of the millet system under the Ottoman Empire, which allowed religious denominations control in specific areas of law. In Israel, it is the Orthodox religious interpretation of Jewish law that predominates. Furthermore, Israel defines itself as a Jewish and democratic state, and although there is no official state religion, the separation between state and religion is blurred. Consequently, since laws pertaining to marriage and divorce enforce an inequality between women and men and are based on a patriarchal power structure, this disparity spills over into other areas of daily life. Giving formal status to religion “is a position that clearly prefers the preservation of the patriarchal culture at the expense of violation of individual rights and liberal values in general, and violation of women and of gender equality in particular” (Halperin-Kaddari 2000, 344). Despite generally tolerant views toward women, a woman’s fertility and her functions as wife and mother remain critical in modern Israeli society, as they are closely associated with religion, nationality, and public policy. Among followers of Haredi Judaism, an ultrareligious group that makes up only 10 percent of the population, the average family has up to seven children (Toren 2003, 64). Despite their growing participation in the public sector and significant accomplishments outside

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the home, women’s identities are significantly intertwined with being wives and mothers. Specific Israeli family dynamics range from the extremely traditional to very liberal customs and practices. Israel’s emphasis on the family, fertility, and motherhood is evident in the ample resources allocated to incentivize growing families. The Israeli government pays for costly infertility treatments for women struggling to conceive and is a global leader in infertility research. Israel implements 12 weeks of paid maternity leave, child support, and a prohibition on firing pregnant women, along with a network of nurseries and child care facilities. All these initiatives and incentives ease the financial burden on growing families (Toren 2003, 66–67). In recent times, Israeli women have pushed for new positions and participation in religious leadership. Prior to the 1980s, women did not serve on municipal religious councils, but in 1986, a woman from the town of Yeruham, Leah Shakdiel, was elected to serve on the council. All elected officials for the municipal councils require approval from the minister of religion, who in this case declined having a woman on the council. The case made its way to Israel’s Supreme Court, which ordered that Shakdiel be permitted to sit on the religious council. This set a precedent for women’s inclusion as representatives on the religious municipal councils across Israel. The court also decided that women could serve on electoral bodies tasked with selecting chief rabbis for both municipal and national roles (Sered 1997, 5–8). Where women have made fewer inroads in Israel is in gaining acceptance to pray at the Western Wall, the remnant of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. In 1988, a group of mostly American women went to the Wall with talilitot (prayer shawls) and kippot (skullcaps), while carrying the Torah scroll and eventually reading from the Torah, a traditional act for men and not women. The issue made it to the Supreme Court in 1989, which ruled that the status quo should continue and sent the issue back to the government to decide. By 2013, a Jerusalem District Court judge ruled that women could pray at the Wall “according to their custom” (Reiter 2016, 79). By 2016, a decision had been reached to open up a previously closed area of the Wall to women so that they could pray there as they please. This decision is extremely controversial especially within the ultra-Orthodox community (Reiter 2016, 91–92). Other changes in the religious realm include women’s study of the first five books of the Bible and expanding on Torah scholarship, religious activities that were previously exclusive to men. Furthermore, religious women who had been exempt from serving in the Israel Defense Forces are participating in a special program studying Torah while in the military. As such, women are accepting new roles in Israel’s spiritual and public realms. When Israel was created in 1948, it adopted a status quo arrangement to appease the religious who did not want a secular constitution. The status quo refers to a political arrangement that although freedom of religion exists in Israel, this concept would not be enshrined in a constitution, leaving disputes between secular and religious communities to be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis (Jacoby 2005). As such, religion would continue to have a role in the state, particularly in issues of personal status. Due to the nature of family law based on religious precepts predicated on different statuses for men and women, Orthodox Judaism dictates



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elements of all Israelis’ lives, even those who are secular. In addition, Israel has ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women but has not incorporated some key provisions into its domestic law that would contradict elements of family law. Orthodox Jewish law forbids women from being rabbis, and only men serve as judges in rabbinical courts, although female lawyers or rabbinical advocates may be present. Rabbinical courts, however, are losing their control on family law due to an increase in nontraditional family patterns, even though the majority of young couples still participate in religious marriage. Some couples marry abroad as a legal decision promulgated in 1963 requires Israel to register those couples as married with the Ministry of Interior. There has been a push toward civil marriage in Israel, although couples married in unofficial civil ceremonies in Israel are not recognized or registered as officially married. Although some of these couples marry civilly to protest religious control of marriage, the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 that the rabbinical courts control divorce but should require a shorter divorce process than a traditional religious one. In many cases, the religious courts have ignored this ruling (Triger 2012, 6–7). Although traditional family values remain strong, the nature of Israel’s democracy, stressing gender equality and a strong work ideology, has exacerbated tension with the traditional family structure. The Israeli government recognizes this pressure and supports working women with special tax exemptions, child allowances, and other benefits. Despite these incentives, Israel still lags behind the United States, Europe, and Scandinavia with regard to women’s participation in the labor force. It is possible that traditional values and religious beliefs constrain the number of women who work outside the home (Beitler and Martinez 2010, 18). Many feminist movements in Israel involved in peace activism or opposition to Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians hold social activism as important in highlighting the role of gender in social change. In the past, Israeli women’s roles in the state’s security were intertwined with their fertility and ability to reproduce for the nation. Many peace activist groups exist, including Women in Black, Women and Mothers for Peace, and Women Engendering Peace. Women’s movements existed in prestate Israel, but by the 1970s, many women’s groups were emerging in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and across the country, creating battered women’s shelters and advocating for women’s rights at the microlevel, particularly in regard to violence. Despite their local-level work, these women’s groups fostered changes at the national level, including new national laws and changes in the role of women in the labor market (Woods 2016). There is also a growing group of Israeli artists who are engaged in exploring Orthodox religious feminism by questioning Jewish law that pertains to ritual purity laws, mikvah (ritual bath), head covering, and other legal perspectives stemming from the conservative Orthodox interpretation of the halacha. Through videos, painted canvases, and photography, these artists question what they perceive as the patriarchic and confining nature of many Jewish laws. Ruth Margolies Beitler

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See also: Judaism: Education; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Peacemaking; Rabbis; Sex and Gender; Women and Work Further Reading Beitler, Ruth Margolies, and Angelica R. Martinez. Women’s Roles in the Middle East and North Africa. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010. Halperin-Kaddari, Ruth. “Women, Religion and Multiculturalism in Israel.” Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 5 (Fall/Winter 2000): 339–66. Israel-Cohen, Yael. “Jewish Modern Orthodox Women, Active Resistance and Synagogue Ritual.” In Contemporary Jewry 32, no. 1 (2012): 3–25. Jacoby, Tami Amanda. Women in Zones of Conflict: Power and Resistance in Israel. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005. Reiter, Yitzhak. “Feminists in the Temple of Orthodoxy: The Struggle of the Woman of the Wall to Change the Status Quo.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 34 (Winter 2016): 79–107. Sered, Susan. “Women and Religious Change in Israel: Rebellion or Revolution.” Sociology of Religion 58 (Spring 1997): 1–24. Toren, Nina. “Tradition and Transition: Family Change in Israel.” Gender Issues (Spring 2003): 60–76. Triger, Zvi. “Religion in Israel: Civil Marriages and Cohabitation of Jews Enter the Rabbinical Courts.” Israel Studies Review 27 (Winter 2012): 1–17. Woods, Patricia J. “The Women’s Movement: Mobilization and the State.” In Contemporary Israel, edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn, 105–27. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Yadgar, Yaacov. “Gender, Religion, and Feminism: The Case of Jewish Israeli Traditionalists.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45, no. 3 (September 2006): 353–70.

JUDAISM IN EUROPE Jews followed the expansion of the Roman Empire when settling in Europe. This means that the Jewish communities in regions that were never part of the Roman Empire, like the Nordic countries, are much more recent than those in southern and Central Europe, Germany, France, or the United Kingdom, for instance. During the Middle Ages, three major areas of Jewish culture developed: Ashkenaz (present-day Germany and northern France); the Iberian Peninsula, referred to as Sepharad; and Provence. Whereas Ashkenazi Judaism was influenced by Christian society, Sephardic Judaism was likewise influenced by Islamic society. Provençal Judaism was formed in an area that was briefly under Islamic rule but was mainly Christian. Provençal Judaism was also marked by its position in between Ashkenaz and Sepharad, having extensive connections with both cultural centers. Lives of Jewish women were marked by the ideals that dominated these areas among Jews as well as non-Jews. Whereas the ideal life of a pious woman in Sepharad was mainly restricted to the home, Ashkenazi women had much greater access to public space and were active in family businesses. Other indications of a more favorable position for Ashkenazi women was that their substantial dowries formed an important part of the capital available in the family businesses, and the Ashkenazi medieval marriage contracts



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include many passages meant to ensure that the married woman was to be treated well. Wife beating was a ground for divorce, and polygyny was prohibited by an 11th-century rabbinic ruling, unlike in Sepharad, where polygyny was practiced. Religious learning and leadership was generally a completely male domain, although many Jewish women learned to read, at least in the vernaculars if not in Hebrew. We know of certain Jewish women in both Ashkenaz and Sepharad who were considered very learned by their contemporaries, but they were seen as exceptional. Another indication of the relatively higher position of Ashkenazi women compared to Sephardi is that they were permitted to practice commandments that were otherwise only obligatory for men, like donning tefillin (phylacteries worn in prayer). By the early modern period, the centers of Judaism had shifted. The expulsion or forced conversion of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula created Sephardi Jewish communities all around the Mediterranean and in other parts of the world. Deteriorating conditions in Ashkenaz, with persecutions and expulsions, prompted a gradual move eastward and the establishment of important Jewish settlements in Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. During the generations after the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula, certain Sephardi women of means and connections rose to prominent positions in the Sephardi communities in various Italian towns. Among Ashkenazi Jewry, the development of the printing press and publication of books in the European vernaculars, including Yiddish, meant an opportunity for education and religious learning for Jewish women, and much of the early modern Yiddish books were aimed at women, such as collections of tkhines, prayers for women. Just like in Christianity and Islam, Judaism was affected by movements that can be called mystical: Kabbalism from the Middle Ages and Hasidism in the early modern period. Unlike in Christianity and Islam, women were mainly excluded from these movements, and they were based on the transmission of esoteric knowledge from male teachers to male disciples. There were, however, women who played important roles in early modern messianic movements, such as the ones around David Reuveni and Shabbetai Zevi. The lives of Jewish women in Western Europe were profoundly affected by the modern movements that sprang out of the Enlightenment and its Jewish counterpart, the Haskalah, as well as the emancipation of the Jews, also a result of the Enlightenment. Haskalah and Reform Judaism originated in Germany and from there spread to Western and Central Europe. For Jewish women, it meant a greater exposure to non-Jewish culture and society and, eventually, increased educational opportunities and professional options. Women of the middle and upper classes lived by ideals similar to those of Christian bourgeois families: the women were educated in languages and culture and dedicated themselves to domestic life, philanthropy, and charities. Jewish women also organized themselves in trade unions, social welfare movements, and women’s suffrage groups. Liberal Judaism proposed greater inclusion of women in religious life as part of its goal to create a Judaism more in tune with modern ideals of equality and reason. Jewish women were agents of promoting these changes, for instance through organizations like Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women). The main educational

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institution of Reform Judaism was the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin, where in 1931 women made up about one-fifth of the students. Eastern Europe, with its strong Hasidic component, was affected by Enlightenment ideals in a different way. Here, they did not provoke a change in the Jewish religious traditions and gender roles; rather they manifested in the form of secularization and polarization between the religious and traditional Jews and the modern, secularized Jews. Women played important roles in both groups. In traditional Judaism, it can be seen in the many forms of female piety and in the women who, through their work, enabled their male relatives to dedicate themselves to religious activities. In secularized circles, Eastern European Jewish women got involved in socialist and Zionist organizations. The Holocaust was in part experienced differently by Jewish women and men. Men made up a majority of the European Jews who managed to emigrate from Germany before the outbreak of World War II. As part of the genocide, the Nazis instituted compulsory abortions in the ghettos. Women were especially targeted for their capacity to reproduce, so pregnant women and women with small children were often sent straight to the death camps. The women were more likely to experience rape and sexual abuse in the labor and death camps. After the liberation of the camps, the survivors usually spent years in displaced persons’ (DP) camps. Both women and men in the DP camps contributed in various ways to the rebuilding of European Jewry. Women were mainly involved in building cultural institutions, such as the establishment of historical commissions dedicated to documenting the prewar and wartime experiences of the survivors. Women also contributed to establishing kindergartens and schools in the camps and taught the children there. Orthodox women promoted facilities necessary for Orthodox life, such as kosher kitchens, and started Orthodox girls’ schools. Some women also held leading positions in Zionist organizations, and chapters of the Women’s International Zionist Organization were established in the DP camps as elsewhere in the world. In 2010, the Jewish population in Europe was estimated at 1.4 million (Pew Research Center 2015), with the largest national groups in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Russia, where they make up approximately 2 percent of the population. This figure corresponds to people who self-identify as Jews when asked as part of a national census or large-scale survey. A majority of Europe’s Jewish population adhere to more liberal forms of Judaism or are secular, although there are significant Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) communities mainly in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Due to high birthrates and a movement to ultra-Orthodoxy from other branches of Judaism, the percentage of Haredim of Jewry as a whole is growing. Whereas the lives of liberal or secular Jewish women generally resemble those of the non-Jewish majority populations, the Haredi communities are to a great extent separated by gender. The role of the women is to care for the family and often also to be the main breadwinner to enable male members of the family to dedicate themselves to religious studies. As a result of gendered education, Haredi women also have a broader education, are less focused on religious studies, and are therefore more attractive as employees. Lena Roos



Judaism in the United States

See also: Judaism: Education; Hasidism; Holocaust; Judaism in Europe; Kabbalah; Marriage and Divorce; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Sephardic and ­Mizrahi Judaisms; Sex and Gender Further Reading Feinstein, Margarete Myers. “Jewish Women Survivors in the Displaced Persons Camps of Occupied Germany: Transmitters of the Past, Caretakers of the Present, and Builders of the Future.” Shofar 24, no. 4 (2006): 67–89. Freeze, ChaeRan Y., Paula Hyman, and Antony Polonsky, eds. Jewish Women in Eastern Europe. Oxford: Littman, 2005. (The) Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010–2050. Pew Research Center, 2015. Green, Nancy L. “Gender and Jobs in the Jewish Community: Europe at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Jewish Social Studies 8, nos. 2/3 (2002): 39–60. Hyman, Paula E. “Gender and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identities.” Jewish Social Studies 8, nos. 2/3 (2002): 153–61. Lehmann, David, and Batia Siebzehner. “Power, Boundaries and Institutions: Marriage in Ultra-Orthodox Judaism.” European Journal of Sociology 50, no. 2 (2009): 273–308. Meyers, Carol, Tal Ilan, Renée Levine Melammed, ChaeRan Freeze, Pamela S. Nadell, Rachel Simon. “Woman.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 21. 2nd ed., edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 156–209. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007.

J U D A I S M I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S Judaism in the United States has been uniquely and profoundly shaped by gender issues. It should be emphasized that Judaism has historically not been about denominations and remains much more than its varied streams. American Judaism, pre to post denominational, has been shaped by unique conditions that range from the lack of religious establishment and freedom of conscience to the distance from the “the old country” at a time when the “nerve center” of at least Ashkenazic Jewish life was still in Europe as well as the lack of a formally ordained rabbinic leadership until the 1840s, which meant an unusual degree of lay control of Jewish life. All this made the United States an unusually suitable setting for both the expansion of women’s roles within Judaism and the feminization of Judaism, even as Judaism in the United States has remained largely male dominated for most of its history. Gender and Early Change

Gender would play a role in the loosening of some traditional observances, most notably the laws of family purity that entailed sexual abstention during menstruation followed by wives’ immersion in the mikvah (ritual bath), when in the early United States, men organized to build mikvahs that their wives then refused to use (Sarna 2004). Gender and changing expectations even shaped synagogue architecture toward greater equality and gender mixing with the expansion and opening of previously small, closed-off women’s balconies to accommodate greater synagogue attendance by Jewish women, who were increasingly imitating the service atten­ dance of their Christian sisters (Gurock 2009). The combination of this increased women’s attendance and concern for the impressions of the non-Jewish majority

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inspired some synagogues to go as far as relocating the women’s sections from the upstairs gallery to the main sanctuary floor. And well before the Reform movement formally introduced mixed seating and promoted (at least theoretical) gender equality, many synagogues were incorporating women’s voices into the mixed choirs that became an increasingly popular part of the service. Women also influenced the Americanization of the Saturday-morning service by promoting the introduction of sermons in the vernacular, based on their centrality to church services that were visited by some Jewish women in this more open society (Sarna 2004). Denominationalism and Woman Question

The arrival of the Reform movement in the United States in the early part of the 19th century led to the formal introduction of gender equality into American Judaism, albeit at first, far more in theory than in practice. The earliest changes included the introduction of mixed seating, the counting of women in the prayer quorum, and the discouragement of traditional observances such as kashrut and family purity, which had been women’s traditional domain. Jewish leadership, however, whether rabbinic or lay, remained almost entirely in the hands of men through the mid-20th century. Although occasionally women, such as Ray Frank and Paula Ackerman, functioned as de facto rabbis, and Martha Neumark began study in the 1920s at Hebrew Union College, the Reform rabbinical school, the first female Reform rabbi, Sally Priesand, would not be ordained until 1972. Modern Orthodox Judaism coalesced as a movement in response to the rise of Reform Judaism, and in the process began, under the leadership of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the “apologetic” approach to the limitations on women’s roles based on women’s superior (as opposed to earlier proclaimed inferior) spiritual state. In practice, organized American Orthodoxy would affirm the role of women in the maintenance of the Jewish home and in women’s auxiliaries, similar to those of their non-Orthodox counterparts. The emphasis on maintaining kosher homes would eventually inspire immigrant and American Orthodox Jewish women to play a serious role in the fight against kosher fraud and price gouging. With the arrival of the Bais Yaakov movement in the 1920s and the postwar founding of Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University, formal religious schooling for girls and women would become more widely accepted than ever in the old country. However, advanced religious study for Orthodox women only became common in the late 20th century, nudged along by the Jewish feminist movement, and most recently, the formal ordination of women as spiritual leaders has only been accepted on the left fringe of Orthodoxy. Similarly, while expanded opportunities for group prayer and more active ritual participation for women in Orthodox settings have emerged since the 1970s, they have remained controversial in most of the Orthodox world, whose leaders have sought to counter the expansion of women’s opportunities through an increased emphasis on modesty that includes banning women from singing in front of men (Diner and Benderly 2002). The Conservative movement, founded in the early 20th century as an Americanized yet still halachic (conforming to Jewish law) alternative to Orthodoxy, began with limited changes in women’s roles, primarily in the institution of mixed



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seating, and was more pioneering in the effort to address the crisis of the aguna (woman stuck in a marriage by her husband’s refusal to grant a Jewish divorce). Over the course of the 20th century, however, the Conservative movement, nudged along by the first religiously based Jewish feminist movement, Ezrat Nashim, began to increasingly emphasize egalitarianism that would eventually pave the way for the ordination of the first women Conservative rabbis in the 1980s (Sarna 2004). By contrast, the Reconstructionist movement, which began as a radical offshoot of the Conservative movement, was the least apologetic and most forward-moving denomination in terms of gender equality, which began with the pioneering bat mitzvah ceremony of Judith Kaplan (Eisenstein), the daughter of the movement’s founder, Mordecai Kaplan. In addition, the Reconstructionist movement made gender equality a cornerstone of its ritual life in theory and practice almost from the beginning, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, founded in 1968, admitted female rabbinical students from the beginning (Fishman 1993). Gender and Jewish Expression Beyond the Synagogue

From early on in American history, congregational and denominational life were far from the only expressions of Judaism available to women. The alterna­ tive of independent organizational participation, a result of the breakup of the traditional synagogue community, provided unprecedented opportunities for involvement and even leadership, primarily in youth education and “sisterhoods of personal service” that offered opportunities for change-making public service, usually to the underclasses. By the early decades of the 20th century, as social work became increasingly professionalized, sisterhoods would shift increasingly to synagogue-assisting functions that also included education and programming (Sarna 2004). These organizational roles were supplemented by women’s continued maintenance of “kitchen Judaism”—home-based rituals that were surprisingly untouched by assimilation and strengthened by the movements’ encouragement of creating home-based observances of major Jewish holidays (Joselit 2002). These emphases on home rituals, in turn, contributed to a feminization of Judaism (or at least Jewishness) that preceded modern feminism by several decades. Modern Jewish Feminism and Religious Change

Jewish women were part of the second wave of the feminist movement that began in the 1960s, and Jewish women’s leadership in the feminist movement inspired the push for increasing women’s leadership in the Jewish world. In addition, the anti-Semitism partially in the guise of anti-Israelism that emerged brought many feminist leaders back into the Jewish fold, with a new focus on creating change in Jewish practice and life. The organized founding of the modern Jewish feminist movement began in 1972 with the establishment of Ezrat Nashim, an organization of Jewish-educated women dedicated to investigating inequality and calling for change in organized Jewish life, primarily in the Conservative movement. The demands of Ezrat Nashim ranged from the equal inclusion of women in the minyan (prayer quorum) to ordaining women as Conservative rabbis (Fishman 1993).

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The most rapid change for women in American Judaism during the second half of the 20th century, however, took place not in the denominations but in the early postdenominational Jewish Renewal movement, whose spiritual and social justice orientation brought increased feminine—and feminist—sensibility into Judaism, creating theologies and practices that in some cases entered the mainstream of Judaism. The Jewish Renewal movement also pioneered the Chavurah movement with the creation of social/prayer groups that emphasized egalitarian, participatory, and sometimes creative services, some of which contributed to the idea of the feminine and feminist in Judaism as alternative and therefore out of the Jewish mainstream. But the Renewal movement, with its emphasis on spirituality, music, and mysticism as well as its openness to feminism, also provided a way in—or back—to Judaism for many secular Jewish feminists. In addition, the Renewal movement became an additional path to ordination for aspiring women rabbis. The changes that the Renewal movement helped pioneer went beyond participation and leadership to include the equal use of ritual garments, such as prayer shawls, that had traditionally been considered strictly masculine. Changes incorporated also included the creation of female life-cycle ceremonies, such as baby namings and healing ceremonies for traumas such as rape and miscarriage (Fishman 1993). The Renewal, along with the Reconstructionist, movement also went beyond the issue of equal status and participation to take on the issue of gender and liturgical language, raising the question of how much change was possible in the name of equalization. This stepped-up introduction of feminine and feminist perspectives also raised the question among Jewish feminists regarding what they should emphasize specific to women’s observances, such as Rosh Chodesh ceremonies, or equal participation in mixed-gender settings. That said, even more traditional Judaism found ways to be more inclusive of women’s perspectives and experiences, including the rediscovery of prayers and ceremonies that had previously been lost as well as the discovery that seeming innovations, such as group prayer led by and for women, were much older than popularly assumed. The discoveries were made possible by increased women’s participation and perspective in Jewish studies and Jewish education, both of which became acceptable forums for women’s learning and leadership before the rabbinate fully opened. This has been especially true in Orthodoxy, where Nechama Leibowitz served as a pioneering role model of a female scholar-teacher and made advanced Torah learning increasingly acceptable for women. None of these advances took place without some backlash, as feminism and women’s advancement were blamed for declining Jewish observance and the shrinking Jewish family, and some Orthodox rabbis pushed back against earlier halachically approved advances in women’s participation, with opposition that sometimes had very little to do with halachah (Hartman 2007). At present in Orthodoxy, some of the most far-reaching practices that include ordaining women as spiritual leaders and halachic decisors are confined to Orthodoxy’s left fringe. But Orthodoxy and even ultra-Orthodoxy (primarily outreach movements, such as Lubavitch) have grappled with feminism no less in giving increased attention to women and girls’ education and creating halachically approved programs and leadership opportunities. Yet many Orthodox movements



Kabbalah

have also successfully emphasized the centrality of women’s traditional roles to Jewish continuity to win over many secular (even feminist) Jewish women to become Ba’a lot Teshuva (returners in repentance) (Diner and Benderly 2002). Across the span of American Jewish history to the present, gender, feminism, and women’s issues have played a variety of roles in the development of a uniquely pluralistic and varied American Judaism. Although the perennial problem of assimilation and continuity remain, and gender is recognized as playing a role, in recent times, antifeminism and nostalgia for fixed gender roles in Judaism have become less acceptable. If anything, the push for greater inclusion of women in Judaism has inspired other movements toward greater inclusion, especially among LGBTQ Jews. The incorporation of the feminine and the feminist into mainstream Judaism has furthermore demonstrated the enduring vitality of American Judaism. Susan Roth Breitzer See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Bat Mitzvah; Education; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Festivals and Holy Days; Food; Hasidism; Mitzvah; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Rabbis; Rosh Hodesh; Sex and Gender; Synagogue Further Reading Diner, Hasia, and Beverly Lieff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. New York: Free Press, 1993. Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Hartman, Tova. Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007. Joselit, Jenna Weissman. The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

KABBALAH The Jewish mystical tradition signifies a broad range of movements, all bound together by a desire to transcend linear readings of sacred texts, such as the Torah, to come closer to God (what is known as devekut). Jewish mystical exegesis thus signals methods of interpreting the Torah and texts such as the Bahir, the Sefer Yetzirah, and the Zohar based on the belief that such texts contain secret paths to wisdom regarding the nature of creation and the manifestations of the Divine. Whereas traditional Jewish commentaries interpret the Torah as a work of sacred, historical, and legal narratives, Jewish mystics engage it as a system of symbols that ultimately reveal the very secrets of God and the laws of the universe. Within the long, diverse history of mystical expressions, Kabbalah, meaning “that which is received” or “receiving,” emerges in the 12th century as a distinct expression of esoteric teachings regarding Jewish mystical insight and practice. Intertwined in this teaching is belief in balancing components, a sacred marriage of masculine and

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feminine qualities that establish the basis for creation to move from spirit to material while also signaling our very own androgynous nature. Yet while Kabbalah stresses the import of feminine qualities and accentuates the concept of Shekinah, or the feminine presence of the Divine in our universe, it has also been restricted across gender lines, limited historically as a male-centered practice, but is finding a more welcoming context in our contemporary moment. As opposed to readings that stress the absolute singularity of a Creator God, Kabbalah begins with Ein Sof, a term designed to capture the boundless and infinite nature of a God that both transcends this world yet remains fully bound to the objects of creation. This form of the Divine presents a panentheistic vision in which the Divine is both beyond and before a universe that nevertheless remains completely tethered to an immanent divinity, what Kabbalists call Shekinah. Before arriving at this immanent reality, Ein Sof created the universe by withdrawing within itself to make room for a material reality that humans could inhabit (Isaac Luria identifies this process as tzimtzum; see Fine 2003). Exactly because Ein Sof exceeds even creation, its energy is translated into another form known as the sefirot (sefirah singular). Broken down into five codetermining pairs, the sefirot serve as messengers of divine qualities and are considered to be revelations of God’s will (ratzon). In developing the nature and meaning of the sefirot, Kabbalists unveil a vision of the sacred marriage, the constant fusion of female and male, good and evil, through which Ein Sof creates and goes on creating the universe. Representing the various stages of God’s inner life, the sefirot function as archetypes of the divine personality, both feminine and masculine, and make up what Kabbalists call the tree of life, which is often understood to reference Adam Kadmon, or the primordial Adam (e.g., the first human whose body encapsulates all that is male and female). Derived from a reading of Genesis 1:26–27, Kabbalists understand the pairings of sefirah as representing an androgynous divine body complete with arms, legs, and sexual organs; each sefirah corresponds to a specific element that makes the Divine accessible and humanity possible. The gender binary connected to the sefirot, which are also organized across three columns—right (good, positive, masculine), left (evil, negative, feminine), and central (balancing)—extend beyond traditional man-versus-woman dynamics. Rather, the feminine/masculine binary signals balancing qualities that reside within each of us. They not only represent the attributes of the Divine but also demonstrate a reciprocal polarity whose balance produces the conditions for divine awareness. The gender and sexual associations found within Kabbalah extend throughout the sefirot, with the ninth sefirah, Yesod (Foundation), representing the sacred phallus, the procreative life force of the cosmos, who receives, mixes, balances, and readies all the higher sefirot to be channeled into the material world of action and sentiency. This process culminates with Malkhut (Kingdom), which, within the specific frames of Kabbalah and its contemporary resurgence, is more commonly referred to as Shekinah (Presence) to capture both the presence of God in the created world and within the Jewish community. Often portrayed as a bride to a male lover who is a composite of the nine upper sefirot (represented by the sefirah Tiferet), Shekinah is commonly positioned as God’s feminine power, which is not



Kabbalah

only—as an emanation of Ein Sof—part of and inseparable from all things but also, as that which connects all life, signifies the essential and codetermining power of feminine energy by representing the means by which humans commune with God. Exactly because the sefirot and their corresponding qualities are divided along two competing pillars of masculinity and femininity, Kabbalists accept the notion that life itself reflects this balance, adapting the non-gender-specific attributes of giving (masculine) and receiving (feminine) to the place of men and women. In other words, Kabbalah views men and women as belonging to two essentially different spiritual conditions, a bridge that is overcome by building male-female relationships that emulate the spiritual system established between God the Creator and humans as creation. As a direct result of these beliefs—of the agency of men versus the receptivity of women—Kabbalah positions men as students of the faith and women as the stewards. Reserved traditionally to (often married) men above the age of 40, Kabbalah, as Gershom Scholem (1995, 37) notes, is “both historically and metaphysically . . . a masculine doctrine, made for men and by men.” Androcentric and patriarchic, it is nearly impossible to locate active female voices within Kabbalah prior to the 18th century. Given the emphasis within Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah regarding the positive and balancing feminine attributes of the Divine, the almost exclusively masculine character of Kabbalah results not from the social position of Jewish women or their exclusion from Talmudic learning but rather, as Scholem (1995, 37) stresses, from “an inherent tendency [in Kabbalah] to lay stress on the demonic nature of woman and the feminine element of the cosmos.” The most prominent example would be Lilith, who is simultaneously and contradictorily understood as either the first Eve or the demonic force that leads Adam and Eve away from God and thus works to break the balance between the Creator and creation. Within the framework of Jewish mysticism, Lilith refuses to be secondary to Adam and flees the garden, an understanding that led Kabbalists to reconsider Lilith not as Eve but as a partner for Samael and the primary feminine expression of the Left (evil) Emanation. While the connection between the feminine and the demonic worked to solidify the need to locate and practice the harmony originally introduced by God, such broad connections veil over both the necessity of the feminine within Godly creation as well as the existence of important women within the history and development of Kabbalah. For instance, as the home of Kabbalistic development, Safedian history includes reference to both Francesa Sarah, a 16th-century Jew living in Safed who is mentioned directly by one of Isaac Luria’s foremost disciples (see Hayyim Vital’s Book of Visions) as a righteous and wise figure who experienced maggid (angelic) possession to foretell the future, as well as an Italian immigrant, Fioretta of Modena, a 17th-century self-taught scholar who, after absorbing herself in the study of Jewish sacred texts—including the Zohar—taught her understanding to her grandson Rabbi Aaron Berechiah of Modena. A noted scholar and Kabbalist, Rabbi Aaron paid full tribute to the mentoring of Fioretta in the introductions to his two major texts, Seder Ashmoret HaBoker Mechavurat Me’eirei Shachar (1624) and Ma’avar Yabbok (1626). Born in Poland in 1815, Channah Rochel Werbemacher holds a similarly fascinating narrative within the backdrop of Jewish mysticism. Though not a Kabbalist

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in a traditional sense, the Maiden of Ludomir was raised by a follower of the Hasidic master Reb Mottel of Chernobyl and displayed, from a young age, an unquenchable thirst for and understanding of Jewish law and Kabbalistic perspectives. Werbemacher dedicated her life to fulfilling commandments traditionally obligatory only for men and spent her days learning, meditating, and praying. In fact, like a Hasidic master, Werbemacher conducted a tish on the afternoons of Shabbat where she expounded on exegetical accounts of the Torah, which led crowds to seek her counsel and blessings. Though Werbemacher passed away in 1892, her legacy remains not only within Kabbalistic and Hasidic circles but has been revived through Gershon Winkler’s (1991) novel based on her life, They Called Her Rebbe. While complicated by its emphasis on competing forces, and although exacerbated by both social practices that limited access to Kabbalistic teaching to men as well as myths (such as that of Lilith) that connect the feminine with the demonic, Kabbalah ultimately seeks to communicate the balance that makes creation possible and that allows humans to gain understanding of the Divine. Indeed, as Rabbi Isaac Luria foresaw, with time and gained wisdom, men and women would reorient from a state of being “back to back” to a configuration of facing “front to front.” Such a reorientation repositions the feminine not within an unequal state of dependence but rather toward a full recognition of gender equality that highlights the absolute independence of both individual sefirah and their male/female counterparts. Morgan Shipley See also: Christianity: Mystics; Islam: Sufism; Judaism: Goddesses; Hasidism; Lilith Further Reading Ariel, David. Kabbalah: The Mystic Quest in Judaism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006. Fine, Lawrence, ed. Essential Papers on Kabbalah. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Fine, Lawrence. Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Novick, Rabbi Leah. On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism’s Divine Feminine. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Scholem, Gershom. On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Vital, Hayyim Ben Joseph, and Isaac Judah Jehiel Safrin, eds. Book of Visions and Book of Secrets. Jewish Mystical Autobiographies. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1999. Weissler, Chava. “Woman as High Priest: A Kabbalistic Prayer in Yiddish for Lighting Sabbath Candles.” In Essential Papers on Kabbalah, edited by Lawrence Fine, 525–46. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Winkler, Gershon. They Called Her Rebbe. New York: Judaica, 1991. Wolfson, Elliott. Circle in the Square: Studies in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.



Lilith

LILITH The belief in Lilith—known to us today as the first woman in Genesis, Adam’s first wife, and Eve’s predecessor—has persisted throughout many cultures in one form or another for at least 5,000 years. Lilith exists in mythology through art, iconography, and oral and written traditions and has been regarded alternately as Goddess, demon, or protective deity. She was named Adam’s first wife in postbiblical Jewish literature, and in feminist writings since the 1970s, Lilith is referred to as the first feminist. The treatment of Lilith over the centuries in both literature and art has been similar to the treatment of Eve. Both have been demonized—Lilith for her independence and full sexuality and Eve for her natural curiosity and quest for knowledge. For example, the Zohar, the “Book of Enlightenment” from which late 13th-century Spanish-Jewish Kabbalistic teachings emanated, repeatedly links Lilith and Eve in their “sinfulness.” Who Was Lilith?

In the “Alphabet of Ben Sira,” a piece of rabbinic aggadah (folklore) written between the 9th and 10th century CE in Babylonia, when God decided to create a female companion for Adam, he created the first woman out of earth in the same way as he had created the first man. Although Lilith was made from the same bloody clay as Adam, he expected her to submit to him sexually and one imagines intellectually and in every other way as well. Lilith refuses to lie beneath Adam sexually or to obey him in other respects— and when he insists, she mutters God’s secret name, leaves Adam and the Garden of Eden, and flies off to the Reed Sea (known today as the Red Sea). After a short time, Adam complained to God that he was tired of being alone, and God sent three angels to bring Lilith back to the Garden of Eden, but she refused. When the angels then threatened to drown her,

Sculpture at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris depicts (left to right) Adam, Lilith as the serpent, and Eve, ca. 12th–14th century. A popular medieval legend identified Lilith as the snake who tempted Eve with the forbidden fruit in the biblical story of “The Fall.” (Jorisvo/Dreamstime.com)

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Eve Meets Lilith While the Garden of Eden is often understood to have been a paradise until Adam and Eve were expelled from it, feminists see things differently. The Genesis story includes two versions of creation: one in which the first woman is created from the same substance, at the same time, and in the same manner as the first man, and a second in which the woman is created after the man and from his rib. In Jewish literature, the woman from the first story is called Lilith, while the woman from the second is called Eve. In “The Coming of Lilith,” from which the excerpt below is taken, Judith Plaskow Goldenberg retells the story from a Jewish feminist perspective: [Eve] had not wandered long on the other side before she met the one she had come to find, for Lilith was waiting. At first sight of her, Eve remembered the tales of Adam [he had called Lilith, his first wife, a demon] and was frightened, but Lilith understood and greeted her kindly. “Who are you?” they asked each other, “What is your story?” And they sat and spoke together, of the past and then of the future. They talked not once, but many times, and for many hours. They taught each other many things, and told each other stories, and laughed together, and cried, over and over, till the bond of sisterhood grew between them. Source: Goldenberg, Judith Plaskow. “Epilogue: The Coming of Lilith.” In Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether, 341–44. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1998.

she swore that she had been sent by God and that although her function was to weaken babies, she would spare any child protected by an amulet or plaque with her name on it if they let her go. They did, but only after meting out drastic punishment. There are three versions of this punishment in the literature: 100 of her babies would die each night; she would be doomed to give birth to children who were demons; or God would make her barren. This part of the legend served to warn women of their fate if they did not obey the men—husbands, fathers, and priests—in their lives. Since Lilith would not return to the garden, and Adam still complained to God that he was lonely, God created Eve. We learn—in traditional recountings—that she is warned against the “evil” Lilith and regards Lilith as a rival competing for Adam’s affections. In a contemporary feminist midrash or reinterpretation of this legend by Judith Plaskow (2009), Lilith and Eve cooperate, become confidantes and friends, and eventually reenter the garden on their own terms. According to traditional tellings, when Lilith fled Eden, she went to consort with demons and engage in unbridled promiscuity, though a more modern reading might interpret her decision to flee Eden as a choice she made to live an independent life in which she could enjoy complete autonomy. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, in her landmark work Black Madonnas (1993), calls Adam’s treatment of Lilith “the first violence done to women” (166). Some read this as rape, making the Garden of Eden more prison than paradise. In this situation, it is understandable that Lilith



Lilith

left. In so doing, as Aviva Cantor wrote in Lilith magazine’s first issue (1976), Lilith chose loneliness over subservience. Literary and Artistic Development of the Lilith Archetype

Lilith’s name is etymologically related to the Sumerian word lil (wind), not to the Hebrew word laylah (night), as was long supposed; it is also translated as “windstorm” and “screech owl.” Among her many related names are Labartu, Lillake, Lilit, Lilitu, Lilithu, Mahalat, Ardat Lili, and Broxa. Most often in traditional (usually monotheistic) texts and in many cultural myths and legends, Lilith is painted as a child stealer or demon who harms children. One finds parallels to Lilith in the amulets used to protect against a child-stealing demon or witch present in Slavonic, Romanian, and Greek literature of the 15th to 19th centuries. While she is also accused of being a child killer, it was the lilu, not the lilitu, demon that preyed on children. According to scholar JoAnne Scurlock, though some confuse her with lilu, the lilu demons were actually male (personal communication 1998). We can trace Lilith’s development through both art and text, through mythological as well as Talmudic and Apocryphal sources. These include the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Huluppu Tree, a 2400 BCE text referring to a Sumerian storm demon, the famous terra-cotta relief of a figure usually identified as Lilith (now thought by many to represent Inanna-Ishtar) known as the Burley plaque (ca. 2000–1800 BCE), and in Babylonian incantations and legends dating back at least 4,000 years. The only actual biblical reference to Lilith or “the liliths” (male or female demons) is in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 34:14); whether or not it truly represents this mysterious figure is a matter of conjecture. Indeed, the same verse in both Christian and Jewish bibles alternately refers to a night creature, screech owl, and night hag. In some paintings of Adam and Eve eating an apple in Eden, Lilith is personified as the serpent. In other recountings, she is portrayed as a devil or witch; as recently as 1999, the Lilith Fair concert series, which raised $3 million to help women in abusive situations, was declared by conservative evangelist Jerry Falwell to be “witchcraft.” We also find Lilith in Aramaic incantation texts written on bowls from around 600–800 CE in Nippur, Babylonia, Arslan Tash (Syria), and Persia; in Talmudic references written around 400–500 CE and additional rabbinic literature, midrashim (retellings), and folklore from the 7th to 12th century CE; in 15th- and 16th-century European sculpture and woodcuts; in Kabbalistic sources beginning from the 12th through the 17th century CE; and in literature carrying her through to the present day. Feminist Perspectives

Lilith is clearly intended to represent patriarchal visions of the “evil” inherent in all women—while male symbols of the negative side of our humanity are often portrayed as natural or justified, even as upholding the social order. Ironically, Adam is given the power to name Eve and all other living things in the Garden of Eden.

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Yet, he is portrayed as an unwitting dupe in the act of eating the forbidden fruit, not as a coparticipant in bringing “sin” into the world. Similarly, despite the fact that men, not women, possess most of the power in patriarchal societies, myths have portrayed men as Lilith’s powerless victims, blaming her for their own sexual impulses. They can say Lilith overpowered or tricked them—not unlike the meme in popular culture of “the devil made me do it.” Lilith symbolizes both the best and the worst in women, both our desirable and socially unacceptable attributes. The myth of Lilith, while perhaps created by men, was doubtless kept alive by women as well. The myth provided a figure to point to when women experienced miscarriages, infertility, or stillbirths, even as they prayed to her for help and protection through these passages. It is highly likely that Lilith was invoked by women who chose to abort their fetus—because they had been raped or did not want children—for courage, as a means of absolving themselves to themselves, or to have someone to blame if their act was discovered. Fearing retribution from the husbands, fathers, clergy, or legal authorities who ruled their lives, women could turn to Lilith as comforter or coconspirator. While Lilith has righteous rage, some believe that she channels this on behalf of those who need her help, women who are invisible in society or who would otherwise have no voice. She is an aggressive seeker of truth—rarely a popular quality. Lilith still reigns as an exemplar of independent, life-loving, justice-seeking women who have often been depicted in art, amulets, history, and literature as sexual predators, demons, and whores. She is criticized for being both warrior and seductress, though neither of these are necessarily negatives. Indeed, in the latter case, advertising geared to selling women makeup and perfume is focused on using those qualities to enhance one’s ability to attract and seduce. Interestingly, while many today speak disparagingly of those using amulets as superstitious or primitive,” protective amulets warding off Lilith or comparable “evil” female spirits are still given to pregnant women, placed near the bed of women about to give birth, or hung in or near cribs of newborn babies across the globe. Amulets against the evil eye, often based on belief in the power of a woman’s gaze, are also popular worldwide and often seem closely related to protections against Lilith. Conclusion

Lilith is shown to have a thirst for justice and a primal eroticism, Eve a hunger for knowledge and growth—qualities that are in reality positive, not negative. Eve has been criticized for over 2,000 years for her disobedience, yet she is usually portrayed as passive, a prime example of women being put in no-win situations. Lilith is both demonized and desired for her wildness and free spirit; she embodies nature itself, making male control of her impossible. Quite apart from the patriarchal view of Lilith as detrimental force, many see in her one embodiment of the Goddess. Kohenet D’vorah J. Grenn



Marriage and Divorce

See also: Ancient Religions: Inanna; Christianity: “The Fall”; Hinduism: Durga and Kali; Islam: Hawwa; Judaism: Ancient Judaism; Art; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Goddesses; Hebrew Bible; Kabbalah; Marriage and Divorce; Midrash; Sex and Gender; Spirituality: Ecofeminism Further Reading Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion & Politics in Italy. Berkeley: iUniverse, 1993. Cantor-Zuckoff, Aviva. “The Lilith Question.” Lilith (Fall 1976). https://www.lilith.org​ /articles/the-lilith-question/. Gadon, Elinor. The Once and Future Goddess. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1989. Gaines, Janet Howe. “Lilith.” Bible History Daily, January 9, 2016. http://www​.biblical archaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/people-in-the-bible/lilith/. Koltuv, Barbara Black. The Book of Lilith. Lake Worth, FL: Nicolas-Hays, 1986. Long, Asphodel. “Lilith.” 1985. http://www.asphodel-long.com/html/lilith.html. Patai, Raphael. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith.” In Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton, 324–25. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2009.

MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE Family life is an extraordinarily important part of Judaism, and intricately interconnected with family is the critical cultural institution of marriage. Emphasizing the significance of marriage, the Talmud discusses the concept of soul mates, contending that 40 days before a male baby’s conception, an announcement is made from heaven dictating which woman he is going to marry. Despite the fact that many attempts are made to keep families together, like most religions, Judaism recognizes that divorce is sometimes inevitable. The history of Jewish marriage and divorce from biblical times is predicated on an inequality between men and women. Jewish marriage emphasizes producing children from the union and, as such, a woman maintains a central role in the Jewish family with her fertility and functions as wife and mother as particularly crucial in Jewish life. In terms of religious beliefs, scripture tells Jews to “be fruitful and multiply,” and in some sects of Judaism, particularly the ultra-Orthodox, this command is followed closely. Judaism allowed for polygyny (men taking multiple wives), and, in many cases, women had very little voice in whether or whom they married. It was usually a woman’s father who arranged the marriage. In the Ashkenazi tradition, polygyny was outlawed in the 11th century, primarily due to the influence of Christianity and its adherence to monogamy. Sephardic Jews and Jews from Muslim countries continued to take multiple spouses, presumably since the countries in which they lived permitted polygyny. In biblical times, men could acquire a spouse through money, a contract, or sexual intercourse. The ketubah, or marriage contract, specifies the husband’s obligation to his wife with regard to inheritance in case of death and his responsibilities in the event of divorce. Furthermore, until there is a signed ketubah, Jewish law

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forbids a man and woman from living together. The wording of the ketubah is very precise, presumably to protect the woman if the marriage dissolves or her husband dies (Sabar 2011, 104). This protective wording was added during the Hellenistic period by the Jewish sages to safeguard women from the whims of their husband, who could divorce without cause (Zeitlin 1933). Although after this modification women received some economic support following a divorce, men continued to divorce at will. There are two key parts to a Jewish marriage. Women are betrothed to men in the process of kiddushin when they accept either money or a marriage contract from a man. Nisuin refers to the actual marriage part of the ceremony, when a woman goes to live in the man’s home. Jewish couples marry under a canopy or huppah, symbolizing the building of a new family and home. In the first part of the ceremony, the bedeken (process of checking), the groom approaches the bride and confirms that she is the woman that he has selected to marry; he then lowers her veil. This tradition stems from the biblical story of Jacob, who believed that he was marrying Rachel; however, Rachel’s father, Laban, secretly replaced Rachel with her veiled sister, Leah. Jacob, who had already worked seven years to marry Rachel, was required to labor another seven years to actually marry Rachel. During the wedding ceremony, the woman circles the man seven times. This particular tradition has many explanations, including that by circling the man under the huppah, the woman creates an invisible wall around what will be their home together, thereby emphasizing their new status as a family. In more modern times, a conflict arose between the concept of civil and religious marriage. For example, in France, French law specified that couples should marry first in a civil ceremony followed by the religious one. In cases where couples married secretly in religious ceremonies conducted by the rabbinate, they were recognized as married by Jewish law but not according to French statutes. The French authorities worked with the Jewish clergy to find “acceptable halakhic methods of harmonizing religious and civil marriages” (Kaplan 2007, 61–62). Throughout history and across the globe, Judaism has found a way to work with civil authorities with regard to marriage laws. To divorce, a woman needs to obtain a get or bill of divorce from her husband, releasing her from the marriage and making her eligible to remarry. Other than gaining some economic security through the ketubah, women in biblical times had very few rights with regard to divorce, and it was the man who decided if he wanted a divorce. Although permitted, divorce was highly discouraged and supported by most rabbis only if the woman “committed a matrimonial offense” (Rayner 1998, 50). Rarely was the man considered at fault for a divorce, although, in some very specific cases, including impotence, abuse, and refusing conjugal relations, women could sue for divorce. Receiving a get is extremely important to a woman as it relates to her status and that of her children. If a woman is unable to obtain a get, she is considered an aguna, or abandoned woman, and is unable to remarry. In addition, if she does remarry without the get, any future children are considered mamzers, or “the offspring of an incestuous or adulterous union” (Rayner 1998, 55). In modern times, in some ultra-Orthodox communities, men



Midrash

continue to hold power over women in the issue of the get. With the advent of civil marriages, rabbis have put conditions on the marriage so that if a husband does not give the wife a get six months after a civil divorce, the kiddushin is voided. In most Conservative and Reform communities, a get is not required, even though many couples have a religious marriage ceremony. Ruth Margolies Beitler See also: Christianity: Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood; Islam: Marriage and Divorce; Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Ancient Judaism; Hasidim; Hebrew Bible; Judaism in the United States; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms; Sex and Gender Further Reading Haberman, Bonna Devora. “Divorcing Ba’al: The Sex of Ownership in Jewish Marriage.” In The Passionate Torah, edited by Danya Ruttenberg, 36–57. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Kaplan, Zvi Jonathan. “The Thorny Area of Marriage: Rabbinic Efforts to Harmonize Jewish and French Law in Nineteenth-Century France.” Jewish Social Studies 13 (Spring/ Summer 2007): 59–72. Rayner, John. Jewish Religious Law: A Progressive Perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998. Sabar, Shalom. “Words, Images, and Marriage: The Protection of the Bride and Bridegroom in Jewish Marriage Contracts.” In Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History: Authority, Diaspora, Tradition, edited by Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosensky, and Marina Rustow, 102–32. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Zeitlin, Solomon. “A Study in the Institution of Marriage.” Jewish Quarterly Review 55 (July 1933): 1–7.

MIDRASH In the 1970s, secular feminism was paralleled by a new wave of religious feminists. Jewish women were engaged in Jewish scholarship and beginning to be ordained as rabbis and serve as leaders. They read the Bible with new eyes and began giving names and stories to marginal women characters. They wove together the classical Jewish inheritance of interpretation reaching back to the first millennium with their own imaginations and experiences. The Jewish biblical cannon was completed in 90 CE. A rich oral tradition of interpretation (Oral Torah) developed alongside the written text (Written Torah). (Torah may refer to the first five books of the Bible or may more generally mean “teaching.”) Both the Written and Oral Torahs were understood to come from God. Eventually the Oral Torah was written down beginning around 200 CE, and commentary and interpretation continued to flourish. The classical text that contained this interpretation of law and narrative was called the Talmud and was completed in 500 CE. Alongside the Talmud, which is topically arranged, there developed verse-based interpretations on both law and narrative called Midrash. While some midrashim (plural of midrash) are contained within the Talmud, there are also separate collections of midrashim that evolved over the centuries.

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What Is Torah? The word Torah comes from the Hebrew root meaning “teaching.” It is sometimes used to refer to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and sometimes used to refer to all Jewish teaching. The Oral Torah is the interpretation that grew from scripture and was eventually codified in a variety of texts, such as the Mishnah, the Talmud, and the Midrash. Rabbinic tradition teaches that God gave both the Written and the Oral Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai. Some see the Torah not as God’s word to the people of Israel from Sinai but rather the words of the people of Israel in search of God. That search is ongoing.

The rabbinic teachers and leaders who created this interpretive tradition established synagogues and academies of learning in place of the Temple. In those academies, the Bible became a portable sanctuary. By dwelling in the text, interpreting it, the people continued the conversation begun at Sinai. Judaism is not the religion of the Bible but of this ongoing rabbinic process of interpretation. Midrash is a body of literature written by men over a period of time. But midrash is also a process—a way of interpreting sacred text. For Judaism to be the heritage of women as well as men, it would need to hear the voices of women as they dwelled in the text and became part of the conversation. Women biblical scholars, poets, writers, and rabbis recovered rabbinic narrative and commentary about women in the Bible that was largely unknown. To this classical treasury of interpretation, they added their own imaginations. Judith Plaskow’s groundbreaking book on Jewish feminist theology, Standing Again at Sinai (1990), brought attention to the Exodus report of revelation as a male account. Feminist midrash sought to uncover and reimagine what women might have seen, heard, or felt. One of the first formal expressions of this new way of understanding Torah came in 1972 when Judith Plaskow wrote an article entitled “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” The 11th-century legend of Lilith contained in The Alphabet of Ben Sira attempted to reconcile the two accounts of creation in Genesis by telling the story of Lilith, the first woman they speculated was created from the same earth as Adam. Unlike the subsequent Eve, Lilith, as an equal to Adam, became a disobedient night demon who threatened grown men and male children. But Plaskow and many other feminist midrashists envisioned her as a symbol of independence and hope, unwilling to be subservient. The popularity of Lilith among early Jewish feminists expressed itself in a proliferation of midrashim. Which Lilith: Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman (1998) included the poetry and writings of numerous women authors as women sought to understand themselves in the light of this powerful, sexually alluring, and autonomous archetype. The Jewish feminist magazine created in 1976 was named Lilith. Over time, Jewish feminism turned its attention from the Lilith legend to Miriam. As more and more women entered rabbinical seminaries and became interpreters



Midrash

of Torah, they began to see themselves not as Lilith, outsiders clamoring for equality, but as participatory citizens reconstructing tradition as equals and making it home. They turned to the more congenial character of Miriam. Miriam was a powerful woman leader, intrinsic to the community, who both nurtured others and protested injustice. In recovering and creating midrashim on Miriam, Jewish women found a story for celebration. Miriam’s story was encapsulated in a song composed in 1988 by the popular singer and songwriter Debbie Friedman. The music and lyrics became a feature of Passover Seders as did a special cup set aside for Miriam. (The Seder is the ritual meal that celebrates Passover. It literally means “order,” as there is a ritual order to the evening meal.) As the Seder set aside a cup of wine for Elijah representing the promise of and hope for future redemption, Miriam’s cup, filled with water, came to symbolize what sustains us as we work toward redemption. Ritual artists began to create Miriam’s cups. They also designed and decorated tambourines as reminders of the tambourine with which Miriam led the women in dance after the crossing of the sea. Miriam was the woman who was invoked in prayers for healing. As Miriam’s well was said to accompany the Israelites in the wilderness, so the image of her well became a source of strength for the contemporary Jewish community thirsting for full inclusion and participation in Jewish life. In biblical commentary, from Aviva Zornberg’s books on Genesis (1995) and Exodus (2001) to Ellen Frankel’s The Five Books of Miriam (1996) to The Women’s Torah Commentary edited by Elyse Goldstein (2000) to The Torah: A Woman’s Commentary edited by Tamara Eskenazi and Andrea Weiss (2007), women have lifted up positive female images in little-noticed classical midrashim and remade characterizations of women in ways that brought women’s perspective to bear upon the text. In addition, women’s collections of contemporary midrash, such as Miriam’s Well by Alice Bach and J. Cheryl Exum (1991), Biblical Women Unbound by Norma Rosen (1997), and Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women by Jill Hammer (2001), brought new ways of discerning meaning from biblical narratives. The poetry of Alicia Ostriker in The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions (1994) and For the Love of God, The Bible as an Open Book (2007) added a rich collection of female voices to tradition. Women’s midrash also took the form of visual art. Jewish women authors began to introduce children to new midrashim about women, such as Sandy E. Sasso’s A Prayer for the Earth: The Story of Naamah, Noah’s Wife and But God Remembered. If religious containers refashioned by writers, artists, and scholars were to become part of the tradition, they would have to be received by children who, in turn, would carry them and reshape them for future generations. Women’s midrash has served as a way of reenvisioning what is meant by Israel, God, and Torah. The people of Israel were once understood as the sons of Jacob who formed the 12 tribes. In new midrash, women bless Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, and all the other women whose stories have not been fully told. Those midrashim have expanded the theological conversation, offering names and images of God

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that reflect partnership, intimacy, and mutuality. Inspired by the verse in the Talmud that teaches that the fetus learns the entire Torah while still in the womb, the artist Jacqueline Nicholl created a Torah scroll cover in the shape of a corset based on a pregnant women’s body shape. In this striking piece of art, a woman’s body becomes a place of revelation. Women have come to be viewed as the embodiment of Torah, standing once again at Sinai. Sandy Eisenberg Sasso See also: Judaism: Feminist and Women’s Movements; Hebrew Bible; Lilith; Mitzvah; Rabbis; Synagogue Further Reading Dame, Enid, Rivlin Lilly, and Henry Wenkart, eds. Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Oxford: Jason Aronson, 1998. Milgrom, Jo. Handmade Midrash: Workshops in Visual Theology. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” In Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, 198–209. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1972. Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith.” In Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, edited by Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton, 324–25. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009. Sasso, Sandy Eisenberg. A Prayer for the Earth: The Story of Naamah, Noah’s Wife. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1996. The book was later reprinted under the name, Noah’s Wife: The Story of Naamah. Sasso, Sandy Eisenberg. But God Remembered: Stories of Women from Creation to the Promised Land. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1995. Walton, Rivka. “Lilith’s Daughters, Miriam’s Chorus: Two Decades of Feminist Midrash.” Religion and Literature 43, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 115–27.

M I T Z VA H In classic Hebrew, the word mitzvah (plural mitzvot) means literally “commandment” and usually refers to commandments from God. Many people still use the word in this sense today, especially among Orthodox Jews. However, many people today also use the word mitzvah to mean simply “good deed” without the original connotation of commandment. The classic term mitzvah includes both ethical and ritual commandments. Ethical commandments are referred to as “mitzvot between a person and his friend.” Feeding the hungry, visiting the sick, refraining from gossip, returning a lost object, and so forth—these good deeds are commandments, obligations placed on us by God. Ritual commandments are referred to as “mitzvot between a person and God.” Examples are observing the kosher dietary laws, reciting prescribed prayers, observing holiday rituals, and so forth. The Talmud mentions that the Torah, or Hebrew Bible, contains 613 mitzvot. (The Talmud is the foundational text of rabbinic Judaism, compiled during the first half of the first millennium.) The number 613 was probably intended symbolically,



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as it corresponds to the sum of 365, the number of days in the solar year, and 248, believed at the time to be the number of bones in the human body. The Talmud states that 248 of the mitzvot are positive commandments, or “do’s,” implying that every part of our body should be active in the pursuit of mitzvah, and 365 are negative commandments, or “don’t do’s,” implying that every moment of our lives we should be vigilant not to do wrong (Makot 23b). Several medieval Jewish scholars attempted to enumerate all 248 and 365. The Mishnah, a compilation of laws redacted in the second century that formed the structural base for the Talmud, states that women are exempted from positive time-bound commandments (Mishnah Kiddusin 1:7). These mitzvot are the rituals that mark the passage of days, weeks, and years. For example, the Talmud elaborates, women are excused from hearing the sound of the shofar—this is a mitzvah that applies only on a particular day of the year, namely the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. Another example: women are excused from donning the phylacteries or tefilin—little boxes that contain parchment scrolls and are worn during morning prayers—because the mitzvah of tefilin only applies at a specific time of day. Many Orthodox women appreciate the exemption from time-bound commandments, especially during child-rearing years when the demands of children and home make thrice-daily prayer and rigorous holiday rituals a challenge. However, in a traditional understanding, obligation and merit are connected, with a mandatory mitzvah earning more merit than an optional one. In other words, if both a man and a woman hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah, both have done a good deed, but the man’s deed is greater than the woman’s. (In contrast, reciting the grace after meals, for example, is an equal obligation and equal merit for women and men, as it is a mitzvah triggered not by the time of day but by the act of eating.) The exemption from positive time-bound commandments has been a factor in the exclusion of women from performance of public rituals in Orthodox Judaism. The prayer leader is understood to be performing a mitzvah on behalf of all who listen and respond “Amen.” A person with lesser obligation cannot fulfill the mitzvah for those with greater obligation. Since the 1970s, a growing movement of Orthodox feminists seeks to promote greater access for Orthodox women to communal rituals and leadership. For the vast majority of liberal Jews, traditional thinking about relative levels of obligation is no longer relevant. Most liberal Jews no longer view mitzvot as obligations set by God but rather as good deeds chosen autonomously by the individual. A person of any gender may autonomously take upon herself or himself any ritual mitzvah, or not. Some scholars within the Conservative movement, wishing to preserve a continuous evolution of thought from past generations, have tried to reframe the Talmud’s statements about positive time-bound commandments in a way that offers women greater access to Jewish ritual. However, their efforts are mostly academic. In practice, most Conservative synagogues are fully egalitarian, with women leading every part of the service irrespective of levels of obligation. The very idea of differing levels of obligation is foreign to many Conservative Jews.

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Yet, the idea of mitzvah as divine commandment still speaks to some liberal thinkers. A good deed is a choice. Doing it is commendable, but passing it up is acceptable. Caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, honoring parents, sanctifying a day of rest, dedicating times to talk to God: some would say such actions are not simply good choices. They have the full weight of divine duty. And if social hierarchies are irrelevant to God, by that view, God’s commandments are equally incumbent on us all. Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon See also: Judaism: Bat Mitzvah; Hebrew Bible; Judaism in the United States; Midrash; Rabbis; Sex and Gender; Shabbat (Sabbath); Synagogue Further Reading Berkovitz, Eliezer. Jewish Women in Time and Torah. n.p.: KTAV Publishing House, 1990. Biale, Rachel. Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, and Their Relevance for Today. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Borowitz, Eugene. Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. Dorff, Elliot N. The Unfolding Tradition: Jewish Law after Sinai. New York: Aviv, 2006. Eisenberg, Ronald L. The 613 Mitzvot: A Contemporary Guide to the Commandments of Judaism. Rockville, MD: Schreiber, 2005. Greenberg, Blu. On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1998. Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Ross, Tamar. Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004.

MIZRAHI JUDAISM See Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms M O D E R N A N D C O N T E M P O R A RY J U D A I S M The place of women in Judaism from the 1980s onward has been characterized by both change and continuity. The last decades of the 20th century and the first of the new century have seen both a revival of traditional/Orthodox religious practice and the integration of new considerations of gender and sexuality to varying degrees into all streams of Judaism. In the United States, the changes have been more radical, inspiring both celebration and worry, while in most of the rest of the Jewish world, traditional Judaism has remained predominant, despite the spread of liberal movements, although women’s roles have been affected in nearly all settings. Change and Resistance within the Jewish Movements

Although all streams of Judaism have undergone major challenges and changes over the last few decades, Orthodoxy has experienced the most and the least



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change. Change within the Orthodox world has furthermore gone in both directions, with increased emphasis on female modesty that includes not only dress but restrictions on gender mixing and hearing women sing, while women’s religious education, including the learning of Talmud, has unprecedentedly expanded, and women have increasing (if still restricted) communal leadership opportunities. The Orthodox Jewish feminist movement that has coalesced into the Jewish Feminist Orthodox Alliance and rabbinical allies have driven many of these changes. But Orthodox Jewish feminists retain different priorities than their liberal/secular sisters, and the plight of agunot (wives unable to get a religious divorce) remains the number one issue. However, religious leadership remains the most divisive issue, with unprecedented opportunities for ordination of women creating controversy within even the Modern Orthodox world. For the Conservative movement, the most divisive issues have been the shift toward ritual equality that included counting women in the prayer quorum and allowing women to become rabbis and cantors. The Reform and Reconstructionist movements, unbound by traditional adherences to Jewish law, continued their path toward complete equality in Judaism, resulting in a large surge in female leadership. In these movements, equality also cut both ways with acceptance of patrilineal descent in response to rising rates of intermarriage. Finally, beyond the traditional denominations, the Jewish Renewal movement has pioneered gender-egalitarian forms of worship that have since become mainstream, while the newer Independent Minyan movement has pushed the boundaries of “traditional-egalitarian” (Kaunfer 2010, 120). Marriage, Family, and the Life Cycle

Women’s changing place in contemporary Judaism has also affected the shape of the Jewish family in a variety of ways, beginning with intermarriage and conversion. In recent decades, the gender disparities in intermarriage have largely evened out, with intermarried Jewish women more likely to raise children in the Jewish faith. Conversely, conversion of children of a non-Jewish mother is becoming an increasingly accepted option when the mother chooses to raise the children in the Jewish faith without converting herself. Nonetheless, in Orthodoxy and the Conservative movement, the maintenance of matrilineal descent creates a greater imperative for women’s marriage-related conversions, though most converts to Judaism remain female regardless of the presence or absence of a relationship with a born Jew. Finally, the reality of divorce and single-parent households has forced the expansion and redefinition of the role of women in creating a Jewish home. Some of the most visible changes for women (and girls) in contemporary Judaism can be found across the life cycle, beginning with the almost routine acceptance of more than minimalist namings and celebrations of newborn daughters increasingly taking hold, even in Orthodoxy. In coming of age, the bar and bat mitzvah have become almost interchangeable in form in the liberal denominations. While there is less room for equalization in Orthodoxy, the bat mitzvah or bat Torah celebration has become increasingly accepted and even expected in Orthodox circles.

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Marriage ceremonies have been slower to change, although double-ring ceremonies have become increasingly common, as is a more active role for the bride, even in some Orthodox ceremonies. When it comes to the ketubah (marriage contract), changes to prevent the possibility of agunot have remained controversial in Orthodoxy. Finally, in death, women’s kaddishes (mourners’ prayers) have become increasingly, though not completely, accepted. Change, Response, and the Jewish Future

Some of the other most significant changes for women in contemporary Judaism have occurred in the areas of learning and leadership. This is most significant in Orthodoxy, which has expanded its learning opportunities for women through institutions such as Drisha, and more controversially, Yeshivat Maharat. And when it comes to using this learning, the “stained glass ceiling” has barely been cracked, with acceptance of female Orthodox clergy limited to the fringe of Orthodoxy (Gurock 2009, 300–06). Beyond Orthodoxy, women are becoming the new liberal rabbinic majority, with increasing numbers of female seminarians and graduates. When it comes to lay leadership, change has also affected the traditional role of the rebbetzin, allowing rabbis’ spouses to choose their own level of involvement. Beyond rabbinic couples, gender barriers to congregational leadership have only started to fall in the last few decades. Beyond numbers and changing roles, the expansion of women’s place in contemporary Judaism has created varying degrees of changes to ritual and liturgy, although some changes have caught on better than others, with the addition of the Imahot (matriarchs) to the Amidah (standing prayer) the most significant and controversial. The gendered nature of the Hebrew language, however, creates challenges toward equalizing the liturgy. Beyond language and liturgy, gender equality has had spillover effects regarding whether or not priestly designations should be abolished. These challenges notwithstanding, it is clear that expanded women’s roles in Judaism show little sign of retreating, even within Orthodoxy, which in

Matriarchs in Jewish Liturgy The Amidah (Shmoneh Esreh), the central prayer of Jewish liturgy, recited by observant Jews three times each weekday and more on Sabbaths and holidays, began to change from the 1970s forward. With the rise of Jewish feminism, there was a push to include the Matriarchs (Imahot) alongside the Patriarchs in the Amidah’s opening blessing. Its text addressed God as “God of our Fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob.” This formulation derived from Exodus 3 and is attested in third century CE texts about prayer. As women’s involvement in synagogue activities increased, eventually all movements except the Orthodox began to include the Matriarchs in the Amidah. While there are variations in the new liturgy, one version, as an example, now reads, “God of our Fathers and Mothers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, God of Sarah, God of Rebekah, God of Leah, and God of Rachel.”



Peacemaking

recent times has gone from the triumphalism of the Ba’al Teshuva movement to worry over those leaving Orthodoxy. And while it has become harder to connect disaffiliation and declining observance with gender equality, this defense has not been abandoned entirely. But within all but the most conservative strains of Orthodoxy, there is a tacit understanding that there is no going backward, and Orthodox apologetics in themselves speak to an acknowledgment of this new reality. Meanwhile, in the liberal denominations, gender equality has gone from a problem to a precedent for creating even more inclusive Jewish movements. Susan Roth Breitzer See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Bat Mitzvah; Education; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Marriage and Divorce; Mitzvah; Rabbis; Sex and Gender; Synagogue Further Reading Diner, Hasia, and Beverly Lieff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. New York: Free Press, 1993. Gurock, Jeffrey S. Orthodox Jews in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Hartman, Tova. Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2007. Kaunfer, Elie. Empowered Judaism: What Independent Minyanim Can Teach Us about Creating Vibrant Jewish Communities. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2010. Sarna, Jonathan D. American Judaism: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

PEACEMAKING Peacemaking, a term that combines the repose of peace with the agency of making, denotes the effort to reconcile enemies. For students of contemporary reception history and gender studies, understanding the peace efforts of Jewish women is crucial to arriving at a broader understanding of the practices and processes of peacebuilding. More than simple activism, Jewish women’s peacemaking efforts have involved acts of creation that can do much to illuminate the bonds between faith and culture in general. The importance of the Hebrew term shalom in Judaism demonstrates the centrality of peacemaking in Jewish values. In Psalm 34:15, one reads: “Seek peace and pursue.” Since all human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and since the name of God is “Peace” (Judges 6:24), each person is obliged to be a peacemaker, and every human life must be sanctified. Etymologically, shalom refers to the concept of perfection. To understand the essence of Jewish Women Peacemaking (JWP)—Jewish women who share a commitment to peaceful values and to their common cultural tradition—a few considerations are necessary. JWP peacemaking efforts emphasize responsibility and the cultivation of humility to navigate the trials of postconflict

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reconciliation. Their principle peacebuilding actions include marches, letters to major newspapers, and calls for a national referendum on the decision to enter a war. Furthermore, their emphasis on collaborative networks and the reliance on courts to obtain justice and change policies demonstrate the JWP’s mindfulness of the core values of the Jewish tradition. Melissa R. Klapper’s volume itself constitutes a moment in the JWP’s historical development into a recognizable ideology within post-19th-century United States: Klapper shows the extent to which Jewish identity shaped the American peace movement. It is in works like hers that we discover the essence of the JWP and its commitment to Jewish tradition, works that in the end affect national policies and international institutions, as we find by retracing the steps of Sara Helman and Sherry Gorelick to illustrate the links between the peace movements in Israel and the United States. In 1908, the Committee on Peace and Arbitration was formed under the auspices of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW). Under the guidance of Fanny Brin, the committee devoted its activities to the effort to end military conflict. The group’s effective motto echoed the mitzvah: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:5). In 1915, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) characterized shalom as representative of a kind of metavalue, a conviction that peace must be offered prior to outbursts of violence. Stemming from this, the mission of the NCJW and the WILPF after World War I was characterized as an effort to bring about an era of peace. Central among its policy goals was the determination that peacemaking should be a collaborative effort. More specific subgoals included the struggle to end military use of chemical weapons. Although the women’s peace movements of the 1930s were imbued with anti-Semitism, the NCJW continued in its peacemaking process, most notably in the form of Brin’s work at Minneapolis Committee for World Disarmament (1929–1931). In the post-Holocaust period, women’s peacebuilding changed dramatically in response to the urgent questions that this era asked of humanity. Organizations like Women Strike for Peace (WSP) dedicated themselves to bringing about the end of nuclear testing. In the commentary by Rashi on the Talmud, we read of the power of humor to reduce tension—to bring about peace. In 1962, the WSP used humor in their attempts to undermine the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ campaign to defame their peace work. Authors like Blanche Wiesen Cook have shown us the importance of women peacebuilders like Bella Abzug: like Esther in the Bible, she fought for justice during the McCarthyist era, building bridges of peace between her people and the Ahasuerus of the 19th century. In 1982, at the outset of the Lebanon War (1982–1985), the International Jewish Peace Union was established in Paris. The subsequent work of Mothers Against Silence (MAS) toward initiating negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization recalls how in 1 Samuel 25, 23–35, Abigail defuses an explosive situation between David and Nabal. MAS worked particularly to open the cross-border areas where Israeli-Jewish and Palestinian women would go on to



Peacemaking

Thousands of Israeli and Palestinian women demand peace negotiations between their governments in a march across Israel, October 2016. The March of Hope was organized by Women Wage Peace, whose mission is to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Jalaa Marey/AFP/Getty Images)

engage in numerous cooperative activities, embodying the peacebuilding principle of interpersonal contact. Notable among the protest movements during the 1987–1993 Intifada was that of Women in Black (WiB), founded by a group of Jerusalem women in 1988. Similar grassroots women’s movements began to appear around the world: the JWP, thanks largely to its colorful approach to peacebuilding, was emerging as an effective paradigm for creating peace in the Middle East. With the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (1990), however, the peace process slowed. Simultaneously, peaceful demonstrations became a symbol for women’s peacebuilding and religious peace movements in general. During the Second Intifada of 2000–2006, WiB recommenced their peace demonstrations. Feminist scholars frequently assert that with the end of the Cold War, the role of feminist theology became more prominent in peacebuilding networks. There has been a marked increase since 2008 in the number of female Jewish peace workers who refuse to serve as soldiers in the West Bank. In 2010, a 12-day research session was sponsored by St. Mary’s Graduate International Relations Department, where Zionism itself was suggested as a possible route for establishing a peaceful coexistence between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. After the 2014 Gaza War, Women Wage Peace was established to work to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2015, they conducted the March to the Knesset, and in 2016, the March of

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Hope: “The strongest of the warriors is who turns one who hates him into one who loves him” (Avot of Rabbi Nathan 23:1). Adele Valeria Messina See also: Judaism: Hebrew Bible; Holocaust; Israel Further Reading Hayward, Susan. “Women, Religion, and Peacebuilding.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding, edited by Atalia Omer, R. Scott Appleby, and David Little, 307–32. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Klapper, Melissa R. Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890–1940. New York: New York University Press, 2013.

PERFORMANCE Jewish women are not historically seen as performers since Orthodox Judaism confines the woman to the home or within the perimeters of Jewish education. However, Orthodoxy, and its ban on female performance, is challenged by European Jewish assimilation and the advent of a Jewish Reform movement. Today, most Jewish women are part of the professional workforce. In the United States, Europe, and parts of Israel, a more modern, secular Judaism prevails. Here, the Jewish woman performer is a vital element within the artistic community. Orthodox Jewish women are traditionally forbidden from public performance. Within the synagogue, it is the man who sings and performs as part of worship. Judaism is the first Abrahamic faith, and women’s role is “to be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Historically, women were observers rather than participants. Within the synagogue, they were separated from the male gaze by a balcony or screen. They were also separated from the male ear, as a Jewish woman’s voice should not be heard. It was commonly believed that the female appearance, and the female voice, distracts men’s thoughts from prayer. However, in the Hebrew Bible, the prophet Deborah (Judges 5) and the prophet Miriam (Exodus 2:1–10) are noted as singers. Performance also features in the book of Esther. In this story, Esther, who is part of the Jewish diaspora, becomes queen of the Persian Empire after taking part in a beauty parade. Esther is honored in the Bible for saving her people from genocide. In the New Testament, Salomé is famous for her dancing (Mark 6:14–29). These renowned biblical female performers are the exception. In Orthodox Judaism, women’s voices are confined to the home. It is the mother who says the prayer before Sabbath dinner on Friday night; otherwise she is silent. Male practice starts young. A boy is officially taken into the community when he is bar mitzvahed at 13. In the synagogue and before the community, he reads his portion of the law. Orthodox girls do not celebrate this ritual. They are also denied the opportunity to say kaddish at funerals. It is the obligation of the nearest male relative to recite this important prayer of mourning. Separation of women from the public arena was customary in Judaism until the Jewish enlightenment known as the Haskalah. This was an intellectual movement



Performance

that modernized Judaism. German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelsohn (1729– 1786) is heralded as the father of Jewish modernism, which still prevails in the Jewish diaspora. The Reform movement accepts gender equality. Female rabbis perform in the public sphere. At 12, girls celebrate bat mitzvah. Napoléon, promoting the French Revolutionary ideals of 1789, is the main political driver of Jewish equality. His desire for Jewish assimilation had a gradual effect on the lives of Jewish women throughout Europe. With the spread of radical and revolutionary ideas from the 18th century onward, secularism spread through most European Jewish communities as assimilation and integration spread. Previously, theater and the arts were considered transgressional by Orthodox Jewry. The 10 Commandments state that humans are made in the image of God; therefore, human artistic representation is blasphemous. Exodus 20:4 forbids the making of idols and graven images. However, radical political ideas encouraged European women to enter traditional male spaces. In Eastern Europe, the acceptance of female performance as a serious profession started with Yiddish theater. Yiddish was accepted as a temporal language and therefore suited to theater. Yiddish was also commonly seen as the language of stories, plays, and jokes, whereas Hebrew, spoken mainly by men, was the sacred language of prayer. As women lived in the temporal sphere of the market, the home, and the town, it also became the language of theater in Jewish settlements all over Eastern Europe. Women performed in translations from Shakespeare and Molière and in Yiddish plays. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they often traveled as touring actors all over Russia, Western and Eastern Europe, South America, and the United States. Often there were Yiddish performing dynasties. Polish-born Esther Kaminska (1870–1925) was known as the mother of the Yiddish stage. Her daughter, the actor, translator, impresario, and director Ida Kaminska (1899–1980) spearheaded the golden age of Yiddish theater. Hanna Rovina and Luba Kadison (1906–2006) were celebrated for the role of Leah in The Dybbuk written by Solomon Anski between 1913 and 1916. Celebrated Jewish actors whose reputations were made in this role were Lithuanian-born Luba Kadison (1906–2006) and Belarus-born Hanna Rovina (1888–1980). Warsaw-born Lili Liliana (1913–1989) played Leah in Michal Waszyn´ski’s 1937 Yiddish film of the Jewish myth Der Dibuk/The Dybbuk. Paul Wegner’s 1920 silent movie The Golem, based on the Czech Jewish legend, featured Prague-born Lyda Salmonova (1889–1968). Yiddish theater flourished in the United States as many 20th-century Jewish immigrants spoke no English. Champion of Yiddish theater Zypora Spaisman (1916–2002) was a Polish actor and Yiddish theater impresario who created the New York City’s Yiddish Public Theater. The Holocaust annihilated most of European Jewry and its performers and, with it, Yiddish culture and language. A relic of Yiddish theater existed briefly in postwar Britain, where Romanian-born Anna Tzelniker (1921–2012) was considered the last major female voice of Yiddish theater. In the United States, when Jewish immigrants assimilated into American culture, there was no longer a demand for Yiddish theater. Jewish women performers appeared on mainstream stages. They include Lauren Bacall (1924–2014), Fanny Brice (1891–1951), and Ethel Merman (1908–1984). Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) and British-born Elizabeth Taylor

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(1932–2011) converted to Judaism. British-born Joan Collins (b. 1933), who had a Jewish father, works as an actor in the United Kingdom and the United States. In the 20th century, it is Barbra Streisand (b. 1942) who is best known for her celebration of Jewish identity. She transmits the vibrancy of Eastern European Jewish culture to modern American audiences in her 1983 film Yentl. Streisand, who directs and stars in Yentl, depicts a rabbi’s daughter who pretends to be a male theological student. Although performing a transgender role is a transgressional act within Jewish Orthodoxy, this fiction belongs to Hasidic-Yiddish literature. The movie was inspired by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Yentl: The Yeshiva Boy, written in Yiddish and translated by Singer. Hasidism is a proletariat Yiddish-speaking culture where song and dance, performed by men, is encouraged as part of worship. Jewish men studied Kabbalah and, by the 20th century, this mystical part of Judaism became attractive to women artists who learned that Kabbalah values the female impulse known as the Shekinah. However, within Hasidic families, the study of Kabbalah is forbidden to men under 40 and to all women. Streisand was not the first woman performer to represent a tradition of women playing male roles. In the 1936 Yiddish movie Yidl Mit’n Fidl, Molly Picon (1898–1982) stars as a boy musician. If Jewish women were transgressing Orthodoxy by representing men, they were also transgressing Orthodox practice by absorbing male Talmudic scholarship into their art. The Jewish tradition of asking questions within Talmudic commentary has penetrated cabaret and satire. Strains of Talmudic questioning and Yiddish humor are revealed in the work of Sandra Bernhard (b. 1955), Bette Midler (b. 1945), Joan Rivers (1933–2014), and the German American actor Lucie Pohl (b. 1983). The most famous stage representation of a Jewish woman’s life in the 20th century is that of Anne Frank. In the adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, stage and screen presence become areas where Jewish history enters the mainstream. The dramatization of the diary of Anne Frank, in which Susan Strasberg (1938–1999) starred in the Broadway version, is an example of the moral force of witness in Jewish women’s experience. Anne Frank (1929–1945) died in Bergen-Belsen, but her writing, and the countless dramatic performances of her diary, maintain female Jewish witness of Jewish persecution. Not all Jewish women actors are known for performing Jewish roles. In the United States, 20th- and 21st-century high-profile Jewish performers include Celia Adler (1889–1979), Stella Adler (1902–1992), Patricia Arquette (b. 1968), Rosanna Arquette (b. 1959), Ellen Barkin (b. 1954), Claire Bloom (b. 1931), Jennifer Connelly (b. 1970), Kat Dennings (b. 1986), Tova Feldshuh (b. 1952), Paulette Goddard (1910–1989), Goldie Hawn (b. 1945), Carol Kane (b. 1952), Lisa Kudrow (b. 1963), Jennifer Jason Leigh (b. 1962), Scarlett Johansson (b. 1984 ), Mila Kunis (b. 1983), Juliana Margulies (b. 1966), Bette Midler (b. 1945), Gwyneth Paltrow (b. 1972), Sarah Jessica Parker (b. 1965), German-born American actor Lili Palmer (1914–1986), Amanda Peet (b. 1972), Natalie Portman (b. 1981), Nikki Reed, (b. 1988), Meryl Streep (b. 1949), Sophie Tucker (1884–1996), Winona Ryder (b. 1971), Sylvia Sydney (1910–1999), Debra Winger (b. 1955), Shelley Winters (1920–2006), and Irene Worth (1916– 2002). Worth was celebrated in the United Kingdom and internationally.



Performance

British-born performers include Peggy Ashcroft (1907–1991), Amanda Boxer (b. 1948), Eleanor Bron (b. 1938), Helena Bonham Carter (b. 1966), Miriam Karlin (1925–2011), Maureen Lipman (b. 1946), Miriam Margoyles (b. 1941), Sophie Okonedo (b. 1968), Jane Seymour (b. 1951), and Rachel Weisz (b. 1970). There were also Holocaust refugees who made successful international careers. These include Austrian-born stage and film actor Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986); Ruth Posner (b. 1930), a dancer-actor who escaped the Warsaw ghetto as a child; and Lili Palmer (1914–1986), who fled the Nazis and enjoyed a long career in the United Kingdom and the United States. In France, the entry of Jewish women into theater was through the classical repertoire. This is recognized in the celebrity of Rachel Felix, better known as Mademoiselle Rachel (1821–1858), and Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). By the 20th century, French Jewish performers include Anouk Aimée (b. 1932), Emanuelle Béart (b. 1963), Simone Signoret (1921–1985), Charlotte Gainsbourg (b. 1971), Eva Green (b. 1980), Isabelle Huppert (b. 1953), and Mélanie Laurent (b. 1983). Jewish women were also important singers, most notably Marie Dubas (1894– 1972) and the Egyptian-born French performer Dalida (1933–1987). In Germany, Jewish emancipation meant that most Jews spoke German rather than Yiddish. Notable actors are Therese Giehse (1898–1975), Nina Hagen (b. 1955), Erika Mann (1905–1969), Grete Mosheim (1905–1986), Luise Rainer (1910–2014), and Helene Weigel (1900–1971). Dance

Between 1919 and 1933, the Weimar Republic was famous for a wave of European expressionist dance. Jewish dancers who particularized this were Lotte Berk (1913–2003), Valeska Gert (1882–1978), and Viennese-born Hilde Holger (1905–2001). Many of these women were targeted by Hitler. Polish dancer Franciszka Mann (1917–1943) died as a heroine killing an SS guard before being murdered in Auschwitz. Jewish ballerinas of the Soviet and post-Soviet period were Maya Plisetskaya (1925–2015) and Galina Ulanova (1910–1998). The influence of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on British ballet was evidenced in the lives of British-born Alicia Markova (née Alice Marks, 1910–2004) and the Warsaw-born Marie Rambert (née Marie Rambaum, 1888–1982). Rambert formed Britain’s first ballet company in 1926, Rambert Dance Company, renaming it as Ballet Rambert in 1935. Julia Pascal See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Art; Hebrew Bible; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Kabbalah; Sex and Gender; Shabbat (Sabbath); Women and Work Further Reading Craig, Kenneth. Reading Esther: A Case for the Literary Carnivalesque. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1995.

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Erdman, Harley. Taming the Exotic Goddess. Staging the Jew. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997. Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds. New York: Schocken Books, 1991. Kadison, Luba, Joseph Buloff, and Irving Genn. On Stage, Off Stage: Memories of a Lifetime in the Yiddish Theatre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Library, 1992. Pascal, Julia. The Yiddish Queen Lear/Woman in the Moon. London: Oberon, 2001. Paskin, Sylvia. When Joseph Met Molly: A Reader on Yiddish Film. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 1999.

PRIESTESSES The reemergence of the Jewish priestess, the kohenet, was one of the most exciting developments in Jewish and feminist conversation and practice of the late 1990s. This idea emerged from a religious tradition that in contemporary times has no priests and that in ancient times rarely officially acknowledged the existence of independent priestesses. While the Hebrew Bible does refer to women’s roles as diviners and oracles, prophetesses, healers, magicians, and sorceresses, these roles are rarely described as priestly functions; instead, at least in many later interpretations, they are viewed with suspicion or as threatening the status quo. The word kohenet is a feminized form of the word kohen, a member of the priestly class headed by Moses’s brother Aaron, the high priest in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. From Aaron a lineage is traced in which the sons of a kohen inherited—and continue to inherit—the role of priest. Though the role of kohenet during the Temple period is usually described as one fulfilled only by the wife or daughter of a priest, a number of scholars and practitioners believe that women who were not affiliated with Temple priests also performed priestess functions before, during, and after this period. There is literary documentation, for example, of prophetesses being consulted and signs of rituals being done on hilltops and elsewhere and of women making offerings and pouring libations to honor a deity, often Asherah, at various sacred sites of worship. Rebirth of the Role in Public Spaces

An active conversation about the possibility of Jewish priestesses in both ancient and contemporary times occurred online in virtual spaces such as the Asherah listserv started in the late 1990s by Jenny Kien in Israel (Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism, 2000) and Judith Laura (Goddess Matters, 2011) in the United States. It was supported by the earlier research of scholars including Asphodel Long (In a Chariot Drawn by Lions: The Search for the Female in Deity, 1992), Savina Teubal (Sarah the Priestess, 1984), and Bernadette Brooten, whose Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (1982) provided evidence of women’s religious leadership in ancient Israel/Palestine and Greece during and after the Temple period. Of equal importance to this discussion were the experiences shared by contemporary women who were already functioning as priestesses in their communities. The impetus to identify the role of a Jewish priestess was born out of (1) a need to define spiritual leadership roles in addition to rabbi in a tradition where male clergy still often held the dominant voice; (2) the desire to name what some women were already doing; (3) the longing women felt for stronger connection



Priestesses

to G’d and to Judaism for those alienated by androcentric texts; and (4) women’s search for rituals and liturgy that could enfold both a feminist spirituality and Jewish practices grounded in the Sacred Feminine. The early conversations on the subject moved investigation of the work of ancient Jewish priestesses forward and stimulated the further development of modern priestesses’ practice and training. The early movement included the voices of practitioners—spiritual leader Rabbi Leah Novick (b. 1932; author of On the Wings of Shekhinah, 2008), Savina Teubal (1926–2005; author of Sarah the Priestess, 1984), Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb (b. 1949; peace activist; founder, Shomeret Shalom), Rabbi Geela Rayzel Raphael (b. 1953; rabbinic director, Jewish Creativity Project; songwriter), Kohenet D’vora K’lilah (b. 1961, founder, Banot Ha-aretz; liturgist; creator of new Jewish ceremonies), Kohenet D’vorah J. Grenn (Founder, The Lilith Institute; thealogian; ritualist), and others. Sacred spaces formed by women brought in new female-centered liturgies, included Sarah’s Tent in Los Angeles and Pardes Rimonim, Shuv Tamid, and Mishkan Shekhinah in the San Francisco Bay Area. Early inspiration also came from Max Dashú (b. 1950; Founder, Suppressed Histories Archives, 1970) and Starhawk (b. 1951), a Jewish Pagan writer and activist whose priestessing began in the 1980s. By 2006, Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Training Institute had been founded by Rabbi Jill Hammer and Holly Taya Shere. Differing Opinions

There are different schools of thought about what it means to be a kohenet. For some practitioners, there is an emphasis on mooring one’s activities primarily to the Hebrew Bible (Torah) and the later Talmud, the primary source of Jewish legal and ethical writings. For others holding the office, while the Torah and Talmud may be among the sacred texts serving as spiritual maps, there is also a great reliance on intuition, weaving in ancient practices to address contemporary needs and drawing on one’s own knowledge, wisdom, creativity, and imagination. For all, there is a desire to be of service to one’s community, to perform sacred work in ways that honor the legacy of the past. Most modern Jewish priestesses, whether they consider themselves kohanot or as following in the naditu or en/entu priestess lineage, work to model an earth-based, embodied, feminist Judaism that includes female divinity/ies. They are usually working toward making positive social, cultural, political, and/or ecological change. This activism may be combined with officiating at life-cycle events, creating interfaith ceremonies, serving as consultants for those facing major life crises or transitions, creating blessings and rituals for specific occasions, teaching, and writing. It will be interesting to see how this role continues to develop in modern times, as more women carry the work out into the world and as it gains more widespread recognition and acceptance within the Jewish community. Kohenet D’vorah J. Grenn See also: Judaism: Ancient Judaism; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Goddesses; Hebrew Bible; Israel

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Further Reading Chavalas, Mark W., ed. Women in the Ancient Near East. London: Routledge, 2014. Hamori, Esther. Women’s Divination in Biblical Literature: Prophecy, Necromancy, and Other Arts of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Marsman, Hennie J. Women in Ugarit and Israel: Their Social and Religious Position in the Context of the Ancient Near East. Leiden, Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill NV and Society of Biblical Literature, 2003. Silvers, Emma. “Kohenet Institute Says It Helps Women Reclaim Their Role as Priestesses.” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 11, 2013. http://www.jta.org/2013/07/11/life-religion​​ /kohenet-institute-helps-women-reclaim-their-role-as-priestesses. Stuckey, Johanna. Matrifocus. 2004–2006. http://matrifocus.com/Bios/bio-johanna.htm. Teubal, Savina. Sarah the Priestess. Athens: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1984. Van der Toorn, Karel. Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1996.

RABBIS Women in the rabbinate was an idea many thought impossible as the 20th century began. Yet, today women have received ordination from most major Jewish movements. The first women rabbis discussed here have blazed paths for future generations of Jewish women to become rabbis. The first woman rabbi was Regina Jonas (1902–1944). She grew up in Berlin. Her rabbi, Max Weyl, encouraged her and studied rabbinic literature with her. In 1924, Jonas enrolled in Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. She completed her studies and exams in 1930. Her thesis dealt with the topic of women’s ordination as rabbis and offered a halachic basis for it. The school denied her ordination, granting her the lesser status of religious teacher. In 1935, she received a private ordination from the Conference of Liberal Rabbis. She worked as a rabbinic counselor for a Jewish hospital and spoke at liberal synagogues as rabbis were emigrating from Germany or else being rounded up by the Nazi state. Jonas continued her calling during World War II, preaching throughout Germany. On November 6, 1942, she was deported to Theresienstadt, where she continued to serve as a rabbi. On October 12, 1944, Jonas was sent to Auschwitz, where she was killed. It would be almost 30 years before another woman received ordination. In 1972, Sally J. Priesand (b. 1946) became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in the United States. Priesand was born in Cleveland and knew from childhood that she wanted to be a rabbi. Priesand’s ordination was granted by the Hebrew Union College’s (HUC) seminary. In 1975, she wrote a book, Judaism and the New Woman. As the first woman rabbi, Priesand experienced difficulties in finding positions to serve as a rabbi. For seven years, she served as an assistant rabbi in New York. Priesand served as rabbi at Monmouth Reform Temple in New Jersey until she retired in 2006. She has worked within the Reform movement to support women in the rabbinate. A couple of years later, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso (b. 1947) became the first woman ordained by the Reconstructionist movement. She was born in Philadelphia. In 1974, she graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. In 1977, she became rabbi of Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis,



Rabbis

Indiana, a dual-affiliated congregation with the Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. The first woman rabbi to serve a Conservative congregation, she became senior rabbi along with her husband, Dennis C. Sasso, in 1995 when they received life tenure. Sasso established new ceremonies for events in women’s lives as well as the first covenantal naming ceremony for baby girls. Sasso has written books on Judaism for both adults and children, including Midrash—Reading the Bible with Question Marks and Jewish Stories of Love and Marriage, which she coauthored with Peninnah Schram. Sasso also served as the president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association. During the 1970s, other Jewish women sought to become rabbis, including Lynn Gottlieb (b. 1949). She was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1973, Gottlieb became a religious leader at Temple Beth Or of the Deaf in New York City. In 1974, Gottlieb cofounded a three-person Jewish feminist theater troupe that performed feminist midrash, ceremonies, and stories. Throughout the 1970s, she prepared for the rabbinate by taking courses at Hebrew Union College in New York and at Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) as well as studying privately with rabbis. In 1981, Rabbis Zalman Schacter-Shalomi and Everett Gendler ordained Gottlieb as the first woman rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement. In 1983, Gottlieb cofounded Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She remained rabbi there until 2005. In 1995, she authored She Who Dwells Within. Gottlieb is well known for her peace and justice activism and participation in interfaith relations. Amy Eilberg (b. 1954) is the first woman ordained as a rabbi by the Conservative movement. Eilberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a graduate student, she studied Talmud at JTS. When JTS decided to admit women for the ordination track in 1984, Eilberg was a member of the first class of 18 women. Since she had already completed sufficient graduate work, she was allowed to sit for ordination after a year. As a rabbi, Eilberg has worked as a chaplain and spiritual director. She is a cofounder of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center in San Francisco. In 2016, Eilberg received a doctor of ministry degree from United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. She has also authored a book, From Enemy to Friend. In 1992, Naamah Kelman (b. 1955) became the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in Israel when the president of HUC ordained her on HUC’s Jerusalem campus. Kelman has worked as a teacher developing various programs and initiatives. In 2009, she became the dean of HUC’s Jerusalem campus, the first woman to hold the position. While women were becoming rabbis in greater numbers by the 1990s, none had achieved a position as senior rabbi at a major synagogue. That changed with Laura Geller (b. 1950), who was the third woman ordained by the Reform movement in 1976. She became the director of Hillel for the University of Southern California. She was active in the Jewish community in southern California throughout the last decades of the 20th century. In 1994, Geller was appointed rabbi of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, becoming the first woman rabbi for a major metropolitan synagogue. She remained there until her retirement in 2016. The Modern Orthodox movement has been resistant to women’s ordination, but in 2009, Sara Hurwitz (b. 1977) became its first woman to be ordained as a rabbi.

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Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb leading prayer at the interfaith Prayer Walk for Peace in New Mexico, 2002. Since the ordination of Sally Priesand in 1972, women have received ordination from most major Jewish movements. (Cary Herz/Getty Images)

Originally from South Africa, Hurwitz’s family came to the United States in 1989. She completed study in a three-year program designed for women that covers the same materials as a rabbinical ordination. Rabbi Avi Weiss and Rabbi Daniel Sperber ordained her. She took the title rabba (a feminine form of rabbi). Her ordination caused an uproar among the Orthodox community. She is a cofounder of Yeshivat Maharat, a rabbinical seminary for Orthodox women. The women who graduate from the program receive the title maharat (a female leader of Jewish law, spirituality, and Torah) and not rabba. Hurwitz serves as the dean of the seminary. In 2012, Miri Gold achieved a major milestone as the first non-Orthodox rabbi in Israel to have her salary paid by the Israeli government. Born in Detroit, she emigrated to Israel in 1977. Gold was ordained by the Hebrew Union College in Israel in 1999. She became the rabbi for Kibbutz Gezer. In Israel, the salaries of non-Orthodox rabbis were not paid by the Israeli government; instead, the majority of funding came from overseas donations. In 2005, Gold petitioned the Israeli courts to have the government pay the salaries of non-Orthodox rabbis just as they pay the Orthodox rabbis, a court case that took seven years to win. John W. Fadden See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Education; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Holocaust; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Midrash; Modern and Contemporary Judaism



Rosh Hodesh

Further Reading Benowitz, June Melby. Encyclopedia of American Women and Religion. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1998. Jewish Women’s Archive. “Women Rabbis.” 2017. https://jwa.org/rabbis. Nadell, Pamela S. Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1985. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Sheridan, Sybil, ed. Hearing Our Voice: Women Rabbis Tell Their Stories. London: SCM, 1994. Umansky, Ellen K., and Dianne Ashton, eds. Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Revised ed. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009.

ROSH HODESH Rosh Hodesh is a holiday that marks the beginning of each month—each new moon. The Hebrew word rosh means “head” and hodesh means “month.” History: Darkness and Light

The sky is black, except for the dazzling, luminous stars. God has handed down nine plagues to Pharaoh and the Egyptian people, each a portent of destruction. Pharaoh’s heart is still hard. The prophetess Miriam, along with her brothers Moshe and Aaron, gather the Israelites before departing Egypt. After close to 400 years of slavery, God is about to redeem the Jewish people. But before leaving, they are given the commandment to observe the new moon: “This month shall be to you the beginning of months: It shall be the first month of the year” (Exodus 12:2). As a sign of a new covenant, the illuminated crescent will appear in the desert sky as a monthly reminder of the cycle from darkness into light, from slavery to freedom. Only a free people can reckon time. Waiting for redemption, eating their bitter herbs with their shoes on their feet and their staff in hand, the Israelites are given this sign—that God will renew the people and be renewed. God, too, is in need of repair after the experience of slavery. The Talmud (Hullin 60b) explicates the commandment to observe the new moon given in Exodus and offers several clues as to the importance of the holiday and its observance. For example, the text states that Rosh Hodesh had been declared a festive day that included sacrifices similar to those offered on other festivals. With the discontinuance of sacrifices, the legacy that remains is the Rosh Hodesh musaf, or additional prayer offering thanksgiving for the return of the moon. A festive meal that includes new seasonal fruit is prescribed in addition to wearing new clothes. Though deemed a festival, and one without prohibitions against working, the Jerusalem Talmud (1:6) explains a custom for women to avoid work on this day. Over time, such teachings were codified. Hence, the 18th-century text Sefer Hemdat Yamim (1:23–24a) states, “It is horrifying that there are women who do laundry on Rosh Hodesh. These women are clearly misguided and should abstain from this wretched, depressing task.” In ancient times, the new month began with an ingenious system of sighting the crescent and providing testimony of this before a rabbinic court. News of the first of the month was then communicated to more distant communities by setting

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flares on the hilltops around Jerusalem. From mountaintop to mountaintop, the flares would spread word of the start of the holiday. A Women’s Holiday

Laws regarding the observance of the holiday—and writings explicitly linking it to women—were consolidated already in the Talmud. But it was only in the 1970s with the impact of feminism that Rosh Hodesh became popular as a women’s holiday. Arlene Agus (1976) argued that the Talmud explicitly states that women were rewarded with a closer connection to the new moon because of their refusal to donate jewels to the building of the golden calf (Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 45). This source provides not only a justification, as Agus saw it, for women’s special relationship to the holiday but also demonstrates the spiritual bond between contemporary women who observe Rosh Hodesh and their foremothers who arose from slavery. Aside from the Talmudic source, women are connected to the cycles of time through the cyclical recurring nature of their bodies: times of creativity and productivity and times of rest, retreat, and temporary pause. The dark of the moon, just prior to Rosh Hodesh, is symbolic of the exile of Shekinah (God’s feminine manifestation) and diminishing holiness; the waxing moon, on the other hand, is symbolic of the return of Shekinah and a move toward greater holiness. According to Talmudic sources, on the fourth day of creation, God made the two great luminaries of equal size. After the moon questioned God about creating two equal lights, God diminished the size of the moon but agreed that in the future, the moon’s light would shine as strongly as the sun’s (B. Talmud, Hullin 60b). Rosh Hodesh and Birth

Marking time is a cornerstone of Jewish holiness. Jews have daily cycles; cycles of the week, month, and year; and cycles of every 7 years and every 49 years. The monthly cycle parallels the moon’s waxing and waning. Birkat HaHodesh, the blessing of the new month, occurs on the Sabbath prior to Rosh Hodesh (except for the month of Tishrei, when Rosh Hodesh is not observed because the new moon heralds the New Year, Rosh Hashanah). The molad, or birth of the moon, is announced after the Torah reading before the Torah scroll is returned to the Ark. There are nine steps to this prayer, corresponding with the nine months of gestation. The Hebrew word molad means “birth.” When the first thin sliver of moon appears in the dark sky—when its head, its rosh, crowns—the Hebrew month begins. The Hebrew word for womb (the safe place where we all begin our lives) is rechem, and this is the acronym for Rashey HodashiM (ReH.eM, Heads of the Months). Susan Berrin See also: Judaism: Feminist and Women’s Movements; Festivals and Holy Days; Hebrew Bible; Mitzvah; Sex and Gender; Shabbat (Sabbath)



Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE)

Further Reading Adelman, Penina. Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women around the Year. n.p.: Biblio, 1996. Agus, Arlene. “This Month Is for You: Observing Rosh Hodesh as a Woman’s Holiday.” In The Jewish Woman, edited by Elizabeth Koltun, 84-93. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. B Talmud, Hullin 60b. Berrin, Susan. Celebrating the New Moon: A Rosh Chodesh Anthology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. Diament, Carol. Moonbeams: A Hadassah Rosh Hodesh Guide. Woodstock, VT: Hadassah, Jewish Lights, 2000. Gottlieb, Lynn. She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism. San Francisco: Harper, 1995. Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 45. Sefer Hemdat Yamim 1:25.

SALOME ALEXANDRA (D. 67 BCE) Women held virtually no positions of power in ancient Judaism. Yet, there was one exception. Her name was Salome Alexandra; she was the only lawful female ruler in Jewish history. From 76 to 67 BCE, she was her country’s sole monarch. She commanded its military and changed its spiritual practices. Her political and religious reforms not only brought about the greatest period of peace and prosperity in her nation’s history but also shaped the world of Jesus and the early Christian faith. Ancient Jewish and Christian historical texts document her remarkable reign. She is the only woman named in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Salome Alexandra lived in the Hasmonean State, which comprised contemporary Israel, Palestine, and portions of Lebanon and Jordan. She took power upon the death of her husband, whose blatant disregard for Jewish law and his countless foreign wars had left his nation morally and economically bankrupt. Salome immediately took command of his army and defeated the Nabatean kingdom of present-day Jordan. Through her expansion of the army and treaties with her neighbors, she quickly brought peace and economic stability to her nation. The rabbis who compiled the compendium of Jewish writings known as the Talmud beginning in the early sixth century CE surprisingly had much to say about her. This work, which is still authoritative for observant Jews, includes a volume titled “Nashim” (women) that is largely a compendium of restrictions on women. Yet, the rabbis who compiled the Talmud, and who were often sexist in their interpretations of religious laws for women, preserved numerous favorable stories about Salome’s piety. They amazingly described her reign as her nation’s Golden Age. Salome belonged to a Jewish religious movement known as the Pharisees, whose members believed in bodily resurrection and emphasized a scrupulous devotion to religious practices in daily life. Because the Bible restricts the priesthood to males, Salome could not aspire to assume her late husband’s position as high priest. However, she chose her son to fill this position: the only time in history that a female selected the high priest. Under her guidance, he changed the religious practices in the Jerusalem temple so that all Jews followed the laws of the Pharisees when they went to the city to observe the biblically mandated festivals. She also transformed

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the composition of the Sanhedrin—the supreme Jewish religious court—to pass laws favorable to women. The Sanhedrin’s most prominent rabbi supported her creation of the ketubah, which is the marriage contract that gave women greater rights in the case of divorce. It remains in use today. During Salome’s reign, she used her military to keep hostile powers from invading her kingdom. She also sent troops to Damascus to prevent a nomadic chief from taking the city and threatening the region’s trade routes; she made peace with him. Unfortunately, her children did not possess her piety or diplomatic acumen. After her death, the Romans took advantage of their civil war to conquer the Hasmonean state. Kenneth Atkinson See also: Judaism: Ancient Judaism Further Reading Atkinson, Kenneth. Queen Salome: Jerusalem’s Warrior Monarch of the First Century B.C.E. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Ilan, Tal. Silencing the Queen: The Literary Histories of Shelamzion and Other Jewish Women Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2006.

SEPHARDIC AND MIZRAHI JUDAISMS Jewish studies in general have traditionally had a bias for Ashkenazi Judaism—that is, the traditions originating from North, Central, and Eastern Christian Europe. Mizrahi/Sephardic studies, and doubly so the study of Mizrahi/Sephardic women, have to a great extent been neglected until the most recent generation of scholars. The terms Sephardic and Mizrahi are sometimes used as synonyms but differ in origin. The designation Sephardim is Hebrew for those from the area called Sepharad—that is, the Iberian Peninsula, meaning descendants of the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century. The Hebrew term Mizrahi Jews is often used for Jews from the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa) without historical connections with Sepharad. Mizrahi means “Eastern, or Oriental Jews”—of course, from the perspective of the West. In this group, other Jews from countries farther east are also included, for instance those with roots in the Caucasus, Kurdistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan. Needless to say, this group is so heterogeneous that its main characteristic is that these Jews are non-Ashkenazi. This is clear when it comes to halachic authority in Israel, mainly family law: the Mizrahi Jews fall under the authority of the Sephardic chief rabbi, just like the Ashkenazi fall under the Ashkenazi chief rabbi. Some groups prefer referring to themselves by country of origin, for instance Moroccan Jews or Yemenite Jews, rather than using an umbrella term like Sephardic or Mizrahi. This article will deal with Jewish women living under Islamic rule in the MENA region as well as Jewish women in Muslim Spain and the Sephardic diaspora, thus including women who may be called either Sephardic or Mizrahi or both. On the one hand, the traditional Jewish texts dealing with the position of women are the same for all Jews, mainly the order of the Mishnah entitled Nashim (Women) and tractates like Niddah (on menstruation and sexual purity) and Mikvaot (on



Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms

mikvah, the purification bath). On the other hand, since Jewish law has always been adapted and interpreted in relation to specific contexts, in reality the application of the law has varied. This means that the notion of what was proper behavior for a Jewish woman was often affected by attitudes among non-Jews in a specific context. So, whereas medieval Jewish women in Christian regions were often active in family businesses, Jewish women in Muslim lands during the same period were rather expected to spend most of their lives in their homes. Likewise, Jewish men living under Islamic law could have several wives as well as concubines, whereas Jews living in Christian lands generally did not. As Jewish women living under Islam spent a large portion of their lives in their homes, they did not have access to the educational opportunities that contemporary Jewish men had, nor did they have the same possibilities of achieving influential positions in Islamic societies. It is clear that some women were literate, but it is difficult to know how many and to what extent. We know of some Jewish women from these areas who were considered learned, for instance the Andalusian poet Qasmuna, who was said to have been trained in the art of Arabic poetry by her father. We also know of some women who were learned enough to function as teachers for children, not merely their own. Women worked as midwives and healers but also as merchants and moneylenders and in various capacities in connection with the production of textiles, especially embroidery. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, Sephardic Jews settled all over the Mediterranean region and also parts of Christian Europe, especially the Netherlands. Some Jewish women with financial resources rose to prominence and influence in these new circumstances. Some families preferred to convert to Christianity to be able to stay in Spain. Some of these new Christians were sincere in their conversion. Others continued to practice Judaism in secret, in Spain as well as in its colonies in the Americas, usually referred to as Crypto-Jews in modern scholarship. Since this meant that religious practices were mainly maintained in the home, the women among these new Christians were especially a target for the Inquisition. Some Sephardic women, Crypto-Jews in Spain or resettled elsewhere, were also part of the various messianic movements that emerged in the early modern era around messianic figures like David Reuveni (1490–1541) and Shabbetai Zevi (1626–1676). One of the claims of Shabbetai Zevi was that he was going to improve the inferior status of women in Judaism. Eva Frank (1754–1816), the daughter of Shabbetai Zevi’s most prominent follower, Jacob Frank, founder of the Frankist movement, was an important leader in that movement. Her father claimed that she should be regarded as the mystical figure of the Shekinah, the Divine presence, who should lead the followers in the absence of the Messiah. The gendering of space and activities continued into modern times and influenced every aspect of women’s lives. Public space, including study houses and synagogues, was considered male space, whereas the home, especially the kitchen, was female space. Women were not expected to attend services in the synagogue and rarely did so. As a result of this gendering of space and activities, women generally did not learn Hebrew and could not participate in the study of sacred texts or in prayers, even if it had been allowed. The vehicle of women’s spirituality was

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instead poetry and songs in the vernaculars. These songs were transmitted orally and therefore did not have a fixed text but rather existed in many variations. The songs were constantly improvised upon, and new ones were composed. They were sung when women met, often to work together, for instance while cleaning the synagogue. The separation of sexes also meant that boys and girls outside the closest family rarely met, and marriages were generally settled by the parents. The lives of Sephardic women began to change in the second half of the 19th century. Two of the vehicles of change were interrelated: the establishment of modern schools, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the fact the women started to seek employment outside the home. The schools meant that girls could get a formal education as well as vocational training that enabled them to enter the workforce. Initially, it was mostly single women from poor families who needed to work to support themselves. In the 20th century, it became increasingly common for women to continue beyond a primary education, not just for economic reasons but also because of interest and personal fulfillment. As a result, the age of marriage rose, and it became increasingly common for young people to choose their own marriage partners. There was a major exodus of Mizrahi Jews from various countries in the MENA region to Israel during the 1950s. The Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews in Israel today are still, as a group, in a disadvantaged position in the political, economic, and cultural life in spite of the fact that the Mizrahi Jews constitute a majority of the Jewish population in Israel. Still, in sociological scholarship in the 1970s, Mizrahi Jewish women in Israel were negatively constructed as backward traditionalists, unsuited for a modern state, through a typical Orientalist discourse. This means that the marginal position of Mizrahi women was mainly seen as their own fault, not as a result of discrimination. This also affected early Israeli feminism, where Ashkenazi women thinkers elevated their own position by distancing themselves from the Oriental “other,” the Mizrahi women. It happened that early Mizrahi feminists were told by Ashkenazi feminists that they needed to focus on oppression by Mizrahi men and not on Ashkenazi oppression of Mizrahi Jews. Similar Ashkenazi Orientalist discourses about Mizrahi Judaism can also be found outside Israel, sometimes resulting in Mizrahi women who wish to become more strictly practicing adopting Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox practices, perceiving them as more authentic. Since the 1980s, there has been an emerging Mizrahi feminist discourse inspired by feminists of color in the United States. These feminists have criticized discrimination not only against Mizrahi but also against Palestinian-Israeli women and have demanded that Mizrahi, Palestinian, and lesbian women have equal representation at Israeli feminist conferences. The tension between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi feminists remains, where Mizrahi feminists challenge the Ashkenazi for focusing too much on the rights of Palestinian women while neglecting the situation of Mizrahi women. Lena Roos See also: Judaism: Feminist and Women’s Movements; Goddesses; Israel; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Sex and Gender; Synagogue; Women and Work



Sex and Gender

Further Reading Jacobson, Shari. “Modernity, Conservative Religious Movements, and the Female Subject: Newly Ultraorthodox Sephardi Women in Buenos Aires.” American Anthropologist 108, no. 2 (2006): 336–46. Lamdan, Ruth. “Jewish Women as Providers in the Generations Following the Expulsion from Spain.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues 13 (2007): 49–67. Lavie, Smadar. “Mizrahi Feminism and the Question of Palestine.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 7, no. 2 (2011): 56–88. Meyers, Carol, et al. “Woman.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica Vol. 21, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 156–209. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007. Motzafi-Haller, Pnina. “Scholarship, Identity, and Power: Mizrahi Women in Israel.” Signs 26, no. 3 (2001) 697–734. Shenhav, Yehouda. The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, and Ethnicity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

SEX AND GENDER Judaism is in its basic structure a binary religion. It tends to divide existence into binary opposites: pure/impure, sacred/profane, male/female. This means that religious practice for most of Judaism’s history, and still in Orthodox communities, has been divided according to gender lines. Women’s religious practice and roles in the family and the community differ substantially from men’s. In traditional Judaism, religious learning and leadership are all-male worlds, whereas in progressive forms, women have equal access to these areas. In the most traditional forms of Judaism, in the ultra-Orthodox/Haredi communities, women and men have very little contact, except for members of the closest family. Partly because of the binary character of Jewish tradition, Judaism has had difficulties in accommodating transpersons into this system. A study on gender and religious identity of transpersons with Orthodox background has revealed that the most difficult phase for them was when they were in transition from male to female appearance or vice versa. Once the transition was complete, sometimes through hormone treatment and surgery, the binary system served to confirm the gender identity of these persons, since the persons interviewed felt that they affirmed their gender identity through their everyday ritual practice and roles in the community. The abovementioned study also highlights that, at times, the system can be less binary than one might think, allowing also for a category defined as persons of unknown or unclear gender (tumtum). Although there are cases in the study of persons who, due to their gender identity, have been forced to leave particular Orthodox synagogues, there are also cases of rabbis who have tried to find ways of accommodating both transpersons and persons with nonbinary gender identity (Poveda Guillén 2017). One woman in this study on transpersons mentions that a major difficulty in the Orthodox community was not merely being a transwoman but also not being fertile or having children. The passage in Genesis 1:28 in which humankind is instructed to be fruitful and multiply is in traditional Judaism understood as a

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sacred commandment. In the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community, families tend to be very big in comparison with the non-Haredi population. In that community, women are excluded from many important parts of traditional piety, most notably the study of traditional texts in a yeshiva (religious academy). Women’s piety is instead in part measured by their ability to raise pious sons who will grow up to be great scholars of Jewish tradition. The high value placed on fertility and procreation also means that in traditional Judaism, the attitude toward contraceptives and abortion has been very restrictive. Generally, contraceptives have only been allowed if a pregnancy would endanger the mother’s life or the life of another child if the mother is currently breastfeeding. The types of contraceptives allowed are also only those used by women. Among more progressive forms of Judaism, contraceptives both for women and men are allowed. But procreation is not the only goal with sex. A husband has a duty called onah, which refers to satisfying his wife sexually. The Mishnah (codified around 200 CE) outlines the frequency that can be expected, depending on profession. A wealthy man who does not have to work for his living should have sex with his wife every day; a sailor’s duty, however, is only once every six months, that of a donkey driver once a week, and that of a camel driver once a month (Mishnah Ketubbot 5:6). The wife’s right to sexual satisfaction is not affected by the chances for procreation; a pregnant or infertile wife has the same rights. Also characteristic of traditional Judaism is the system often referred to as taharat mishpachah (family purity). This is an important area of personal piety that is largely in the hands of the women, since it concerns one of the merely three commandments in Jewish law that are directed specifically to women, the commandment of niddah. Niddah is Hebrew for “menstruation” or “menstruating woman” but is often used as a more general term for sexual impurity. Clearly the Talmudic rabbis considered this an important part of Jewish law, since an entire tractate of the Talmud is dedicated to marital sex (tractate Niddah). This system takes as its point of departure Leviticus 15:19–24, which states that a menstruating woman is ritually impure for seven days. Anything she sits or lies on is also impure, and that impurity is transferred to whoever touches that which she has sat and laid on. In postbiblical Jewish law, this period was extended by also including seven days after menstruation, the so-called white days. During this period, a woman must examine herself daily to make sure that she is not bleeding. If during this examination she discovers a stain of menstrual blood, she must commence a new period of white days once she has ascertained that the bleeding has stopped. Not only sexual relations are prohibited during this period but also any physical contact between spouses, passing things to one another, eating from the same plate, or seeing each other naked. Traditional couples who follow these rules strictly may even have separate beds that can be pushed apart during the period of the woman’s impurity to prevent any accidental touching during sleep. After the end of the white days, the woman must immerse herself in a ritual bath, a mikvah, before resuming physical contact with her husband.



Sex and Gender

Within more progressive forms of Judaism, the rules of family purity have long been considered obsolete and as an obstacle to equality between women and men. There seems, however, to be a renaissance for this practice also outside Orthodoxy but with a different understanding. Now it is understood as a way of stressing the sanctity of marriage and sexuality and as a way of maintaining sexual interest in a marriage by going between abstinence and sexual activity. There has also been an increased interest in going to the mikvah beginning in the 21st century, but this is not necessarily connected to notions of impurity but rather as a way of spiritual and physical rebirth, for instance after sickness, miscarriage, or even rape. Some mikvaot resemble luxurious spas where women are able to have some relaxing “me time.” Within Orthodoxy, the dominant view is that sexuality should be practiced within a heterosexual, monogamous marriage. During earlier periods, polygamy and marriage to concubines was allowed, but this is no longer practiced. To be a halachically valid marriage, the marriage partner must be an eligible candidate, which excludes same-sex marriages, marriages to non-Jews, or relations that are considered to be incestuous as outlined by Leviticus 18:6–18 and rabbinical commentaries on those verses. Part of the rationale for reserving sex for married relations is to be able to ascertain who the father of a child is, to know that the child is not a mamzer, a product of an illicit relation. This, in turn, is important due to restrictions on whom a mamzer may marry (another mamzer or a convert to Judaism). Same-sex relations between women have generally not been seen as grave a sin as same-sex relations between men, which is explicitly prohibited in the Bible (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13). Still, most of the Orthodox world still reject treating same-sex relations on par with heterosexual relations. A film that shook the Orthodox Jewish world was the documentary Trembling before G-d (2001, director Sandi Simcha Dubowski) in which a number of homosexual Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox women and men in Israel and the United States talk about their lives, some of them living in heterosexual marriages and others in same-sex relations. More progressive forms of Judaism in the United States now permit various forms of marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples and rabbinical ordination of homosexual women and men. The attitudes in Israel are less permissive, probably due to the fact that a larger portion of the Jewish population define themselves as Orthodox/Haredi. Lena Roos See also: Judaism: Israel; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Mishnah; Mitzvah; Rabbis; Synagogue Further Reading Alpert, Rebecca. Like Bread on a Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of a Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Biale, David. Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

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Broyde, Michael J., and Michael Ausubel, eds. Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva. Menstrual Purity. Rabbinic and Christian Reconstruction of Biblical Gender. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Plaskow, Judith, and Donna Berman, eds. The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics. Boston: Beacon, 2005. Poveda Guillén, Oriol. “According to Whose Will: The Entanglements of Gender and Religion in the Lives of Transgender Jews with an Orthodox Background.” PhD diss., Uppsala University, 2017. Satlow, Michael. Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality. Atlanta: Scholars, 1995. Valler, Shulamit. Women and Womanhood in the Talmud. Atlanta: Scholars, 1999.

S H A B B AT ( S A B B AT H ) Also known as the Sabbath, Shabbat (from the Hebrew shavat, meaning “cease, rest; seventh”) is a day of rest and refraining from work that, according to Jewish tradition, occurs on the seventh day of each week, beginning at sundown on Friday and ending at sundown on Saturday. The biblical injunction to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy by performing the week’s work within six days so that the seventh may be a day of rest is explicitly commanded of all members of the household, including servants and animals, regardless of sex or gender (Exodus 20:8–11; Deuteronomy 5:12–15). Other than this particular specification, the Hebrew Bible does not detail how Shabbat is to be kept; therefore many traditions abound, traditions that are taught both through institutional education and in the Jewish home. Three of the customs most common to Jewish communities around the globe focus on the role of women as active agents in the initiation and observance of Shabbat. Since maintaining the household, including food preparation, traditionally falls within the responsibilities of women, observant Jewish women take special measures to prepare the house for Shabbat so that everyone in the household may observe the holiday fully. For example, all foods that are to be eaten during those 24 hours, including the Friday-night feast and challah bread, are prepared before sundown on Friday and left in a low-temperature oven or slow-cooker until mealtime. This practice has inspired much culinary creativity, such as the chili-like dish chulent, and connects women across generations as recipes, cooking duties, and other domestic Shabbat preparations are shared among the women of the household and beyond. Another Shabbat tradition that has historically been the responsibility of women is setting aside the challah portion. The Bible states that when the Israelites entered the land promised to them, they were to regularly give a portion of their bread or dough to the priests as a gift to God and as part of the priests’ salary (Numbers 15:18–21). Although the Temple and priestly system are no longer operative, the custom of dedicating a portion of bread—in this case, challah—continues, except rather than give a sizeable amount to the priest, an olive-sized portion of dough is burnt or otherwise disposed of respectfully. In this way, when a woman prepares the challah



Shabbat (Sabbath)

Jewish woman lights the candles for Shabbat. Many traditions exist for observing Shabbat, or Sabbath, including covering the head (the woman in the photo is wearing a wig), and making the challah (braided bread). (In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)

and sets aside the portion, she preserves the memory of the days when the Temple was operative and also the hope that another temple will someday take its place. Perhaps the most well-known Shabbat tradition that is specific to women is the lighting of the candles. Although it is not clear when or why this tradition began, what is clear is that the practice is at least 2,000 years old and is considered by rabbinic tradition as a command directed specifically to women (Shanks 1999, 8–10). On Friday evenings, in the early moments of Shabbat, the woman of the household lights the Shabbat candles (specific customs vary from culture to culture) and recites the Hebrew blessing, “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who sanctified us with thy commandments and commanded us to kindle the lights of Shabbat.” With this act and these words, she has marked the beginning of Shabbat and initiated this holy time of rest for her household. In addition to women’s practical roles in the preparation and observance of Shabbat, Shabbat itself is often spoken of in liturgy and song as a queen or bride, especially in mystical traditions. This personification emphasizes that one is to enter in relationship with Shabbat in a meaningful way and that the “groom,” the Jewish people, await its arrival with anticipation and love. The feminine characteristics of Shabbat also emphasize its connection to family and home as well as the sensual pleasures encouraged in Shabbat observance, such as eating and making love. Amy L. Balogh

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See also: Judaism: Food; Hebrew Bible; Mitzvah Further Reading Elon, Menachem. “Woman.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 21, 2nd ed., edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolni, 156–207. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2006. Raphael, Melissa. “Gender and Religion: Gender and Judaism.” In Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., edited by Lindsay Jones, 3350–56. New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004. Shanks, Hershel. “Lighting Shabbat Candles—Where Is It Commanded?” Moment 24, no. 5 (1999): 8–10.

SYNAGOGUE The relationship of women to the Jewish synagogue has changed through history and taken various forms in different geographic places. In ancient times until the modern period, women were not normally counted in the quorum of 10 adult men required to perform central parts of Jewish prayer services, nor did women lead worship for their congregation, or later, serve as rabbis and cantors. From the early medieval period to modern times, from what is known, synagogues normally had separate sections for men and women. Despite (or perhaps, on account of) these historical limitations on women’s involvement in synagogue worship, we find records in various locations of women’s contributions to the financial and material maintenance of synagogue structures. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these patterns shifted as gender identities and roles changed and women’s marginality in the synagogue became more apparent. Debates ensued in many synagogues and in various denominations regarding the introduction of mixed (family) seating, the possibility of women leading prayers, women’s ordination, and liturgical amendments to introduce feminine language. In Jewish antiquity, women may not have been segregated from men in the Second Temple, which became the structural model in many ways for early synagogues (Grossman and Haut 1992). It would thus seem that it was only in the rabbinic period that severe restrictions became imposed, limiting women’s access to synagogue space. Likewise, there is evidence that in the first centuries of the common era, women’s presence in early synagogues was common, and there may not have been barriers between genders (Safrai 2004). Women attended sermons, prayed along with male worshippers, and may have even read from the Torah. The predominant norm through history of women’s exclusion from the synagogue may, therefore, be a sociohistorical development that occurred in Babylon roughly around 200–500 CE (Safrai 2004). Rabbinic reasoning supporting women’s exclusion from the synagogue included a number of Jewish legal concerns. Among others, these included the exemption of women from time-based commandments; issues of honor in a community where women leading prayers would suggest that men lacked these skills, causing the latter embarrassment; the prohibition against hearing a woman’s singing voice; and in various communities, concern about women’s impurity caused by menstrual blood. Yet, while the general norm in most communities was that women were excluded from the synagogue sanctuary and from synagogue rituals, there are examples in various places and times of women’s active participation in other ways.



Synagogue

In medieval Cairo, Jewish women regularly attended synagogue (Reguer 1992). While they were not involved in leading worship, they served as caretakers and contributed financially by buying liturgical honors for male kin and donating oil, lamps, and books. Through the Middle Ages in Germany, Italy, and neighboring areas, women acted as prayer leaders for other women in a separate gallery adjacent to the synagogue sanctuary (Taitz 1992). These women taught other women how to pray and offered translations of the liturgy. Some women also wrote tehinot (specialized prayers) to be uttered by women both in the synagogue and at home, providing spiritual recitations that related directly to women’s daily lives. Several of these supplications added the biblical matriarchs to passages that normally only included the patriarchs. Also at this time, in medieval Europe, there was a shift in Jewish legal prohibitions against menstruating women’s presence in the synagogue (Baumgarten 2014). By the 17th century, it is reported that Shabbetai Zevi took a Torah scroll into the women’s section and called women to read from the Torah. This act, however, was considered scandalous by the Jewish community and may have led, in response, to further restrictions in subsequent centuries on women’s synagogue involvement. In Kurdistan and neighboring areas, there is evidence that women didn’t enter the synagogue at all (Sered 1992). Likewise, in Yemen, women were barred from the synagogue because they were considered impure due to menstrual blood (Katzir 1976). Later, however, in the 20th century in Jerusalem, for some women from the Middle East and North Africa, it was expected that once they grew older and were no longer responsible for taking care of their families, they would begin attending synagogue services even if they did not understand the rituals. Beginning in the 19th century, women’s relationship to the synagogue underwent a major shift, in the United States especially. Synagogues were seen in the United States as the Jewish form of a church, and since in Christianity female religiosity was expressed in church, Jewish female religiosity was expected to be expressed in synagogues as well (Goldman 1997). More women than men were attending synagogue at this time, and women’s exclusion from ritual action and leadership became much more explicit. In turn, women’s balconies above the main sanctuary were architecturally adjusted to be open, and barriers were removed. Mixed seating, often called family seating, became increasingly popular as well. Since the beginning of the 20th century, sisterhoods were founded in synagogues across the denominational spectrum of American Judaism, raising funds for their synagogues and organizing social events. Through the century, women in various denominations began to serve on congregational lay leadership boards. In the sanctuary, Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement, introduced the first bat mitzvah for his daughter in 1922. Bat mitzvah ceremonies began to appear in Reform congregations in the 1950s. The first female Reform rabbi in the United States was ordained in 1972, formally establishing women’s equal status within this movement. In the Conservative movement, a paper was issued in 1955 suggesting that women be honored by being called up to the reading of the Torah in an attempt to give women more equal status in the sanctuary. In 1973, a debate was carried out

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over counting women in a minyan (the quorum of adults required for communal prayer), followed in 1974 by the Conservative movement’s adoption of a series of proposals that suggested that women be considered equal to men in all areas of Jewish ritual. A decade later, the Conservative movement accepted women to serve as rabbis and cantors. The story of women’s shifting involvement in modern Orthodox synagogues is ongoing. Beginning in the late 1970s, Orthodox women’s prayer groups were established, mainly in New York and later in other American cities, in Montreal, in Jerusalem, and in a few other locations across the world. In these groups, women lead prayers for each other and, most importantly, read the weekly portion of the Torah (a central ritual in the synagogue service), yet they normally do not perform the liturgies that require a quorum of 10 adult men. Because women read from the Torah, these groups have been at the center of a considerable amount of controversy in Orthodox circles. With some exceptions, most of these groups have not been allowed to hold their services in Orthodox synagogues and instead have had to meet in party rooms or private homes. In 2002, offering another model of women’s increased participation, an independent Orthodox religious community was established in Jerusalem that holds services where women read from the Torah and lead parts of the service on the other side of the barrier that separates genders. This model of worship, which continues to consider itself Orthodox despite opposition, has been copied by several independent groups across the world. In more institutional Jewish settings in recent years, in a few modern Orthodox synagogues, the Torah scroll is passed through the women’s section, and women have been able to give sermons in the main sanctuary. Debates are ongoing regarding Orthodox women’s ordination, though several cohorts of women have already been ordained by one school in New York and by individual rabbis in other locations. Apart from these somewhat outlying examples, in most Orthodox synagogues, women sit behind a barrier or up in a gallery and participate by praying privately. In many communities, especially ultra-Orthodox, married women with children attend services infrequently unless there is a special occasion, such as a holiday or family event. In these communities, where gender identities and roles are especially distinct, the synagogue is largely a male domain, as it was for many centuries since the early Middle Ages. Yet, while women remain excluded from the main synagogue rituals in such contexts, increased women’s education over the past century has meant that most Orthodox women can easily follow services from the women’s section, and prayer, in the synagogue or at home, plays a critically important part in their lives. Hannah Mayne See also: Judaism: American Denominations: 1850 to Present; Bat Mitzvah; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Mishnah; Rabbis; Sex and Gender Further Reading Baumgarten, Elisheva. Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.



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Goldman, Karla. “When the Women Came to Shul.” In Judaism since Gender, edited by Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, 57–61. New York: Routledge, 1997. Grossman, Susan, and Rivka Haut, eds. Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakhah, and Contemporary Realities. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Katzir, Yael. “The Effects of Resettlement on the Status and Role of Yemeni Jewish Women: The Case of Ramat Oranim, Israel.” PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1976. Reguer, Sara. “Women and the Synagogue in Medieval Cairo.” In Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakhah, and Contemporary Realities, edited by Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, 51–57. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Safrai, Chana. “The Minyan: Gender and Democracy.” In Men and Women: Gender, Judaism, and Democracy, edited by Rachel Elior, 112–21. Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2004. Safrai, Hannah. “Women and the Ancient Synagogue.” In Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakhah, and Contemporary Realities Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, 39–50. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Sered, Susan. Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Taitz, Emily. “Women’s Voices, Women’s Prayers: The European Synagogues of the Middle Ages.” In Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakhah, and Contemporary Realities, edited by Susan Grossman and Rivka Haut, 59–72. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992.

WOMEN AND WORK The acceptability of productive work, and especially remunerative work for women, and what kind, has been discussed in Judaism from almost the beginning of Jewish history, and opinions from various sources in various periods, along with realities on the ground, have been shaped by a variety of historical contexts. Neither opinion nor practice has consistently conformed to larger gender assumptions in regard to whether it was acceptable for women to work for pay, and, if so, in what kinds of occupations. This includes a long-standing acceptance in the Orthodox world of wives working to support their husband’s Torah study as well as the acceptability of women contributing to family businesses or toward family support with unpaid as well as paid labor. The study of Jewish women and work has historically been complicated by a lack of information, as most traditional Jewish histories have paid relatively little attention either to women’s issues or to gender as a category. A comparative lack of primary sources on Jewish women and work has also complicated research, and when it has been available, the information they provide contains relatively few clues as to what was normal versus what was exceptional. Finally, for many areas of history, the definition of work itself has not always been clear cut, even beyond the ancient agricultural economy, in a time when women’s household labors actively contributed to household economies. Women and Work in Ancient Israel

In the ancient world of the Bible, when household economies were based on agriculture, there was little distinction between work and home. There was also less

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gender distinction when it came to agricultural chores than commonly assumed. Although women in high-status occupations, such as Deborah (book of Judges), were known precisely for their exceptionality, even the archetypical Wife of Valor described in Proverbs was much more than a housewife and is described producing goods, purchasing property, and dealing in commerce. The postbiblical literature of the Talmud has somewhat conflicting views on work and the appropriate roles for women, affirming women’s preference for work over idleness but delineating to a certain degree what kind of work is appropriate for women. Most notable is the ruling that even a woman with servants must perform some household tasks to avoid the sinful possibilities of idleness. Otherwise, there have been relatively few work restrictions specific to women beyond avoidance of household labors during part of Rosh Hodesh and while the Chanukah candles were burning. The historical realities of ancient times reflected the images of women and work portrayed in biblical literature, with women’s work being integral to the functioning of a predominantly agricultural society in which there was relatively little division between household labors and sustaining a household. Although some women held more unusual and specialized positions, ranging from scribe to musician, the majority of women’s work was centered on the household economy, and women were responsible for much of the hard daily labor that ranged from food preparation to the care and raising of children (Meyers 1998). Women and Work in the Diaspora

Throughout postexilic history, women’s remunerative work in Judaism was limited more by religion than by gender, although there were variations both within and between the Ashkenazic (western and eastern European) and Sephardic (southern European and Levantine) world, reflecting the greater or lesser freedom of movement for women within the host society. In most situations, through the Middle Ages, Jewish women practiced many of the same occupations to which Jewish men were limited, from merchant to moneylender, along with distinctly female occupations that included mikvah (ritual bathhouse) attendant and midwife. Many businesswomen of this era came into business ownership through widowhood and inheritance of their husband’s enterprises, with the most famous example Dona Gracia Mendes (1510–1569), whose heroism as the rare female Jewish leader of this era was made possible by her stewardship of the Mendes banking and mercantile empire that she inherited from her late husband and brother-in-law (Grossman 2004). Women’s participation and sometimes stewardship of family businesses continued into the early modern era, and the phenomenon of a widow taking over the management of her late husband’s business rather than handing it over to male relatives was widely accepted. One of the most famous examples is memoirist Gluckl of Hameln (1646–1724), who, following her husband’s death, continued to run the family businesses while raising 14 children. Continuing into the modern era, professional-class work—primarily, though not exclusively, teaching—became acceptable for single women, but work by married women was generally considered a lower-class phenomenon, though an acceptable one. For example, in 19th-century



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Germany, Jewish middle- and working-class women worked in a variety of occupations, though in the middle class they were most likely to be unpaid (Kaplan 1991). In the meantime, in Imperial Russia and Eastern Europe, a combination of the increasingly restricted opportunities for Jews and religious approval of wives working to support their husband’s study meant that most women in this community were engaging in remunerative work that ranged from home manufacturing to peddling. Notably, in this world, where the main prestige lay in religious study rather than earning, women’s breadwinning roles did not necessarily raise their status within families but did provide them with a sense of self-worth and strength (Weinberg 1988). Coming to the United States, this culture and economic necessity would clash with the American ideal of the husband as breadwinner. Coming to the United States

Historically, immigrant Jewish women had worked, usually in family businesses, since the first Sephardic arrivals in the 1600s. And as the second wave of German Jews migrated from the East Coast across the country, Jewish women became farm wives and managed the dry goods stores into which many peddling operations evolved (Diner and Benderly 2002). But it was the arrival of the third wave of Jewish immigrants that included an unusually high percentage of female migrants who would have the most challenging balancing act between economic necessity and Americanization. Adjusting to the unacceptability of married women working outside the home, immigrant Jewish wives worked from within, making money in ways that ranged from doing outsourced factory “homework” to taking in boarders. Their daughters, however, went out to work, generally choosing factory work over domestic service, with the more Americanized ones seeking out department-store or white-collar positions, or in subsequent generations, becoming teachers. Although all female factory workers were assumed to be there only temporarily until they got married, young Jewish women defied assumptions of unorganizability to play leading roles in the labor movement. With comparatively rapid Americanization and upward mobility that included the expectation that male honor was no longer in religious study but breadwinning, American Jewish women increasingly adopted the homemaker ideal, albeit seeking college degrees and training in traditionally feminine professions, such as teaching or nursing, “just in case.” It would not be until the late 20th century with Jewish women’s involvement in the second wave feminist movement that Jewish women would challenge these expectations and pursue career choices far beyond teaching and nursing (Diner and Benderly 2002). It is for these reasons that Jewish attitudes toward affirmative action have been divided by gender, with Jewish men more likely to oppose it as a new version of the anti-Jewish quotas and Jewish women more likely to support it as one of the best-positioned groups to benefit from it. Women and Work in Modern Israel

During the 20th century, the rebirth of the State of Israel would create its own sometimes contradictory expectations regarding Jewish women and work. While

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the halutza (female pioneer) who worked the land alongside the men was admired in theory, in practice, work on the kibbutzim (collective communities) increasingly reverted to traditional gender expectations. And from statehood onward, the necessary centrality of military service has been a double-edged phenomenon for women who serve only in noncombat roles, as military service remains an important part of career advancement in Israel. Beyond the military, Israel has been a couple of decades behind the United States in terms of career advancement, and paid employment among Israeli Jewish women is very much affected by parental status, even though affordable child care is much more available (Kaddari 2004). In addition, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) population follows the traditional pattern of wives working to support their husband’s Torah study, increasingly in fields such as computers that take them beyond the confines of their communities and illustrate anew the tension between Jewish tradition and modernity. Susan Roth Breitzer See also: Judaism: Ancient Judaism; Education; Feminist and Women’s Movements; Food; Hebrew Bible; Israel; Judaism in Europe; Judaism in the United States; Marriage and Divorce; Modern and Contemporary Judaism; Rosh Hodesh; Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms; Sex and Gender; Shabbat (Sabbath) Further Reading Diner, Hasia, and Beverly Lieff Benderly. Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Fishman, Sylvia Barack. A Breath of Life: Feminism in the American Jewish Community. New York: Free Press, 1993. Grossman, Avraham. Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. Kaddari, Ruth Halpern. Women in Israel: A State of Their Own. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Kaplan, Marion A. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Meyers, Carol. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Weinberg, Sydney Stahl. The World of Our Mothers. New York: Schocken Books, 1988.

Paganism

INTRODUCTION The Paganism section includes entries on religious groups that self-identify as Pagan and whose historical development can be traced to the 19th and 20th centuries, with ideas and practices drawn from ancient traditions. Modern Paganism is diverse and widespread, with Pagans in the United States, Canada, South America, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, and elsewhere. Among the new religions arising in the 20th century, it has been called Neo-Paganism, with neo meaning “new,” as in a renewal of the “old” (ancient) traditions from which the name Pagan is taken. The term pagan originated in the ancient world as a sometimes derogatory term referring to polytheistic worship practices seen by newer faith groups, such as Christians, as primitive, even savage. This negative association continued into modern times, with common use denoting people seen as irreligious outsiders. These usages are now outdated, and there is growing acceptance of the term Pagan as connoting positive spiritual groups and practices. Common threads between the many diverse Pagans today are a reverence for nature and for the Divine Feminine and an emphasis on the aspects and seasons of nature. There is crossover with other contemporary spiritualities (see the Spirituality section), as well as differences. Contemporary spiritualities tend more toward modern innovation, while reconstruction and revival of older traditions is important to many Pagans; nonetheless, there are innovations and revivals in both categories. The entry “Paganism” by Race MoChridhe provides an overview of the traditions, history, and diversity of contemporary Paganism. In “Seasonal Celebrations,” Michelle Claire White relates Pagan celebrations that mark the cycles and changing seasons of nature, from the winter solstice through the autumn equinox and those in between. Also basic to many Pagan rituals is magic. In the entry of that title, Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) discusses magic within the natural world, its function in diverse Pagan practices, and mystical connections between nature, the feminine, and the masculine. Among the Pagan religions, Wicca is the best known. In her essay on this topic, Vivianne Crowley identifies important Wiccan beliefs and practices, among them, veneration of the Divine as manifest in nature, and outdoor rites. Pinpointing the origins of Wicca in 20th-century England and its spread through the writings of Gerald Gardner (1884–1964), Crowley traces its further spread through inspirational and leading women, such as Doreen Valiente (1922–1999), whose liturgical writings have supported Wiccan practice, and Zsuzsanna Budapest (b. 1940), who

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founded the first women-only feminist coven. Crowley also notes the growing recognition of Wicca as a religion today and its strong representation in interfaith movements. A variety of other groups or emphases within Paganism are discussed in separate entries, including “Eco-Paganism,” “Heathenry,” “Druidry,” and “Reconstructionist Paganism.” As some of these show, not all Pagan traditions are feminist. While women and the feminine are clearly and highly valued in Paganism as a whole, there are some Pagans with antifeminist views (see Odinism in “Heathenry”). Roles and responsibilities of women leaders in Paganism are discussed in “Priestesses and Elders,” where MoChridhe notes some variations and contested areas between different groups. Creating and leading rituals is an important function of Pagan priestesses. In “Rituals,” Wiccan high priestess Ruth Barrett provides an overview of the development of women’s rituals in Pagan practices. Some of these have been reconstructed from ancient women’s mysteries, she notes, while others are created through experimentation and innovation. Barrett’s essay also details some types, methods, and meanings of rites for women. General Bibliography—Paganism Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America. New York: Penguin, 1986. Budapest, Zsuzsanna. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow, 1989 Clifton, C. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006. Coleman, Kristy S. Re-riting Woman: Dianic Wicca and the Feminine Divine. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2009. Crowley, Vivianne. Wicca: A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Religion in the Modern World. 2nd ed. London: Element/HarperCollins, 2003. Dashu, Max. Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700–1100. Richmond, CA: Veleda, 2016. Davy, Barbara J. Introduction to Pagan Studies. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007. Griffin, Wendy. Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2000. Harvey, Graham, and Charlotte Hardman, eds. Paganism Today: Wiccans, Druids, the Goddess and Ancient Earth Traditions for the Twenty-First Century. San Francisco: Thorsons, 1996. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hwang, Helen Hye-Sook, and Mary Anne Beavis, eds. Celebrating Seasons of the Goddess. n.p.: Mago Books, 2017. Krasskova, G. Transgressing Faith: Race, Gender and the Problem of Ergi in Modern Heathenry. n.p.: Sanngetall, 2013. Meredith, Jane. Rituals of Celebration: Honouring the Seasons of Life through the Wheel of the Year. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2013. McCoy, Edain. The Sabbats: A New Approach to Living the Old Ways. Saint Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1999. Pearson, Joanne, Richard H. Roberts, and Geoffrey Samuel. Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.



Druidry

Pike, Sarah M. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Rabinovitch, Shelley T. S. The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2011. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979. York, Michael. Pagan Ethics: Paganism as a World Religion. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer International Publishing, 2016.

D R U I D RY Druidry is a Celtic-inspired spiritual tradition focused on fostering connection with nature and cultivating poetic inspiration. The relatively scarce evidence for the Druids of ancient Celtic societies (sixth century BCE–fifth century CE) suggests that women were full participants prior to the Roman conquests. Women were initially excluded, however, from modern forms of Druidry, which emerged in the 18th century as fraternal organizations inspired by the development of new archaeological interest in Britain and Ireland’s ancient monuments, parallel to and often interconnected with Freemasonry and similar societies. Most orders opened to women once again as a variety of changes occurred, beginning in the mid-19th century and reaching their culmination in the 1960s, when large numbers of Pagans entered the formally ecumenical, but previously Christian-dominated, Druid orders. Today, women hold approximately half of the leadership positions and constitute over half of the membership of most major orders, including the world’s largest—the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids (OBOD, est. 1964). The first modern order to admit women was the United Ancient Order of Druids (1833–1979)—a splinter of the Ancient Order of Druids (est. 1781)— which admitted women as auxiliaries, much like certain forms of Freemasonry. It was under the influence of friendly societies such as these, as well as organizations related to the Woodcraft movement, such as the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift (1920–1932), that the Ancient Druid Order (ADO, est. 1717, modern form since 1909, a.k.a. The Druid Order, An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas, or The British Circle of the Universal Bond)—the first to promote Druidry as a system of spirituality—opened its ranks to women. One of its most notable early female members was Vera Chapman (1898–1996), best known as the founder of the Tolkien Society and the author of the Arthurian Trilogy. One of the first women admitted to Oxford in 1920, she was also one of the first women to leave a lasting mark on modern Druidry, first as a prolific writer and scholar in the ADO and then as the pendragon of the OBOD following its split from the ADO in 1964. The OBOD and the great majority of orders founded since have been inclusive, and other notable modern Druidesses include the former joint chief of the British Druid Order (est. 1979) and founder of the Druid Network (est. 2002) Emma Restall Orr (b. 1965), the former vice president of the Henge of Keltria (est. 1988) and cochief of the Order of WhiteOak (est. 1997) Ellen Evert Hopman (b. 1952),

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and the former vice president of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (est. 1985) Phaedra Bonewits (b. 1951). Most Druid orders focus on the cultivation of spiritual/poetic inspiration, named by either the Welsh term Awen or the Irish term Imbas. Some American orders, such as Ár nDraíocht Féin, emphasize this less while putting a greater focus on building relationships with one or more deities. Both approaches are based on relating to the Divine Feminine. Awen/Imbas has a long history of identification as a feminine power, having been commonly associated by medieval bards under Christianization with the feminine Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. The deities most commonly venerated by modern Druids are, similarly, the Irish Goddess Brigid—whom the pre-Christian Celts regarded as the Patroness of Druids and the Bestower of Imbas (and whom the converted Irish identified with Mary)—and the Welsh Goddess Cerridwen, whose cauldron was the source of Awen. The cauldron is associated in Druidic traditions with the womb of both birth and rebirth and is seen as a metaphor for the creative power of Awen/Imbas—a tradition drawn from the medieval Irish text The Cauldron of Poesy (seventh century), which envisions the subtle body as three cauldrons in the pelvis, chest, and head (similar to the Indian system of chakras) and conceptualizes divine and poetic inspiration, even for male Druids, through the metaphor of pregnancy. Race MoChridhe See also: Paganism: Paganism Further Reading Bonewits, I. Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism. New York: Citadel, 2006. Eason, C. The Modern-Day Druidess. New York: Citadel, 2003. Hutton, R. Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Mulligan, A. C. “‘The Satire of the Poet Is a Pregnancy’: Pregnant Poets, Body Metaphors, and Cultural Production in Medieval Ireland.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108, no. 4 (October 2009): 481–505.

E C O - PA G A N I S M Eco-Paganism is a movement grounded in elements of feminist spirituality and Goddess worship whose adherents combine dimensions of Pagan theology and environmental activism in their beliefs and rituals. Many women who practice Eco-Paganism attest to the relationship they perceive between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature, often referred to by Pagans as the Great Mother. Inspired by concepts such as James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, which asserts that earth’s organic and inorganic materials work symbiotically to produce the conditions of life, Eco-Pagans confirm their commitment to venerating and protecting nature through a complex system of environmental philosophies and activist projects. Some Pagans argue that their commitment to the sacredness of nature and the feminine further distinguishes their beliefs and practices from patriarchal, monotheistic traditions that convey the idea that the earth—and



Eco-Paganism

women’s bodies—are meant for instrumental consumption (Starhawk 1982; Harris 1996; Pike 2004). Eco-Paganism arose simultaneously in the United States and Britain during the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. During this era, several notable women on the cutting edge of environmental and feminist activism constructed the ideological framework of Eco-Paganism. Among them was the founder of San Francisco’s Reclaiming community, Starhawk (b. 1951), whose book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religions of the Great Goddess (1979) explicates Paganism’s spiritual and practical commitment to both women and the environment, especially the belief that everything—animate and inanimate—has some level of consciousness and is a manifestation of the Goddess. Starhawk (1982, 12) emphasizes the importance of going beyond mere ideology to embodied practice in one’s daily life, noting, “Meditation on the balance of nature might be considered a spiritual act in Witchcraft, but not as much as cleaning up garbage left at a campsite or marching to protest an unsafe nuclear plant.” Eco-Pagans’ reverence for all the elements of nature, which are pervaded by the Divine Feminine, guide their work to rehabilitate the environment and combat the oppression of women. In her seminal work Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, GoddessWorshippers, and Other Pagans in America (1979), scholar-practitioner Margot Adler (1946–2014) notes that the most ardent followers of this Pagan-inspired, environmental activist lifestyle understand the necessity for change at all levels of society, including political, economic, and religious. These transformations work from the bottom up, beginning with individuals who make personal choices such as adopting vegetarianism or forgoing automobiles, which will eventually build up to global policy changes and a radical shift in humankind’s consciousness of its relationship to the natural world. These transformations are thought to be particularly powerful when initiated by female practitioners who, some claim, have an intuitive relationship with nature. Healing the natural world will in turn empower women and strengthen their position in global society. The contemporary Pagan movement represents a great diversity of belief and practice among both solitary practitioners and affiliated groups, such as Druids, Heathens, Shamans, and Wiccans. One such group that actively aligns itself with Eco-Paganism, and is founded on Starhawk’s writings on nature and the Divine Feminine, is the Dragon Environmental Network. Founded in London in 1990, Dragon is a decentralized group of Pagan activists who use a variety of magical rituals to address environmental issues, such as deforestation, genetically modified crops, and animal abuse. Eco-Pagans use magic and ritual to combat environmental ruin and to support the women who work every day to protect the natural world. Clara Schoonmaker See also: Paganism: Druidry; Magic; Paganism; Wicca; Spirituality: Deep Ecology; Ecofeminism; Goddess Spirituality

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Further Reading de Angeles, Ly, Emma Restall Orr, and Thom van Dooren. Pagan Visions for a Sustainable Future. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2005. Harris, Adrian. “Sacred Ecology.” In Paganism Today: Wiccans, Druids, the Goddess and Ancient Earth Traditions for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, 149–57. San Francisco: Thorsons, 1996. Harvey, Graham. Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Letcher, Andrew James. “The Scouring of the Shire: Fairies, Trolls and Pixies in Eco-Protest Culture.” Folklore 112 (2001): 147–61. Pike, Sarah M. New Age and Neopagan Religions in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Boston: Beacon, 1982.

ELDERS See Priestesses and Elders H E AT H E N R Y Heathenry is an umbrella term for modern Pagan traditions based on the beliefs and customs of pre-Christian Germanic cultures. Women constitute, on average, approximately one-third of practitioners (Schnurbein 2016, 216)—a percentage that has risen over the past 30 years (Snook 2015, 108)—and their roles vary substantially among different groups, owing both to the influences of broader political and cultural movements with which those groups are aligned as well as the mixed record of women’s status and of gender identity provided by the medieval texts and folk customs that inspire modern Heathen practice. In the English-speaking countries, Latin America, and Iceland, the primary divisions among Heathens fall between universalist and folkish practitioners, with the former holding that Heathenry may be practiced by anyone and the latter believing that it is only relevant to, or appropriate for, persons of Germanic ancestry. Some folkish Heathens prefer the terms Odinism or Wotanism to describe their traditions. In the German-speaking countries and continental Scandinavia, the chief division is instead between Ásatrú groups that focus on reconstruction of traditions from the evidence of medieval archaeology and the Eddas, and fólkatrú groups that reject what they see as an artificial approach in favor of organically developing surviving folk traditions that have origins in pre-Christian times. Although it is common for Heathens of all paths to celebrate the heritage of greater freedom and influence enjoyed by women in Norse culture compared to many other medieval societies, folkish and conservative-leaning Heathen groups frequently attempt to hew so closely to the models of medieval Norse society as to be judged antifeminist by modern standards. Such groups have been associated with the perpetuation of essentialist gender constructs that promote hypermasculinized behavior for men and stereotypical roles for women as homemakers and mothers (Snook 2015, 110–17). Conversely, many universalist and more liberal-aligned



Heathenry

groups view the status of women in Norse culture not as a fixed standard but as an example of general principle, and they see the adoption of feminist stances as a logical modern extension of traditional Norse attitudes. These practitioners often point to stories in the lore showing women in diverse political and even military roles and exercising considerable autonomy in matters of consent and reproduction. The status of LGBTQ practitioners is similarly controversial. Many folkish and conservative groups judge homo- and transsexuality to be incompatible with the traditional family structures of Germanic cultures and with the emphasis placed in Heathen ethics on family ties and responsibilities of ancestry and lineage (Schnurbein 2016, 244). Such groups often draw connections between the gender-ambiguous conduct of the Norse God Loki—traditionally viewed as a villain and betrayer of the Gods—and LGBTQ Heathens. On the other side of the debate, many universalist and liberal-oriented groups point to similarly gender-atypical behavior in the myths of respected deities such as Odin and Thor as a justification for more inclusive stances toward LGBTQ practitioners. Because folkish and conservative Heathens tend more often to be solitary or only locally affiliated, a majority of national Heathen organizations in the United States and Europe now accept LGBTQ members and perform same-sex weddings (Schnurbein 2016, 246–47), though it is not clear, owing to the difficulty in counting Heathens accurately, whether that represents a majority view overall. A particularly noteworthy practice in the context of these debates is seiðr—a form of oracular, trance-based divination attested in medieval Norse sources and largely reconstructed using studies of contemporary shamanic traditions during the 1990s. Traditional sources depicted seiðr as almost exclusively practiced by women, with male practitioners regarded as deviant and effeminate (Snook 2015, 137; Schnurbein, 2016, 243). Reflecting broader debates about gender roles and sexuality, conservative Heathens often eschew the practice, noting its association with Loki and with Odin in his trickster forms. More liberal Heathens, however, note its association with Odin positively, using this as justification for both the acceptance of gender-diverse identities and of the practice itself, which, in addition, gives a distinct and respected role to women in such Heathen communities. The Germanic mystic and Viking Revival currents that fed the initial development of Heathenry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were largely dominated by men, but women have been increasing in visibility in the Heathen movement since the 1970s, mostly, though not exclusively, among universalist and liberal groups. Significant figures include Isabel Rubio, cofounder of the related Circulo Odinista Español (est. 1981); Diana Paxson (b. 1943), former steerswoman (director) of the U.S.-based universalist group The Troth (est. 1987); Jónína Kristín Berg (b. 1962), former allsherjargoði (chief priest) of the universalist Icelandic organization Ásatrúarfélagið (est. 1972); Else Christensen (1913–2005), a far-right/anti-Semitic activist and founder of the folkish Odinist Fellowship (est. 1969); and Angie Hervör and Maria Luisa Olmeda, founders of the Madrid-based Ásatrú Lore Vanatrú Assembly (est. 2011).

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With the greater visibility of women in Heathen communities has come a greater focus on women in Norse lore, giving rise to devotional movements dedicated specifically to worship of popular Goddesses and other feminine spirits, such as the valkyries and the dísir. Race MoChridhe See also: Paganism: Paganism Further Reading Krasskova, G. Transgressing Faith: Race, Gender and the Problem of Ergi in Modern Heathenry. n.p.: Sanngetall, 2013. Martinez, S. S. “Consent within Heathenry.” In Pagan Consent Culture: Building Communities of Empathy and Autonomy, edited by Christine Hoff Kraemer and Yvonne Aburrow, 21–30. Hubbardston, MA: Asphodel, 2015. Paxson, D. Essential Ásatrú: Walking the Path of Norse Paganism. New York: Citadel, 2006. Schnurbein, S. Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2016. Snook, J. American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.

MAGIC Pagan magic can be envisioned as a Tree of Life whose roots and branches encircle the whole earth: the Goddess Gaia depicted as pregnant with the globe. Magic throughout history is often personified as Nature herself, the Mother of All Life. During the Reformation, the mystic Jacob Boehme explained: “Magic is the mother of the essence of all beings. . . . Magic is action in the will’s spirit” (Magee 2009, 145). Magic has been misconstrued in various cultures as evil because of this active aspect and juxtaposed against the construct of mysticism, which is considered passive. The passive receiving of boons (miraculous gifts from a divine source) in mysticism was considered good, whereas an active taking of boons through human will in magic was considered evil. The former, mysticism, reflects divine descent into the human realm, while the latter, magic, is an active ascent of human into the divine realm. Magic has often been declared heretical, and persecution of magicians continues to this day, particularly against women, who are decried in various cultures as sorceress. Nonetheless, practitioners of magic continue to claim their right to this personal access to Goddess in her many forms. This active magic, embedded within Pagan spirituality and accessible to all humans through nature, is often symbolized in the natural female creative functions of birthing and producing breast milk. Throughout the ages, both earthly and celestial natural phenomena have been explained in terms of Nature’s magical creative powers: for instance, the Milky Way has been depicted as cosmic milk pouring from the Creatrix Goddess’s breasts. Thus Paganism has not confined its magic to earthly realms but has also encompassed cosmic and divine realms. Throughout history, female magicians have been



Magic

designated pejorative names, such as sorceress, enchantress, or witch. Reclaiming their right to access boons through magic, female magicians today self-designate as witch or sorceress as they see fit. In general, magic is thought to function through attractions and repulsions— positive and negative influences—between animate and inanimate objects, whether gross or subtle. In folk magic, the witch might prepare a potion using herbs and other earthly ingredients. In angel magic, the sorceress might conjure angels or other spirits through a talisman such as an amulet incised with geometric forms. Ritual magic, the basis of Wiccan traditions, entails a more elaborate enactment of magical operations, using sacred items placed on an altar or laid out on the floor, such as prayer bowls, wands, daggers or swords, goblets, and candles. In astral and natural magic, the magician brings planetary influences to bear on themselves or others through the use of imagination, words, music, or elemental qualities. In high or intellectual magic, divine love is the vehicle for the alchemical wedding of male-female androgyne with the spiritual seeker becoming the archetypal human who seeks to marry their counterpart soul through divine love. In its archetypal manifestation, the androgynous union of opposites is represented as the Sun and Moon. The archetypal ideas of sun and moon are personified as male and female, respectively, where the practitioner of alchemical magic envisions them in a love relationship that progresses through symbolic stages. While this marriage of Sun God and Moon Goddess takes place within the mind of the intellectual magician, this alchemical wedding has also been played out physically by various cultures, such as the Aztec at their Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. This fertile divine marriage was enacted for centuries at Teotihuacan, “the place where gods were created” (UNESCO World Heritage Centre n.d.). Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles) See also: Ancient Religions: Gaia; Christianity: Mystics; Indigenous Religions: Ancestors (Native American); Paganism: Wicca Further Reading Copenhaver, Brian P. Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Magee, Glenn A. “On the Will in Nature: Schopenhauer, Animal Magnetism, and Magic.” In Esotericism, Religion, and Nature, edited by Arthur Versluis, Claire Fanger, Lee Irwin, and Melinda Phillips, 137–47. East Lansing, MI: North American Academic Press, 2009. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacan.” http://whc.unesco. org/en/list/414. Versluis, Arthur. Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

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PA G A N I S M Paganism (known variously as “modern Paganism,” “contemporary Paganism,” and “Neo-Paganism”) is a diverse and multifaceted religious movement with branches self-consciously inspired in varying proportion by Romanticism, Western occult, and magical traditions, pre-Christian and pre-Islamic cultures of Europe and the Middle East, Goddess and feminist spirituality, Jungian psychology, and deep ecology. Much like the related New Age movement, not all individuals or groups commonly regarded as Pagan identify as such, and those who do often disagree on the definition and boundaries of the term. Academics and practitioners are divided on whether Paganism constitutes a family of religions or a single religion with multiple denominations, as well as its age, its relationship to other world religions and spiritualities, and much else. Despite its heterogeneity, certain common elements bind the movement together: polytheism (variously understood), animism, pan(en)theism, nature worship, folk and ceremonial magic, divination, reincarnation, and reverence for the Divine Feminine. The first developments in what would become Neo-Paganism emerged from the 19th-century cultural movement known as Romanticism (Hutton 1999), which celebrated qualities often denigrated during the 18th-century period of Enlightenment—the emotional, the irrational, the intuitive, the occult, and the ancestral—which Romantic writers and artists often represented by images of the medieval past, the natural world, and femininity. Although early Romantic depictions of women were often idealized and superficial, the revaluation of subjects traditionally associated in Western culture with women—the earth, the body, the mysterious and unknown, as well as ties of ancestry, heritage, and place—slowly began to create space for women’s own voices to be heard, giving birth as the century progressed to both first wave feminism and the earliest forms of modern Paganism—Witchcraft, Druidry, and a variety of ethnic polytheisms (most notably Germanic polytheism, or Heathenry). Many women were, in fact, heavily involved in both developments, such as the scholar Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898), who campaigned for women’s suffrage, abolition, and Native American rights, and also rehabilitated, through her historical writings, the medieval witch as a symbol of women’s independence and, by extension, the freedom of the individual, the freedom of the mind, and reconnection with nature. As early as the 1860s, small circles identifying with homebrewed forms of invented “witchcraft” provided a means for women’s consciousness raising and empowerment in the United States and the United Kingdom (White 2013). During the 1920s, the English anthropologist Margaret Murray (1863–1963) proposed that medieval witchcraft was the last survival of a Goddess-worshiping pre-Christian religion and, in the 1940s, an English civil servant named Gerald Gardner (1884–1964) claimed to have been initiated into that tradition by a surviving group of witches in England, giving birth to the religion now known as Wicca. Although Gardner is often credited as Wicca’s founder, many high priestesses during the 1950s and 1960s played equally important roles in both formulating and promoting its teachings, including Doreen Valiente (1922–1999), Eleanor Bone (1911–2001), Patricia Crowther (b. 1927), Maxine



Paganism

Participants celebrate the summer solstice at the ancient site of Stonehenge (built ca. 3,000– 1,600 BCE) in Wiltshire, England, June 21, 2017. The summer solstice is one of eight festivals in the Pagan Wheel of the Year. (Richard Baker/In Pictures via Getty Images)

Sanders (b. 1946), Janet Farrar (b. 1950), Yvonne Frost (b. 1931), and Vivianne Crowley. During the 1970s, Wicca came into dialogue with other strands of Goddess and feminist spirituality, resulting in new traditions that were more politically engaged and brought feminist concerns to the fore. In 1971, the Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1 was founded by Zsuzsanna Budapest (b. 1940) as the first modern women-only coven, inaugurating the tradition of Dianic Wicca. That same year, a feminist-focused but male-inclusive form of Dianic Wicca was started by Morgan McFarland (1941–2015). In 1979, Starhawk (b. 1951) published The Spiral Dance, which became a seminal text in both Wicca and Goddess Spirituality and led to the formation of the Reclaiming tradition. During the 1960s and 1970s, a self-consciously “Pagan” identity developed among readers of new national periodicals in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as Green Egg (1968–1976, 1988–2000, 2007–present), The Wiccan (since 1968, Pagan Dawn since 1994), and The Cauldron (since 1976), encompassing Druidry and ethnic polytheisms with Witchcraft in a broader movement. The disproportionate size and geographic spread of Witchcraft made it extremely influential on the development of the newly integrated Pagan movement as a whole, including an increase in women’s participation in non-Witchcraft traditions. The Druid orders, which had been restricted to men in the 18th and 19th centuries, opened to women at this time, and women also began to assume leadership roles in ethnic polytheistic traditions, such as Else Christensen (1913–2005), founder of the Odinist Fellowship (1971–2005); Diana Paxson (b.  1943), former steerswoman (director)

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of The Troth (est. 1987); Tamara Siuda (b. 1969), founder and spiritual head of Kemetic Orthodoxy (est. 1988); Celtic shaman Caitlín Matthews (b. 1952); Raisa Kemaikina, former head of the Mordvin Pagan organization Erzyan Mastor; and Ellie Sheva, leader of the Levantine Pagan group Am Ha Aretz. Today, Paganism exhibits the highest proportion of women in leadership, including clergy and seminary professors, of any major world religion and, through its increasing visibility in the interfaith movement, plays a significant role in bringing awareness to issues of women’s representation in global religious discourse. Race MoChridhe See also: Paganism: Druidry; Heathenry; Priestesses and Elders; Reconstructionist Paganism; Seasonal Festivals; Wicca Further Reading Clifton, C. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006. Davy, B. J. Introduction to Pagan Studies. Plymouth: AltaMira, 2007. Hutton, R. The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Sadovsky, S. The Priestess and the Pen: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Dion Fortune and Diana Paxson’s Influence on Modern Paganism. Minneapolis: Llewellyn Worldwide, 2014. White, Ethan Doyle. “An Interview with Dr. Robert Mathiesen.” Albion Calling, September 26, 2013. http://ethandoylewhite.blogspot.com/2013/09/an-interview-with-dr-robert ​-mathiesen​.html.

PRIESTESSES AND ELDERS Pagan traditions have diverse customs for selecting and recognizing priestesses and elders as well as varying expectations regarding their roles, rights, and responsibilities. In general, these are equal or superior to those of their male counterparts. Pagan concepts of priestesshood are predominantly contextual, emphasizing performative roles rather than investment or consecration. Most Pagan traditions hold to some form of universal priesthood, and that status is therefore not distinctive among practitioners. The word priestess is commonly used as a verb, however, and great respect is accorded to those who, in addition to being priestesses, are seen as actively engaged in the work of “priestessing”—organizing groups, leading rituals, and teaching students. The most widely recognized figure of Pagan leadership and practice today is likely the Wiccan high priestess. This owes partly to the fact that Wiccans are the most numerous Pagan tradition and partly to the primacy of the Divine Feminine in Wiccan theology. The oldest traditions of Wicca (collectively known as British Traditional Wicca, or BTW) employ both a high priestess and a high priest in ritual and coven leadership. Though the two are formally equal, in practice, the high priestess bears both the greatest authority and the greatest responsibility (White 2012, 4), with the high priest taking a supporting role (Berger 2000, 107). This primacy is reflected in many aspects of BTW practice, such as the core ritual of “drawing down the moon,” in which the high priestess enters a receptive trance



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state to embody the Goddess. While some groups do practice a corresponding “drawing down the sun” ritual for the high priest, this is of more recent invention and is less widespread. The roles of Druidical priestesses are generally more equivalent to those of their male counterparts than is the case in Witchcraft traditions, while priestess roles in ethnic polytheisms (Heathenry/Ásatrú, Hellenism, Celtic Reconstructionism, Kemetism, etc.) vary according to the historical practices of the cultures from which those groups draw inspiration. Across nearly all Pagan groups, however, leadership in general remains diffuse and democratic. Priestesses and elders are almost exclusively volunteers, as virtually no paid positions for Pagan clerics or theologians currently exist, which encourages groups to divide and share leadership functions among members. As modern Paganism grows, however, increasing demands are placed on Pagan groups to provide officiants for weddings and funerals, chaplains in institutional settings, pastoral counselors, and other spiritual professionals, leading to an increase in institutionalization that remains contentious within the Pagan community. Many Pagan organizations of all traditions are now legally registered as churches and offer formal ordination and other credentials for those engaged in priestessing. Race MoChridhe See also: Paganism: Druidry; Paganism; Ritual; Wicca Further Reading Berger, H. A. “High Priestess: Mother, Leader, Teacher.” In Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment, edited by W. Griffin, 103–18. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2000. Clifton, C. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 2006. Davy, B. J. Introduction to Pagan Studies. Plymouth: AltaMira, 2007. Harvey, G. Contemporary Paganism: Listening People Speaking Earth. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Shuler, E. “A Balancing Act: A Discussion of Gender Roles within Wiccan Ritual.” Intermountain West Journal of Religious Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 47–59. White, M. H. “The Priestess Ascending: Subversion and Hegemony in Wiccan Constructions of Gender.” Unpublished master’s thesis, Lund University, Lund, Sweden, 2012.

R E C O N S T R U C T I O N I S T PA G A N I S M Reconstructionist Paganism refers to modern efforts to restore ancient Pagan and polytheist traditions, including the worship of Goddesses. In the modern Pagan spectrum, Reconstructionism’s historical orientation and concern with “authenticity” makes it different from “new religions” such as Wicca or eclectic groups and practitioners who draw from multiple traditions and practices. There are a myriad of Reconstructionist groups. These include groups working in the Sumerian, Hellenic, Norse, Germanic, Roman, Slavic, Baltic, Egyptian, Celtic, and “Guanche” (Canary Islander) traditions, among others. Many, but by no means all, of the European

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groups are involved in nationalist politics and are collectively referred to as “native faith” groups. Women’s participation in Reconstructionist Paganism differs by traditions and groups. The membership of some Reconstructionist traditions is majority female, while in others women are a minority. Like other modern Paganisms, Reconstructionism attracts people interested in venerating the Divine Feminine—a possibility largely excluded by mainstream Abrahamic faiths. (The lack of a Goddess figure in Christianity is the frequent subject of Pagan criticism.) However, women in Reconstructionist traditions do worship and work with male deities as well as female. Reconstructionist Paganism offers roles of religious leadership to women, although the overall leadership of Reconstructionist groups is usually in the hands of men. One example of a woman Reconstructionist Pagan leader is the Mordovian poet Raisa Kemaikina. The Mordovians are an ethnic group of the Volga basin linguistically related to the Finns, and Kemaikina’s movement to revive Mordovian Paganism after the fall of the Soviet Union was explicitly anti-Russian and anti-Christian. The desire of many Reconstructionist groups to re-create an idealized version of pre-Christian society often leads to an emphasis on distinct, gendered roles for men and women, both religious and social. This involves a rhetorical exaltation of women’s domestic roles as housekeepers and mothers, often associated with the worship of “Hearth Goddesses” such as the Norse Frigga, the Lithuanian Gabija, the Greek Hestia, or the Roman Vesta. However, some Reconstructionist groups offer women alternative roles, such as priestess, sage, or even warrior. Issues of menstrual impurity, as found in the history of some polytheistic religions, are also debated by Reconstructionists. (Like other Pagan groups, Reconstructionists are struggling with issues of transgender and other gender-variant people.) Many European Reconstructionist movements, often collectively referred to as native faith movements, are allied with the nationalist right and take an authoritarian, patriarchal stand on gender relations. American Reconstructionist traditions tend to be more influenced by contemporary ideas of gender equality. Celtic Reconstructionist Pagans and “Heathens,” followers of Germanic and Scandinavian Pagan traditions, in particular, frequently emphasize what they claim is a historical tradition of gender equality. Practitioners of traditions more strongly associated with the subjugation of women, such as Hellenic Reconstructionism, often draw a distinction between the egalitarian religion they practice and the male-dominated society in which it emerged. The discourse of Reconstructionists who compare their own “rigorous, scholarly” approach to religion with the “fluffiness” of non-Reconstructionist Pagans, particularly Wiccans, is often strongly gendered against the feminine. American Heathens often contrast their own “masculine” practice with feminized Wicca. William E. Burns See also: Paganism: Heathenry; Paganism



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Further Reading Filatov, Sergei, and Aleksandr Shchipkov. “Religious Developments among the Volga Nations as a Model for the Russian Federation.” Religion, State and Society 23 (1995): 233–48. Snook, Jennifer. American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015.

RITUAL In the early 1970s in the United States, a resurgence of interest in women’s rituals occurred as the movements of Women’s Spirituality, Goddess Spirituality, and contemporary Paganism emerged. New archaeological findings (Marija Gimbutas, 1921–1994), feminist scholarship on ancient and prehistoric cultures (Merlin Stone, 1931–2011 and Patricia Monaghan, 1946–2012), and the concept of archetypes from Jungian psychology provided stimulus and inspiration for growing numbers of women unsatisfied with limited female roles and images of divinity within available mainstream religions. Women from within mainstream male-centered religions were inspired to discover, adapt, and reinterpret the meanings of sanctioned rituals, changing or adapting the symbols and ritual activities to honor and bring attention to roles of women in new and meaningful ways. Some women joined the resurgence of European Pagan traditions based on ethnic heritage or interest, where rituals include seasonal and home ceremonies done within the family group or in communities of like-minded women and men but not around women’s needs specifically. For others, there arose a specific focus on women’s rituals to address women’s needs apart from male-centered religious conventions. As women in these movements began to embrace femalecentric spiritualties, some focused on the Great Mother Goddess of antiquity and learned about Goddesses suppressed or almost entirely eradicated within their pre-Judeo-Christian cultural heritage. Others embraced the psychological idea of the Divine Feminine. In the Dianic tradition of Witchcraft, a feminist denomination of Wiccan tradition within contemporary Paganism, women’s rituals were revived and given new focus by Zsuzsanna Budapest. Budapest authored The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows, later republished as The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Written for 20th- and 21st-century women, this book included specifically lunar rituals and life-cycle rituals, such as conception ritual; menstruation ritual; celebration of the end of menstruation; welcoming a new mother into the circle of mothers; dedication of a newborn child; ritual after an abortion or miscarriage; ritual for healing after removal of ovaries, womb, or breasts; “queening” ritual celebration and responsibility of middle age; and “croning” ritual for entering elderhood. Another source of inspiration for the modern adaptation of ancient women’s rituals was the anthropological research of Jane Harrison (1850–1928). Harrison gave readers a glimpse into the sex-specific holiday celebrations of the ancient Greeks, which for women, addressed concerns with fertility and the continuation of the community. While those rituals reinforced expectations for women’s

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proper behavior and roles in patriarchal Greek society, such as marking transitions from childhood to puberty and marriageability and from marriage to motherhood, contemporary Pagan adaptations acknowledge how being female within the context of patriarchal culture affects women’s self-perception. For example, in addition to honoring female life-cycle passages, some contemporary Pagan women’s rituals address healing from physical and sexual violence and from internalized cultural attitudes about women. Certain Pagan women’s rituals created for and performed exclusively among women are specifically intended to provide support and witnessing, to resist female socialization rather than to support it. Some female-specific rituals did not survive in forms that can be replicated today due to eradication by the church-sanctioned Witchcraft persecutions of the 11th to 17th century. With many of the ancient practices lost, it became necessary for contemporary Pagan women to experiment to meet their needs. Such experiments include creating rituals from remnants of traditional folk customs, folk magic and lore, traditional folk crafts, and holiday foods, as well as using creativity to develop completely new rituals. Some women revived family traditions passed down through the maternal line for both religious and secular holidays. Many Pagan women’s rituals today restore a focus on rites of passage specific to the female body and commemorate personal and communal milestones of significance to women. Rituals assign meaning to an experience or initiate a life-cycle transition to integrate that meaning into conscious awareness, and they are designed to communicate specific messages and meanings to individuals or to a collective group through the manipulation of sensory modalities that carry symbolic meaning. These modalities are often combinations of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic activities and may include speaking or listening to prescribed words, songs, sounds, plays, gestures, activities, dances, touch, induction into a trance state, special dress, colors, manipulation of objects, special scents, and drinking or eating specific foods. Ritual is also a vehicle to transition from one mental, emotional, or physical state to another, acknowledging and attending to the experience of liminality that goes with being “between” a physical or emotional state of what was and what has yet to be. Many women’s rituals honor the Goddess, or specific female deities that women can relate to for addressing their needs. Pagans consider the Goddess, or Great Mother, as the embodiment of the Divine, the cosmos, Mother Earth, all of Nature as the Creatrix and the created. The Goddess may be understood as residing within and independently without. For women to honor a female Creator (Creatrix) is a bridge to honoring themselves as sacred. A common ritual practice is the creation of altars dedicated to specific female divinities and containing specifically female images to remind the practitioner of her own divinity and her connection to her ancestors. A woman’s personal altar affirms female autonomy as she empowers herself as facilitator of her own spiritual experience. An example is the ritual of “self-blessing,” where a woman might select specific meditative music, light a candle on her altar, and then bless her body as she gazes into a mirror. Here she may use salt water or scented oil, anointing her forehead, eyes, mouth, heart, breasts, womb and sex, hands, and feet while blessing herself as a reflection of the



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Goddess. For example, she may say to herself, “Bless my womb and sex that I may know pleasure in my creativity as the Goddess has brought forth the universe.” This personal ritual and its variations are tools for self-healing from female body hatred common for women raised in patriarchal cultures and religions. Putting the female celebrant at the center of her ritual and addressing her needs around the ritual occasion was a new revelation. Women began experimenting in creating new forms of ritual making based on their own needs rather than participating in a set form of malecentric religious enactments carried out in a prescribed order that carried meanings considered demeaning or irrelevant to their lives. Pagan women expanded the definition of ritual to allow for the possibility of transformation, incorporating improvisation to depart from a scripted event. Pagan women’s ritual practices today are most often creative and eclectic, drawing inspiration from a mix of intuitive need, folklore, mythology, and indigenous women’s life-cycle ritual occasions, such as the Navaho “blessing way” for pregnant women, and feminist adaptations of culturally celebrated occasions, such as the bridal shower, focusing on the bride’s personal autonomy within her marriage. Rituals called “women’s mysteries” are the revelations, wisdom, and understandings that emerge from the personal experiences of having a female body. In this context, mysteries can become known through the personal embodied experience. Women’s mysteries rituals address menstruation, sexuality, birth giving and lactation, menopause, death, healing from physical and sexual abuse, body hatred, abortion, marriage, hysterectomy, uterine and breast cancer, mother-daughter relationship, choosing not to have children, female-to-female relationships, losses, body blessings, honoring the female “mother line,” and other rituals of female embodiment and empowerment. Ruth Barrett See also: Paganism: Eco-Paganism; Magic; Priestesses and Elders; Wicca Further Reading Barrett, Ruth. Women’s Rites, Women’s Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2007. Budapest, Z. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow, 1989. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Harrison, Jane. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. London: Merlin, 1962. Monaghan, Patricia. The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines. New York: New World Library, 2014. Mountainwater, Shekhinah. Ariadne’s Thread. Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1991. Noble, Vicki. Shakti Woman. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Shinolda Bolen, Jean. Goddesses in Every Woman. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Stone, Merlin. When God Was a Woman. New York: First Harvest/HBJ Edition, 1978.

S E A S O N A L F E S T I VA L S Modern Paganism, also known as Neo-Paganism, is an umbrella term that encompasses a range of earth-based religious traditions that draw on pre-Christian

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imagery, myth, and symbols to express an understanding of the earth as sacred. These traditions are part revival, part reinvention, and part re-creation and take the view that the Divine is immanent in nature. Traditions such as Wicca, Witchcraft, Reclaiming, Druidry, Heathenry, and Neo-Shamanism celebrate this through a cycle of seasonal rituals known as the Wheel of the Year. Women, and their creative capacities, are celebrated and offered models of empowerment through the inclusion of female imagery expressed through the transformations of the Divine Feminine as Goddess. She appears in the seasonal cycles of the year through images of Maiden, Mother, and Crone alongside her masculine counterpart who is her Son, Lover, and King in a cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. Also known as the eight Sabbats, the seasonal festivals within modern Paganism mark the equinoxes of spring and autumn, the solstices of winter and summer, and the days that fall as midpoints between these moments, known as the cross-quarter days. The names of the seasonal festivals of Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Eoster, Beltane, Litha, Lughnasahd, and Mabon are all drawn from Celtic sources; however, over time, the traditions have come to absorb the cultural materials of European folk traditions as well. A short examination of each of these festivals, beginning with the winter solstice, follows. Through these we may trace the role of the sacred feminine within the seasonal celebrations of modern Paganism. The winter solstice, known as Yule, is the shortest day of the year and the time of the longest night. The sun appears to stand still, and from this day onward the amount of light in a day begins to increase to reach its peak at the summer

Women participate in Beltane (May Day) festivities at Chalice Well, Glastonbury, 2017. Beltane festivities include jumping over bonfires to purify oneself, and Maypole dancing to celebrate the blessings of sexuality and fertility. (Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images)



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solstice. Modern Pagans celebrate this as a time of renewal and rebirth, with many beginning their ceremonies in darkness and together lighting a ritual fire within a cauldron, or hearth, to honor the Goddess as the Mother of the Sun and the birth giver of the divine child of promise. Imbolc or Oimlec, placed at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox is the time of celebration of the beginning of spring, marked by the birth of lambs and the first flowers blooming. Many traditions celebrate this festival through images of the Goddess Brigid, the Irish Goddess of light, fire, and poetry. The growing light is celebrated, and blessings are sought for growth with the lighting of candles and the tying of ribbons to trees to ask for the granting of wishes. The spring equinox, also known as Eostre, is the time of the balance of light and dark that marks the full bloom of spring. Maiden Goddesses, such as the Greek Persephone, the Anglo-Saxon Eostre, and the Roman Flora are honored alongside masculine images of the young God and Green Man. Altars are decorated with flowers and greenery with ceremonies including the use of eggs as symbols of fertility along with dances that wake up the earth to bring forth its bounty. The next seasonal festival, Beltane, is the cross-quarter moment between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. Beltane honors fertility and sexuality and restores the sacredness of sensuality. The Goddess appears as coming into her sexual maturity and, for some, the sacred coupling of the Goddess and God is celebrated. Modern Pagans gather to purify themselves by jumping over bonfires as well as performing Maypole dances to bring the blessings of growth and fertility into the land and their lives. The summer solstice, known as Litha, is the longest day and the height of the sun’s power. The Goddess is celebrated again as Great Mother whose fertility is manifested in the land, and the God is honored as Sun King. Ritual spaces are decorated with flowers and summer fruits, and, where possible, fires are lit and flowers offered to the flames. As a time that many associate with the activity of fairies, offerings of milk, honey, bread, and wine may be left to obtain protection and good will from the spirits of the land. The next festival, Lughnasadh or Lammas, is the cross-quarter moment between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. As the wheel turns, the Goddess begins to take on a dual role as both Mother and Reaper. Modern Pagans celebrate the first harvest, and altars are decorated with fruit, vegetables, and seasonal grain. Bread figures and corn dollies are made to acknowledge the life of the fields, and these are kept, offered to fires, or buried to bless the harvest and honor the earth. The autumn equinox, also known as Mabon, is the second time of balance in the Wheel of the Year, and it is a celebration that offers gratitude alongside acknowledging loss. It is a second celebration of the bounty of the harvest, and thus the Goddess again appears as Mother and Reaper. Altars are decorated with seasonal vegetables alongside the fallen leaves. Many celebrate this festival with sharing circles, where people speak of their achievements and their losses over the course of the year. The growing darkness is honored with collective acknowledgments of grief and loss.

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Samhain, also known as Halloween, is the cross-quarter moment between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. As a time that honors death and endings, the Divine Masculine undergoes a sacrificial death that he might be reborn from the Goddess at Yule. The Goddess is here both death crone and birth giver so that the God who dies is through her eternally reborn. This is celebrated by modern Pagans as a time for acknowledging the dead and the ancestors through feasts and toasts in their honor. Within this mythic cycle, the Goddess is eternal. She never ceases to be; she transforms herself from Crone and Grandmother to become again the Great Mother and Maiden Goddess. Her transformations within this seasonal cycle are the cycles of nature: of birth, living, dying, and transforming. Michelle Claire White See also: Paganism: Druidry; Eco-Paganism; Heathenry; Paganism; Wicca Further Reading Billinghurst, Frances. Dancing the Sacred Wheel: A Journey through the Southern Sabbats. Salisbury Downs, Australia: TDM, 2012. Hwang, Helen Hye-Sook, and Mary Anne Beavis, eds. Celebrating Seasons of the Goddess. n.p.: Mago Books, 2017. Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Reinventing Earth-Based Goddess Religion. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005. Meredith, Jane. Rituals of Celebration: Honouring the Seasons of Life through the Wheel of the Year. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 2013. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: The Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. New York: HarperCollins, 1979.

WICCA Wicca, the religion of Pagan witchcraft, developed in its current form in the 20th century as a synthesis of beliefs and practices from pre-Christian Pagan Religions, folklore, folk medicine, and esoteric and occult traditions. There are also influences from Western encounters with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shamanism. Media images often portray Wiccans as teenage women, but Wicca is practiced by women and men of all ages. History and Background

Wicca draws its inspiration from the Book of Shadows, a book of rituals, teachings, and spells compiled by Gerald Brosseau Gardner (1884–1964). Considered the founding father of contemporary Wicca, Gerald Gardner was the son of an American mother and British father. He spent most of his working life in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, then parts of the British Empire, as a tea planter, rubber planter, and latterly as a customs official. Through his travels, he encountered religious, folk, and shamanic practices that stimulated him to find a new form of religious expression. In 1936, he had a mystical encounter with the Great Mother Goddess on the island of Cyprus, the traditional birthplace in the Mediterranean of the Goddess Aphrodite. With his retirement to Britain, he joined various esoteric groups that



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eventually led him to a coven of witches in the New Forest in the south of England. In 1939, he was initiated by them as a priest and witch. After World War II, he began to publicize Wicca. His books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959) argued that witchcraft was not Satanism or black magic but the pre-Christian Paganism of Europe, which had been practiced in secret into the modern age. He called the religion “Wica,” pronounced “witcha,” and later spelled “Wicca,” a word he derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for “wise.” Gerald Gardner’s books and media interviews attracted thousands to Wicca, and it was soon transmitted to other English-speaking countries. Wicca reached the United States in 1963 through Gardner’s initiates Rosemary and Raymond Buckland, who moved to New York and began to set up covens. In the United States, Wicca attracted both newcomers and those whose families had brought their own folk traditions of witchcraft from other countries. From the 1970s onward, initiates from other European countries began practicing Wicca in their own countries and languages. Wicca has now spread into Central and South America, South Africa, Japan, and other Western-influenced countries. Women and Wicca

In contrast to patriarchal religions, in Wicca the Divine is worshipped as Goddess and God, with women being priestesses and considered preeminent in conducting religious rites. For post–World War II generations with a longing for reenchantment in the face of a growing impersonal and mechanistic society, a spirituality that emphasized the feminine, while welcoming men, and that also encouraged the development and use of psychic and magical powers had enormous appeal. This appeal was heightened by the contribution of one of Gerald Gardner’s early initiates, Doreen Valiente (1922–1999), often known as the founding mother of Wicca. She fleshed out the skeletal rites of the Book of Shadows with poetic texts written by herself and others and compiled a text, “The Charge of the Goddess,” which has become a core liturgical expression of Wicca’s thealogy. The influence of women writers and practitioners grew stronger in the 1970s, particularly in the United States, where feminists were rejecting patriarchal religions and seeking religions that honored the Divine as Goddess rather than God. New forms of Wicca began to evolve from the model taught by Gerald Gardner, including feminist women-only covens inspired by Zsuzsanna Budapest (b. 1940), founder of the Susan B. Anthony Coven, the first feminist, women-only witches’ coven, and covens focused on environmental activism inspired by Starhawk (b. 1951). Most people enter Wicca as adults, but there are families who raise their children as Wiccan. Some Wiccan parents prefer, however, to raise their children with knowledge of different religions, believing that choosing a religion is a decision that should be made when children reach adulthood. The total number of adherents is difficult to estimate, not only because Wicca lacks central organization but also because not all Wiccans choose to be “out.” As members of a nonvisible minority, Wiccans do not have to be public about their beliefs, and many fear discrimination

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and prejudice. Academic researchers consider that adherents of Neo-Paganism including Wicca number around 1 million in the United States and 200,000 in the United Kingdom, with smaller numbers in other countries. Beliefs and Practices

In Wicca, the universe is considered a manifestation of the Divine, which is both transcendent and immanent in the natural world. Wiccans believe the Divine is beyond gender but is most accessible to human beings when personified as female and male deities. Some Wiccans would describe themselves as polytheists, others as pantheists, panentheists, or animists. Many Wiccans view the different deities worshipped in different cultural and historical periods as aspects of the Divine One, the Cosmic Mind. The principal form in which the Goddess is worshipped is the Triple Goddess of the waxing, full, and waning moons. In her full moon form, the Goddess is often called Aradia, a name revealed by an Italian witch, Maddalena, to the American folklorist Charles G. Leland (1824–1903) and published in his book Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches (1899). The name most often used for the God is Cernunnos, meaning “Horned One,” a Celtic deity worshipped in ancient Gaul (modern France). The deities are worshipped at eight major religious festivals, known as sabbats, which commence at sunset and end at sunset the following day. The sabbats mark changes in the seasonal cycle but also symbolize the stages of the human life cycle of birth, reproduction, maturation, death, and rebirth. By honoring the seasonal cycle, Wiccans consider that human beings come to an understanding of and acceptance of humankind’s place in the cosmos. The dates of the eight festivals derive from the pre-Christian festivals of Europe. Four of the festivals are at important points of the solar cycle—winter solstice, the shortest day, around December 21; summer solstice, the longest day, around June 21; plus spring equinox around March 21 and fall equinox around September 22, when day and night are equal. The other four festivals are usually known by names derived from Irish. These mark important dates in the traditional agricultural calendar. Imbolc is celebrated around February 1, the lambing season. Beltane or May Eve, around May 1, is the beginning of summer. Lughnasadh, around August 1, celebrates the grain harvest and is also known by its Anglo-Saxon name of Lammas or Loaf Mass. Samhain or “summer’s end,” around November 1, was associated with death. It was the time when animals were killed and the meat salted and preserved to provide food for the winter. Samhain is celebrated as a time to venerate the ancestors and to remember the dead. In the Southern Hemisphere, the festival dates are reversed. Since Wicca venerates the Divine made manifest in nature, rites are often celebrated outside, but indoor worship is common if outside space is not available. There are some Wiccan churches that own places of worship, but smaller groups often rent space or meet in members’ homes. Wiccan rites take place in a consecrated space, the circle. Even if there is a permanent temple, the sacred space is created anew for each rite. The space is blessed with the four elements of air, fire, water, and earth.



Wicca

It is then symbolically sealed by drawing a circle around it in the air with a wooden wand or a black-handled knife known as an athame. The four directions—east, south, west, and north—are then honored and the deities invoked. Sabbat rites are primarily services of worship. Typically, they involve prayers, invocations, a mystery play to illustrate the spiritual message of the seasonal festival, and ceremonial feasting with food and drink appropriate to the season, together with music, singing, and sometimes dance. Wiccan clergy also perform rites of passage for child naming, marriage, and death, not only for other Wiccans but also for people who are sympathetic toward Paganism and want a non-Christian service. Some covens also conduct initiation rites to mark entry to the coven and on assuming leadership of a coven. Gerald Gardner was a Freemason, and Wiccan initiation rites draw much of their symbolism from Freemasonry and ritual magic. In addition to sabbats, Wiccan ceremonies called esbats are conducted at the full moons, the time when psychic and magical powers are thought to be stronger. At esbats, Wiccans perform spells and magic. Spells generally focus on addressing life problems of the participants, friends, and family—for example, finding a new home or job, becoming pregnant, or passing an examination. Techniques include empowering objects with particular intentions—for example, consecrating a crystal to help someone find a new job—and other traditional magical techniques, such as making herbal pouches with herbs appropriate to the magical intention or burning a candle while chanting a spell. Wiccans believe that magical and psychic abilities are natural to human beings and can be learned, though like all skills, some people have more natural ability than others. Magic is practiced according to an ethical code that teaches that magic may only be performed to help people and not when it would harm others. Both positive and negative actions are thought to affect those who perform them, but with added effect, a belief known as “Threefold Law.” Another important teaching is that people should strive to live in harmony with other human beings and with the environment. Environmental issues are particularly important to Wiccans because nature is believed to be a manifestation of the Divine. Wicca teaches reincarnation. After death, people are reunited with those they love in the Summerland, a resting place between incarnations. They will then reincarnate among those with whom they have ties of love and affection. Contemporary Wiccan ethics and beliefs about the afterlife draw on ancient Pagan beliefs but have been influenced by Western interpretations of Hinduism and Buddhism. There is a difference of emphasis, however, in that the aim of reincarnation for Wiccans is not to escape life on earth but to enjoy experiencing incarnation again and again, until everything that can be learned has been absorbed. Wicca has no restrictions on sexual expression between consenting adults, provided that it does not harm the individuals involved or other people. Hetero- and homosexual orientations are equally valued, and Wicca attracts many lesbian, gay, and transgendered people. Marriage, known as handfasting, can take place between people of different genders or the same gender.

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Status in Society

In many countries, the public visibility of Wicca has grown in recent decades, with increased tolerance toward people with minority beliefs. In the United States in particular, Wiccans have established churches and temples as nonprofit organizations. There are countrywide organizations, such as the Covenant of the Goddess, that organize events and campaign for religious recognition. The U.S. military has organizations that provide religious services for Wiccan personnel in military bases throughout the world. In Europe, The Pagan Federation, established in 1971, acts as a representative body for Wiccans and other Pagans and is consulted by government when considering the impact of legislation on religious groups. Internationally, Wiccan organizations take part in interfaith activities, and Wiccans have been represented at the Parliament of the World’s Religions since 1993. In many countries, Wicca is now widely accepted as part of the religious spectrum of contemporary Western society. Outside major urban areas, however, where people are less familiar with Wicca, Wiccans may still be subject to prejudice and discrimination. Vivianne Crowley See also: Paganism: Eco-Paganism; Paganism; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality; Radical Women’s Spirituality Further Reading Berger, Helen A., Evan A. Leach, and Leigh S. Shaffer. Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in the United States. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. Budapest, Zsuzsanna. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting and Other Womanly Arts. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow, 1989. Crowley, Vivianne. Wicca: A Comprehensive Guide to the Old Religion in the Modern World. 2nd ed. London: Element/HarperCollins, 2003. Heselton, Philip. Witchfather: A Life of Gerald Gardner. 2 vols. Loughborough: Thoth, 2012. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Leland, Charles Godfrey. Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches. London: C. W. Daniel, 1974. Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. London: Faber and Faber, 1931. Murray, Margaret Alice. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: A Study in Anthropology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1921. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper, 1979. Valiente, Doreen. Natural Magic. London: Robert Hale, 1975.

Prehistoric Religions

INTRODUCTION Prehistoric artifacts and sacred art have been discovered and recorded by archaeologists. Since there is no written work (at least none that we are able to translate), the meanings and intentions of prehistoric symbols are a matter of speculation. What does it mean that, of the many prehistoric human figures that are extant, the majority are female? What does it mean that many prehistoric female figures show the human female as merging and morphing with plants and animals? What does it mean that some of the prehistoric sites that have been unearthed show no signs of war, slavery, or social hierarchy? And, what does it mean that situated together in proximity within some prehistoric sites are female figures with musical instruments, ritual masks, women on thrones, and boundary markings that seem to set off space for ritual and sacred enactments? Women, plants, and animals in the natural world are easily linked by simple observation—plant seeds sprout to create new plants, fertile women’s bodies create new humans, as do those of animals. Animals, plants, seeds, and breasts are sources of food on which humans depend for survival. Did the prehistoric cultures who represented woman merging with plant or animal make these connections? In searching for meaning, more recent indigenous cultures may provide clues. A Northern Paiute man, Wovoka (1856–1932), is quoted as saying, You ask me to plow the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother’s bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest. You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die, I cannot enter her body to be born again. You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white man! But how dare I cut off my mother’s hair?

Such a comparison yields interesting similarities, but how far can we safely extrapolate from later indigenous cultures into prehistoric ones? Observable facts of human nature can provide clues, as can the combination of data found in archaeological digs, like where and with what artifacts women’s bodies were found. Without claiming a link between later indigenous beliefs, such as those expressed by Wovoka, and those of prehistoric peoples, a reading of this quote demonstrates a human observation about nature that is seen across the millennia and across the world: the perception that both the earth and women bring forth and sustain life. It is not impossible to gain meaning from prehistoric symbols. Humans know from whose womb they have been born. This is called mother. Humans know from what earth they receive food. This, too, is called mother in many cultures. In the symbolism of woman and nature (plants and animals) from prehistoric cultures,

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it is clear that nature (in some form, abstract or concrete) was a mother, that this mother was revered, and that rituals were performed in connection with mother and Mother Nature imagery. Did the people who used those symbols believe in spirits or in the rebirth of human life as a mirror of the reemergence of plants in spring? We may not know for certain, but there is much we can learn from observations of human nature, its context, evidence from prehistory, and clues from early historical documents. The entries included here are written by scholars who have studied prehistoric artifacts and theories about them. Given how little can actually be known of these cultures, it is not surprising that scholars differ markedly in their interpretations of the artifacts. One particularly controversial scholar is Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994). In her article on Gimbutas, Joan Marler discusses this brilliant archaeologist who founded the field of archaeomythology. While drawing on mythology, folklore, and comparative religions to better understand prehistoric cultures, Gimbutas’s work remained highly scientific, especially in the areas of linguistics, archaeology, and the collection and interpretation of historical and archaeological data. The importance of Gimbutas’s work in any discussion of women in prehistory is obvious given the abundance of feminine imagery in prehistoric artifacts. Marler explains some of the ways Gimbutas interpreted these artifacts. While, on the one hand, there is much that cannot be known of prehistory, on the other, we know more than we did previously thanks to Gimbutas’ work. The evidence she presented has, little by little, been proven correct as new archaeological discoveries come to light. And, although traditional archaeologists have disagreed with Gimbutas’s theories about prehistoric female figures, the old interpretations of them as sex objects for the pleasure of male audiences are clearly limited, given ongoing developments and new evidence within the field. Miriam Robbins Dexter further develops the subject of prehistoric female figures in “Neolithic Female Figures.” Dexter, a well-known expert in prehistoric artifacts, discusses Neolithic evidence that connects the female figures with the sacred and with the cycles of life, death, and regeneration. Detailing the diversity of form in the female figures, in the stages of a woman’s life from girlhood to old age, in combination with plants and animals (female statuettes with the head of a bird, for example), and more, Dexter provides clear and proven data on Neolithic female imagery. She further develops links between these images and early historical symbols and documents, following the methodology begun by Gimbutas, in which data from early historical documents on female deities are seen as clues to prehistoric female figures of the same region. And, in “Upper Paleolithic and Pre-Neolithic Female Figures,” Dexter describes female and female/animal/plant hybrid imagery from much further back in time (up to 40,000 years ago). In “Crete, Religion and Culture,” Carol P. Christ takes interpretations of prehistory in the region of Crete a step further. Drawing on what can be gleaned from evidence of women’s activities in weaving, cooking, and agriculture, among others, Christ weaves together a scenario of life in prehistoric Crete. She then lays bare the controversy between old school and new school archaeological theories, and laments that evidence of prehistoric Goddesses of Crete has been shoved into a



Introduction

dark back portion of the Heraklion Museum, where the majority of Cretan artifacts are housed, making further study of them difficult. At the crux of this controversy is the question of whether or not some prehistoric cultures were peaceful and egalitarian. Old school archaeologists insist on interpreting prehistoric female figures in the context of social structures that were warlike and hierarchical, where there is no evidence of either. At question is the assumption “that patriarchy and war are universal” (“Crete, Religion and Culture”). The difference between the yay and nay sides on this issue is no less than a difference of paradigms about the nature of human existence. In other entries, Harald Haarmann relates significant findings about links between women and possibly the first (undeciphered) pictograms ever created, incised on the Tartaria Tablets found buried with a woman and dating to about 5300 BCE.

The Tartaria Tablets, ca. 5300 BCE, were found at the Neolithic site of Tartaria in Transylvania, Romania, along with the bones of a woman who was probably a shaman or holy woman (called “Milady of Tartaria”). The tablets contain a message, rendered both in pictorial symbols and signs of the Danube script, but the meaning is unknown. In prehistoric times, women were shamans and priestesses, and there is evidence that they used writing for ritual purposes. (Harald Haarmann)

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Haarmann finds evidence that may link these symbols to women and religion in prehistory. Finally, in “Guardian Spirits in Eurasia” and “Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices,” discussion extends to animistic beliefs among prehistoric peoples based on extrapolations from early history that are linked with prehistoric evidence in the same cultures/regions. As Haarmann explains, based on the evidence, “it is reasonable to assert that the animistic traditions [of later cultures in the region] have been inherited from the earliest times of human occupation in Eurasia” (“Guardian Spirits of Eurasia”). General Bibliography—Prehistoric Religions Barber, E. J. W. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times. New York: Norton, 1994. Benigni, Helen, ed. The Mythology of Venus: Ancient Calendars and Archaeoastronomy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2013. Biaggi, Cristina. Habitations of the Great Goddess. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas and Trends, 1994. Claasen, Cheryl, and Rosemary A. Joyce, eds. Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Conard, Nicholas J. “A Female Figurine from the Basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany.” Nature 459 (May 14, 2009): 248–52. Cook, Jill. Ice Age Art. London: The British Museum Press, 2013. Dexter, Miriam Robbins. Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book. New York: Teachers College, 1990. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Victor H. Mair. Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010. Ehrenberg, Margaret. Women in Prehistory. London: British Museum Publications, 1989. Gimbutas, Marija. The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 6500–3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974. (Re-published as the The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1982). Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide, ed. Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future. Toronto: Inanna, 2009. Hodder, Ian. “Women and Men at Catalhoyuk.” Scientific American (January 2004): 77–83. Hodder, Ian, ed. On the Surface: Çatalhöyük 1993–95. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, 1996. Ilieva, Anna, and Anna Shtarbanova. “Zoomorphic Images in Bulgarian Women’s Ritual Dances in the Context of Old European Symbolism.” Journal of Archaeomythology 1 (2005): 2–12. Jeffries, Rosalind. “The Image of Woman in African Cave Art.” In Black Women in Antiquity, edited by Ivan Van Sertima, 98–122. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1989. Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark. Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Oxford: University Press, 1998.



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Kent, Susan. Gender in African Prehistory. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 1998. Leroi-Gourhan, André. The Dawn of European Art. Translated by Sara Champion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Marinatos, Nanno. Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image, and Symbol. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. Marshack, Alexander. The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s First Art, Symbol, and Notation. Revised, expanded ed. Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1991. Mellaart, James. Ancient Civilizations of the Near East. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. Mellaart, James. Çatal Hüyük: A Neolithic Town in Anatolia. London: Thames and Hudson, 1967. Power, Camilla. “Women in Prehistoric Rock Art.” In New Perspectives in Prehistoric Art, edited by Gunter Berghaus, 75–103. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Rice, Patricia C. “Prehistoric Venuses: Symbols of Motherhood or Womanhood?” Journal of Anthropological Research 37, no. 4 (1981): 402–14. Soffer, O., J. M. Adovasio, and D. C. Hyland. “The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Palaeolithic.” Current Anthropology 41, no. 4 (August​ /October 2000): 511–37.

BURIALS Prehistoric burials, found in caves and tombs, tell us about the practice of burial, ideas about the meaning of life and afterlife, and the importance assigned to specific community members. Burials are especially important to our understanding of prehistoric gender dynamics in a community because archaeologists can usually easily determine the gender of a corpse. Then, by looking at grave goods, or the items buried with the body, scholars can learn about the role of an individual within his or her community; the ways that gender was defined, marked, and practiced in that community; and what, if any, preparations the community made for an afterlife. Unfortunately, many graves have been disturbed by natural events like storms or unnatural events like grave robbers or modern construction. As such, while some burials tell a complete story, other burials only hint at prehistoric communities and their burial practices. The oldest known burials are from the Upper Paleolithic period, between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago. For example, the Czech cave Dolni Vestonice contains the burial of several human bodies alongside artifacts such as pottery and sculptures. This cave includes a woman buried beneath a mammoth’s scapulae or shoulder bones and ivory carvings that resemble the buried woman. Scholars believe that this woman was a shaman, and the way she was buried indicates her importance in the community. Graves from the next prehistoric period, the Mesolithic, which occurred between 11,000 and 8,000 BCE (with prolonged duration in northern Europe), commonly include weapons such as knives or arrows alongside pottery and sculptures. At the Danish Vedbaek Mesolithic cemetery, dating to about 5000 years BCE, archaeologists have found single burials, double burials of a female and infant, and one triple burial of two adults and one child. Of the nine women

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in single burials, seven do not have any grave goods. Of the two women buried with grave goods, one has a small knife and the other has a knife and deer bones and was clothed in a dress decorated with pendants, teeth, and shells. In contrast, seven of the nine male burials contained grave goods such as small knives. These graves are evidence of gender differentiation and distinctive gender roles in communal life. Similarly, burials in the Lybian Uan Afuda cave do not contain grave goods, but the clustering of bodies indicates the beginning of segregation of men from women and young from old members of the community. The Neolithic period, between about 8000 and 3500 BCE (with early beginnings in the Near East in the 10th millennium BCE), was a time when some communities transitioned from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture. As they settled, communities began marking graves with large monuments or structures, some of which are still seen today. At this time, some communities also practiced excarnation, or placing a body in the open before burial to be defleshed by raptors, and at times removing bones, especially skulls, from the grave for ritual activities. In Kent, a woman’s body from this period shows evidence of excarnation and use of her bones after death. It is unclear if the woman died naturally or was part of a human sacrifice. The Bronze Age, a period between about 3500 and 1200 BCE, was marked by the establishment of long-distance trade networks. These changes are reflected by grave goods such as jewelry, which both mark a body as important and sometimes depict images of daily life. For example, Scythian graves include women who were  buried with personal weapons and sculptures showing how these weapons were used. Other Bronze Age graves, such as those found in California, demonstrate the way that gender was practiced. For example, archaeologists have found evidence of “two-spirit” burials (referring to transgender males) in which a male is buried with female artifacts, a male is buried in a female part of the cemetery, and/or a male is buried with third-gender grave goods (Hollimon 1997, 188–89). From these studies, we can learn about the participation of women in society, burial practices, and the ways that gender was defined in prehistoric communities. Allison Hahn See also: Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Sacred Script; Shamanism; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices Further Reading Amkreutz, Luc Win, and Sophia Wilhelm. Persistent Traditions: A Long-Term Perspective on Communities in the Process of Neolithisation in the Lower Rhine Area (5500–2500 cal BC). Leiden, Netherlands: Sidestone, 2013. Hollimon, Sandra E. “The Third Gender in Native California: Two-Spirit Undertakers among the Chumash and Their Neighbors.” In Women in Prehistory: North America and Mesoamerica, edited by Cheryl Claasen and Rosemary A. Joyce, 173–89. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Kent, Susan. Gender in African Prehistory. Lanham, MD: AltaMira, 1998.



Crete, Religion and Culture

C R E T E , R E L I G I O N A N D C U LT U R E The first permanent settlers came to the island of Crete around 7000 BCE from Anatolia during a period of extensive migration of early farmers out of the Near East and into Europe. Bronze Age Crete, known as Minoan Crete, begins around 3000 BCE. Its destruction occurred around 1450 BCE, followed by Mycenaean Greek occupation of parts of the island. Hieroglyphic and Linear A writing systems developed in Bronze Age Crete, but neither has been deciphered. Without written records, scholars must rely on material evidence to reconstruct the religion and culture of ancient Crete. According to the view presented here, the religion of ancient Crete in the Neolithic centered on the Goddess as the symbol of the powers of birth, death, and regeneration in all life. Not a fertility symbol in the narrow sense, the Goddess was the Source of Life and the animating force within it. Hers was not only the power to give life but also to regenerate life after death, ensuring the continuation of life through the generations and the seasons of the year. The symbol of the Female Divine as the Source of Life, inherited from the Paleolithic era, took on new meaning in the Neolithic revolution with the invention of agriculture, pottery, and weaving. As the primary gatherers of fruits, nuts, and berries in the Paleolithic, women would have noticed that plants sprouted where seeds were dropped and so would have been the ones to invent agriculture. Pottery is associated with food storage and preparation; it is likely that women who cooked and stored food also developed the techniques of pottery making. Women are the weavers in almost all traditional cultures; they were probably the inventors of weaving as well. Agriculture, pottery making, and weaving are mysteries of transformation: seeds become plants and then bread; earth becomes snake coil and then fired pot; and wool or flax becomes thread and then cloth. Each of these mysteries would Statue of a Minoan Snake Goddess, found in the temple of Knossos, Crete, ca. 18th–16th century BCE. Snakes have been understood to be part were one of many symbols used by the Minoans in of the greater mysteries of trans- their devotion to an Earth Mother Goddess. (DEA/G. formation that govern all life. Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images)

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As discerners and guardians of the mysteries, women created rituals to celebrate the source of life and to pass the secrets of agriculture, pottery, and weaving down through the generations. The major rituals of the agricultural cycle involved blessing the seeds before planting, offering the first fruits of the harvest to the Goddess, and sharing the bounty of the harvest in communal feasts. These rituals establish that life is a gift of the Goddess and institute gift giving as a cultural practice. As women controlled the secrets of agriculture, it makes sense that land was held by maternal clans, that kinship and inheritance passed through the maternal line, and that governance and decision making for the group were in the hands of the elders of the maternal clan. In this context, the intelligence, love, and generosity of mothers and clan mothers would have been understood to reflect the intelligence, love, and generosity of the Goddess. The people of Crete began building large complexes around 1900 BCE. Identified as palaces, but more accurately described as sacred centers, these buildings contained many altars, processional paths, and rooms identified as shrines, as well as storage areas for grain, wine, and oil to be shared on festival days. There were workshops where clay, bronze, gold, stone, and ivory were crafted into exquisite pitchers, bowls, storage vessels, and jewelry to be used in rituals. Linear A archives testify to an administrative function. Although bronze technology was introduced, and larger building projects were undertaken, there is a continuity of religious symbolism. The image of a spiral spiraling into another spiral symbolizes life in movement, the grace of life. There is no reason to assume hierarchical rule. The nature of the religion and culture of ancient Crete is disputed by archaeologists. Was ancient Crete matrilineal and matrilocal? Possibly an egalitarian matriarchy? Was rule in the hands of the elders of maternal clans? Or in the hands of kings? Was the society peaceful? Or is this the fantasy of a golden age? Was the primary deity the Goddess? Or is it better not to speculate? Did Minoan culture evolve from the Neolithic, continuing its values? Or was there a cultural shift in the Bronze Age? Was Minoan culture overthrown by Indo-European invaders? Or did it become warlike through internal evolution? Underlying these questions are prior ones. What can we know about the ancient past? And how can we know it? The excavator of the palace of Knossos, the Englishman Arthur Evans, named the culture he unearthed “Minoan” after the legendary King Minos mentioned in later Greek texts as having sent ships to the Trojan War (ca. 1200 BCE). Evans believed that ancient Crete must have been ruled by a king. Failing to find artifacts depicting a larger-than-life-size bearded male ruler like those found in Assyria and Egypt, Evans reconstructed fresco fragments to depict an unbearded young “Prince of the Lilies” that he identified as a priest-king. Evans believed that the Minoan culture was not warlike and that it was overthrown by Mycenaean Greek invaders. He identified the primary deity of the Minoans as the Goddess, representing the powers of nature. Archaeologists continue to call the culture Evans explored “Minoan,” despite recognizing that King Minos would have lived long after the fall of the culture that bears his name. Several scholars have questioned Evans’s reconstruction of the Prince of the Lilies, arguing that the crown may have belonged to a mythical griffon



Crete, Religion and Culture

and that the figure depicted in Evans’s fresco might even be a female bull leaper. Nonetheless, traditional archaeologists continue to assert that Minoan society must have been ruled by a king or kings. Evans’s theories are further questioned by archaeologists who are hesitant to speculate about the spiritual and who worry that evidence of a peaceful past is being used to promote the myth of a golden age. Responding to second wave feminist claims of peaceful matriarchies that worshipped the Goddess, they draw a line in the sand, dismissing even nuanced theories about Neolithic Goddess cultures written by scientific scholarly archaeologists like Marija Gimbutas and James Mellaart. In this context, evidence of female power in religion and culture may be ignored or downplayed. For example, the newly reopened Heraklion Museum, which houses the majority of ancient Cretan artifacts, begins with a discussion of new technologies invented by generic “man” in the Neolithic, including agriculture, pottery, and weaving. Neolithic Goddess images are tucked away in a corner with the notation that such figurines may be male, female, or animal and that their meaning is mysterious or unknown. Minoan culture is presented in a series of rooms without reference to spirituality or the Goddess. The well-known Snake Goddesses appear toward the end of the exhibits in a room devoted to Minoan Religion. They are placed at the back center of the room in a case that does not allow them to be viewed from all sides. Many visitors to the museum miss them altogether. Gold seal rings depicting rituals and epiphanies of the Goddess are also on display in this room but without photographic enlargements that would enable their significance to be pondered. In contrast, the reconstruction of the religion and culture of ancient Crete presented here assumes that, as in many other traditional cultures, the spiritual and the material were a seamless whole in ancient Crete. Though the spirituality of ancient Cretan people cannot be directly known, hypotheses can be developed and tested through analysis of symbols in relation to theories about the material life of the people who created them. Such hypotheses are valuable if they make sense of a wide variety of data that would otherwise remain undecipherable. Marija Gimbutas wrote about a conflict of cultures in Europe. The earlier culture she named “Old Europe” (ca. 6500–3500 BCE) was peaceful, agricultural, sedentary, highly artistic, matrifocal, matrilineal, probably matrilocal, and worshipped the Goddess as the power of birth, death, and regeneration. In contrast, the Indo-Europeans (whose language is antecedent to most European languages as well as to Persian and Sanskrit) were nomadic, warlike, patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal, indifferent to art, had domesticated the horse and invented the wheeled vehicle, and worshipped the shining Gods of the sky as reflected in their bronze weapons. Their homeland is north of the Black and Caspian Seas in the Russian steppes. Gimbutas dated the first Indo-European invasion of Old Europe to about 4400 BCE with continuing invasions over the next several millennia, arguing that Minoan Crete, the most southerly point in Old Europe, was the final flowering of Old Europe and the last territory to be conquered by the Indo-Europeans. While most scholars agree that the Minoans spoke a pre-Indo-European language, many remain unwilling to consider that Minoan Crete might have been the last remnant of a peaceful prepatriarchal Old Europe because they assume that patriarchy and war are universal.

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Scholar of religion Carol P. Christ asserts that patriarchy and war are not universal, arguing that patriarchy arises at the intersection of the control of female sexuality, private property, and war. Kings are warriors who take as the spoils of war not only territory and material goods but also the women of the enemy, who become slaves and concubines. In this situation, ruling males control female sexuality to ensure that property will be passed down to legitimate male heirs. Christ cites new research on egalitarian matriarchal societies (see below) in support of her claim that patriarchy and war are not universal. If patriarchy and patriarchal kingship are social structures introduced as a result of warfare and conquest, then patriarchal kings would need to legitimate their power through symbols. This occurs in Egypt and in Assyria, where the power of kings and pharaohs is repetitively depicted in monumental frescoes, friezes, and statues. Yet this did not occur in Minoan Crete. Evans searched for images of the king but failed to find them. There is no evidence that a king or a queen lived in the buildings he identified as palaces: archaeologist Nanno Marinatos argues that all the rooms designated as royal residences are in fact ritual spaces. There is no large room where the populace could gather to bow down to a ruler. Moreover, and here the contrast to later Greek art is unambiguous, there are almost no depictions of violence in Minoan art: no lions devouring lambs, no battles against giants or enemies, no slaying of sacred snakes, no defeat of Amazon warriors, no Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa. No big man graves of the kind typical of the Indo-Europeans or graveyards with large numbers of warriors buried with their weapons have been found. The argument from absence is telling. New lines of evidence are converging to confirm the picture of the culture and religion of ancient Crete presented here. DNA research identifies the most common Y (male) DNA in Europe (R1a and R1b) as originating in the Russian steppes and introduced into Europe during the time hypothesized for Indo-European invasions. DNA research on bones from Crete does not find a new population arriving at the beginning of the Bronze Age, suggesting cultural continuity with the Neolithic. Mycenaean warrior graves have been discovered in Chania, dated around 1450 to 1390 BCE, providing evidence of invasion. Research on egalitarian matriarchal societies that exist today disproves the assumption that patriarchy, domination, and war are universal. Philosopher Heide Goettner-Abendroth (2009) finds that matriarchies are not the opposite of patriarchies but rather egalitarian societies of peace. At early stages of agriculture with land held by the maternal clan, they ensure equal distribution of goods through the practice of gift giving, they have mechanisms to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard, and they tend to view the earth as a great and giving mother. The Mosuo in the Himalayas as well as the Minangkabau of west Sumatra are prototypical examples of egalitarian matriarchies. All this evidence renders plausible the view of the religion and culture of ancient Crete presented here, and this is increasingly being recognized by scholars in a number of fields. Carol P. Christ



Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe

See also: Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion; Mesopotamian Religion; Pre-Greek Goddesses in the Greek Pantheon; Christianity: Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archaeology, and History; Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Prehistoric Religions: Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Neolithic Female Figures; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Spirituality and Gender in Social Context Further Reading Christ, Carol P. “A New Definition of Patriarchy: Control of Women’s Sexuality, Private Property, and War.” Feminist Theology 24, no. 3 (2016): 214–25. Evans, Arthur J. The Palace of Minos: A Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early Cretan Civilization as Illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos. 4 vols. London: Macmillan, 1921–1936. http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/evans1921ga. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide, ed. Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future. Toronto: Inanna, 2009. Hughey, Jeffery R., Peristera Paschou, Petros Drineas, Donald Mastropaolo, Dimitra M. Lotakis, Patrick A. Navas, Manolis Michalodimitrakis, John A. Stamatoyannopoulos, and George Stamatoyannopoulos. “A European Population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete.” Nature Communications 4 (2013): 1861 doi:10.1038/ncomms2871. Marinatos, Nanno. Minoan Religion: Ritual, Image, and Symbol. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993. http://www.academia.edu/3433058/Minoan​ _religion​ _Ritual_image_and_symbol.

G I M B U TA S , M A R I J A ( 1 9 2 1 – 1 9 9 4 ) A N D T H E RELIGIONS OF OLD EUROPE The Lithuanian American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas is widely known for her pioneering scholarship concerning the beliefs, rituals, and symbolism of the earliest horticultural societies of Old Europe (ca. 6500–3500 BCE). During the mid-20th century, she was the first archaeologist to expand the boundaries of her discipline by combining up-to-date archaeological data informed by mythology, folklore, historical documents, comparative religion, and linguistics—an approach she coined “archaeomythology.” Her interdisciplinary investigations into the profusion of female imagery and ritual activities found throughout southeast Europe and the Mediterranean region highlight women’s cultural significance during the Neolithic period of European prehistory. Marija Gimbutas (née Marija Birute Alseikiene) was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, on January 23, 1921, into a dynamic family of physicians, scholars, and historians. Lithuania was the last European country to be Christianized, and many of the ancient Baltic practices honoring the sacredness of the natural world with its beliefs in male and female deities were still alive among village people into the 20th century. The songs, stories, and vibrant imagery of this ancient folkloric tradition informed her understanding of the role of mythology and symbolism, and of women, in preserving ancient patterns of traditional culture. Marija Gimbutas (Lith. Gimbutiene) received a classical education in linguistics, archaeology, folklore, and comparative religion (MA Vilnius University, 1942; PhD

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Tuebingen University, 1946). After emigrating to the United States in 1949, she joined Harvard University (1950–1963) and was honored as a research fellow at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, where she produced influential texts on European prehistory before becoming professor of European archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles (1963–1989). During those years, she directed five major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeast Europe. In her view, the vast predominance of female images in these and other Neolithic sites throughout the region, and the lack of evidence of male dominance, reflect the respect and centrality of women within Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas developed the an egalitarian social structure. discipline of archaeomythology. Her combined study In 1974, Marija Gimbutas of archaeological data—which included the pro- produced The Gods and Goddesses fusion of female imagery in the Neolithic period of Old Europe (republished in (ca. 6500–3500 BCE)—with historical documents, linguistics, mythology, folklore, and comparative 1982 as The Goddesses and Gods religion, led to the discovery of women’s cultural of Old Europe), presenting a rare significance throughout prehistoric Europe and the collection of Neolithic sculptures Mediterranean. (Joan Marler) in their archaeological contexts made available to the West for the first time. Some female figurines are engraved with signs and symbols, some are naked or masked, while others wear distinctive ceremonial costumes. In The Language of the Goddess (1989), Marija Gimbutas focuses on the symbolism of the earth-based spirituality of the Old Europeans. She defines Goddess as a primary metaphor of the source of life expressed in myriad forms, reflecting the cyclic reality of the living world in continual transformation. Her magnum opus, The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), introduces the long-lived Neolithic societies and their matrifocal social system and sacred script with widespread evidence of what she calls the “religion of the Goddess.” While distinctive Neolithic temples and sanctuaries indicate communal rituals, widespread evidence of women’s religious activities throughout Old Europe is preserved within domestic contexts. Niches and special tables are associated with portable altars, elegant ceramics, female sculptures, and ritual paraphernalia. The art of weaving was ubiquitous, assumed to be the provenance of women. Loom weights and spindle whorls were frequently engraved with signs and symbols



Guardian Spirits in Eurasian Cultures

implying sacred intentions, as though weaving was both a practical and ritual activity. Offering vessels, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic sculptures, and ritual equipment have been found near the hearth as a primary center of women’s activities. Babies who died at birth were sometimes buried there, carefully placed in womb-shaped baskets or pots symbolic of the potential for rebirth. During the early Neolithic, women and children were frequently interred within houses or very close by, and it was not unusual for elder women to be buried with special grave goods. For Old European women, there seems to have been no division between mundane activities and sacred practices. From her own excavations, Marija Gimbutas found sculptures of pregnant women in places where grain was stored, ground, and baked into bread, with evidence of accompanying rituals. The typical Old European bread oven is in the shape of a pregnant belly as the source of new life. It seems that each stage of the daily process of caring for the community was sanctified. According to Marija Gimbutas, women’s ritual devotions documented during later historic periods are evidence of the tenacious survival of indigenous Old European patterns into patriarchal times. Women’s ancient practices of tending to people’s spiritual needs and honoring the cycles of birth, death, and the regeneration of life are deeply rooted in the timeless reality of the sacredness of the living earth. Joan Marler See also: Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices Further Reading Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 B.C.: Myths and Cult Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Marler, Joan. From the Realm of the Ancestors: An Anthology in Honor of Marija Gimbutas. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas and Trends, 1997.

G U A R D I A N S P I R I T S I N E U R A S I A N C U LT U R E S Religion and ritual tradition in Eurasia developed in a wide area of cultural convergence. Beliefs in female guardian spirits are especially vital in certain regional cultures of Eurasia. Studies in comparative religion have identified the stage of religious beliefs among hunter-gatherers as animism, which means that the world is perceived as spirited. Guardian spirits reside in everything living, which does not only refer to plants and animals but also to sources of life energy, such as rivers, lakes, springs, and places of geological activity, such as hot springs, volcanoes, and the like. In the mythical tradition of Uralian (i.e., Finno-Ugrian and Samoyedic) peoples, these protective spirits are perceived as specifically feminine. These beliefs form

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a vital tradition of animism that has been documented for the earliest Eurasian cultures of northern Europe and Siberia, and this tradition shows continuity throughout historical times into our days. Continuity there moves on a straight trajectory, not disrupted by an agrarian world view, because agriculture cannot be practiced in the far North. It is reasonable to assert that the animistic traditions have been inherited from the earliest times of human occupation in Eurasia. As long as the Uralian tribes lived as hunters and gatherers, their beliefs concentrated on female spirits of nature. By the time these foragers became accustomed to a sedentary lifestyle and had adopted farmers’ cultural patterns inherited from the south during the Neolithic period, a transformation of basic beliefs occurred: the female spirits of nature transformed into a central agrarian Goddess. The earlier layers of animistic beliefs in female guardian spirits merged with the religion of the Great Goddess (the One-ness in her manifold appearances, as Bird Goddess, Bee Goddess, Goddess of Regeneration). Certain archaic traits in the iconography of the Goddess, showing a female deity with animal limbs, for instance, continued throughout the Bronze Age into the Iron Age. Among the Ob-Ugrian peoples in western Siberia, the Khanty and Mansi, the bear as mythical being dominates local beliefs, “creating one of the world’s richest bear cults” (Schmidt 1989, 189). In the cultural memory of the Ob-Ugrians and the Tungus of central and eastern Siberia, many stories about the bear have been preserved, in particular about its role in human genesis. The bear is considered to be the son of the Sky God and Mother Sun. In the Ob-Ugrian myth of origin, the celestial bear is sent down to earth by his parents. There, the bear takes a female guardian spirit of the forest as wife, and their offspring become the ancestors of the first clans of the Khanty and Mansi, respectively. In the Tungus version of this myth, the Sky God became angry when finding out that his son liked life on earth better than in heaven. So the Sky God punished him by denying him return to heaven and forcing him into eternal life on earth. Among the Palaeoasiatic Ket, the female being chosen by the bear as his wife was “Heaven’s Daughter, disguised as a female reindeer” (Alekseyenko 2001, 58). Harald Haarmann See also: Ancient Religions: Sun Goddess; Indigenous Religions: Shamans in Korea; Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Sacred Script; Shamanism; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices Further Reading Alekseyenko, Yevgenia A. “Shamanism and Worldview: A Ket Contribution to the Issue.” In Shamanhood—Symbolism and Epic, edited by Juha Pentikäinen, 49–62. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001. Haarmann, Harald, and Joan Marler. Introducing the Mythological Crescent. Ancient Beliefs and Imagery Connecting Eurasia with Anatolia. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 2008. Schmidt, Éva “Bear Cult and Mythology of the Northern Ob-Ugrians.” In Uralic Mythology and Folklore, edited by Mihály Hoppál and Juha Pentikäinen, 187–232. Budapest: Ethnographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 1989.



Neolithic Female Figures

NEOLITHIC FEMALE FIGURES By definition, there can be no texts in which prehistoric female figures are named or discussed. We only have iconography: painted and sculpted female figures. Because we must interpret the evidence, often thousands of years after the original conception of these fgures, we only have theory, which leads to controversy over the meaning of female figurines: Do these figures represent dolls, amulets, Goddesses, or human women? Such female figures discussed in this article will be given the designation “Goddesses,” assuming that the contexts for these female figures are sacred. This article refers to “Goddesses” and “female figures” rather than “fertility figures” because there is controversy over whether or not these female figures were related to fertility. A large number of Neolithic female figures were bird/woman, snake/woman, and bird/snake/woman hybrids. They took the form of other animals as well. Tens of thousands of female figurines have been excavated from southeast Europe and the Near East. In her excavations in southeast Europe, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas found that female figures outnumbered male figures at least 20 to 1; for example, in Achilleion, only 2 out of 200 figurines represented male figures (Gimbutas 1991, 22). Chronology and Geographic Extent

The Neolithic Goddesses belong to the era of prehistory when seminomadic hunters and gatherers were beginning to become sedentary, to settle and begin to domesticate plants and animals. The Neolithic dates from about 9000 BCE in the Near East and 6000 BCE in Europe and lasts until about 3000 BCE. From the seventh millennium on, female figurines become quite prolific in the Near East and in southeast and Central Europe. The Neolithic figures show greater diversity of form than those dating to the Upper Paleolithic. The dawn of European history appears with the first historic texts, in Egypt and Sumer, around 3000 BCE. Contextual Evidence for Pre-Neolithic and Neolithic Female Figures

In the pre-Neolithic, female figures are found in shrines; those dating to the Neolithic were often found in domestic areas of excavated settlements. They have been discovered in association with hearths, grain bins, storage pits, refuse pits, and graves. Some are covered with red ochre. Figurines found in the context of graves probably represent forms of goddesses who protect the body in death as well as helping to birth it into a new life. The grave is the site of both death and regeneration. Marija Gimbutas has written on Goddesses, graves, death, and regeneration (1999) and on Goddesses from the Neolithic period of southeastern and Central Europe (1976 and 1991). The southeast European villages of Sitagroi, Selevac, Sesklo, Dimini, and Achilleion were particularly rich in female figurines, as were those of the Cucuteni peoples of northeastern Romania; the Vincˇa peoples who lived near present Belgrade, Serbia; and the Gumelnitza peoples of southern Romania and Bulgaria.

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Functions of the Goddesses

Although, without texts, we cannot know for certain the functions of Neolithic Goddesses, the earliest historical cultures of the Near East offer clues. Each culture has as part of its pantheon multifunctional Great Goddesses: Egyptian Hathor, Sumerian Inanna, Akkadian/Babylonian/Assyrian Ishtar, and Syrian Anat, and, among others, there are Goddesses of love, war, handicrafts, and many other functions. If the Goddesses had these multiple functions at the dawn of history, then they probably had numerous functions in prehistory as well. Prehistoric Goddesses had several functions: they represent the female in many different life epochs, from pubescent girl to mature woman (sometimes pregnant) to elderly woman. They were likely responsible for the life continuum: birth, death, and rebirth; human and nonhuman animal fertility and vegetal fertility; wisdom; and crafts, as were those of the first literate cultures. When, in later prehistory, these societies needed defensive protection, the Goddesses became city protectors and warrior Goddesses (as did the later Akkadian/Babylonian Goddess Ishtar and the Greek Goddess Athena; the warrior function of the precursor to Ishtar, the Sumerian Inanna, was not as pronounced as that of Ishtar). A Mesopotamian Goddess may give a clue to the earlier function of the Goddesses in overseeing birth, death, and regeneration. The Sumerian/Akkadian/Babylonian Goddess Ereshkigal, “Great Lady Earth,” was Goddess of Earth and Underworld. In the poem “The Descent of Inanna,” Ereshkigal’s sister, Inanna, Goddess of Heaven and Earth, descended to the underworld to visit her. As Inanna was descending to the underworld, she was compelled to take off all her clothing and jewelry. When she arrived, Ereshkigal, as Goddess of Death, turned Inanna into a corpse, hanging her on a meat hook. But Inanna’s attendant, Ninshubur, was able to convince the Wisdom-God Enki to save her. To achieve this, Enki created asexual creatures who sympathized with Ereshkigal as she was going through the birth pangs, which moved Ereshkigal to grant life to Inanna. Thus, the Underworld Goddess gave both death and new life. (See Dexter 1990, ch. 2.) Prehistoric iconography leads one to the same conclusion, that the Goddess of Death was a cyclic Goddess of the life continuum; for example, prehistoric “stiff nude” Cycladic Goddesses were found in tombs; one, which has been displayed in the British Museum, is clearly pregnant: a Death Goddess giving birth to life. Neolithic Female Figures

The Goddesses appear in the forms of both human and animal. There are female figures with human bodies and the faces of birds and snakes, and they also appear as hedgehog and frog, among others. The Bird Goddess is often represented with a beaky nose and breasts; the mouth is rarely depicted. Bird and snake and bird/ snake figurines have been excavated throughout Eurasia, and they are found in myth and iconography through the historic era. In the double mound of Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site to the south of modern Konya, in Turkey, sometimes the female figure is accompanied by leopards or wears leopard skin. Some are depicted with birds, such as vultures. One figure is



Neolithic Female Figures

seated on a throne flanked by two leopards. She was found in a grain bin, perhaps protecting the grain; she may be a precursor to Grain Goddesses, such as the Greek Demeter. Many figurines are found with domestic “debris,” illustrating the connection of the sacred with everyday life. From level VI of the Neolithic site of Hacılar, near Lake Burdur, west of Çatalhöyük, were found small, naturalistic female figurines associated with leopards. This female iconography of female deity and feline continues among the Mesopotamians (the Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians) and the Hittites to the north in Anatolia. In both classical (ca. 500 CE) and modern India, the Great Goddess Durga/Kali is represented on a lion in both text and iconography. Female figures appear in the earliest Neolithic in Israel, many of them seated. They often have stripes, perhaps representing feathers, and they rarely have mouths; they may represent bird/female hybrids. The Indus Valley civilization, exemplified by the sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, in modern Pakistan, had its high phase between 2600 BCE and about 1900 BCE. The lifelike Harappan figurines are anatomically refined. They are represented with headdresses unique to each figure. They may represent the Feminine Divine or mortal females. Proto-Indo-European Female Figures

According to recent DNA evidence, the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated from the Russian grassy and forested steppes, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, to all parts of Europe, to the Near East, and to parts of Asia as well. (See Jones et al. 2015.) They were seminomadic stock breeders, and their social structure was patriarchal and patrilineal. They assimilated with the sedentary, indigenous peoples of the lands to which they migrated, and their female figures were assimilated to those of the indigenous peoples, which were very different. As evidenced by the plethora of female figurines, the indigenous peoples had worshiped a rich pantheon of female figures, including many Great Goddesses—that is, Goddesses who have multiple functions and attributes, while the Proto-Indo-Europeans worshiped few Goddesses, all of them representing naturalistic phenomena. After the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated to their new homes and assimilated with the indigenous people living there, the resulting peoples worshipped both their own original Goddesses and the Goddesses of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The Proto-Indo-Europeans assimilated the multifunctional Neolithic European Goddesses from the indigenous Neolithic Europeans. These include the Germanic Freyja, Indic Devi, Lithuanian/Latvian Laima, Iranian Anahita, and Greek Athena, among others. (See Dexter 1990, ch. 3.) Miriam Robbins Dexter See also: Ancient Religions: Athena; Inanna; Mesopotamian Religion; Hinduism: Durga and Kali; Indigenous Religions: Shamans in Korea; Prehistoric Religions: Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Sex and Gender; Spirituality and Gender in Social Context

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Further Reading Biaggi, Cristina. Habitations of the Great Goddess. Manchester, CT: Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, 1994. Dexter, Miriam Robbins. Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book. New York: Teachers College, 1990. Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddess Civilization: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Hodder, Ian. “Women and Men at Çatalhöyük.” Scientific American (January 2004): 76–83. Jones, Eppie R., Gloria Gonzalez-Fortes, Sarah Connell, Veronika Siska, Anders Eriksson, Rui Martiniano, Russell L. McLaughlin, et al. “Upper Palaeolithic Genomes Reveal Deep Roots of Modern Eurasians.” Nature Communications 6, no. 1 (2015): 8912. doi:10.1038/ncomms9912.

SACRED SCRIPT The theme addressed here involves two agents, which, as separate topics, have been investigated extensively over a long span of time. One is the question of prominence of women in ancient society; the other is the functional use of signs and symbols. The implications of women’s role in visual communication are still widely ignored and have only recently been studied. The association of women with sacred script has to do with the visual manifestation of language use. Another manifestation of language use in association with women is spoken language. The former is represented by settings in Old Europe (in the Danube civilization), which have been studied only recently, while the latter is known from ancient Mesopotamian civilization. In Sumerian society, women occupied a prominent role, and one of the domains where this can be documented is the use of ritual language. In the second millennium BCE, the emergence of a specific ritual variety of Sumerian can be observed. This language variety in ritual functions is called eme-sallu (“fine tongue, genteel speech”). Emesal was used in religious songs, laments, and love songs (in the so-called sacred marriage texts) to render the speech of women or female divinities. In the European context, the sociocultural settings of one particular archaeological site in Transylvania highlight the association of women with writing in an exemplary way, and this is Tartaria, where one can observe a merging of old traditions (i.e., shamanism) and innovative technologies of the agrarian communities (i.e., intentional sign use). The Mesolithic tradition of shamanism, which included the office of female shamans, continued into the Neolithic, with transformations of shamanistic practices into more sophisticated ritual activities, under the supervision of priestesses, among the early agriculturalists. At the archaeological site of Tartaria, there is circumstantial evidence for shamanistic practices. This is suggested by the ritual pit and its various objects, most probably votive offerings, and by the conditions of the burial. The pit also contained the bones of a buried person. Analysis shows that the bones are the remains of a woman in her early fifties, named “Milady of Tartaria” by some



Shamanism

archaeologists. It is assumed that she functioned as a shaman or priestess for her community. What distinguishes the settings at Tartaria from Mesolithic animism is the presence of inscribed tablets, the famous Tartaria tablets. The age of the tablets has been recently determined, by calibrated dating, as about 5300 BCE. Two sets of signs are found on the tablets: some are signs of writing (of the Danube script), and others do not recur on objects that bear the script; these are sacred signs with symbolic function. Whatever the exact functions of these tablets may have been for the shaman, Milady of Tartaria, and her rituals (of initiation, of fertility, of ancestor reverence?), we will probably never know. Anyway, the Tartaria tablets are no rare instance of a systematic and intentional use of signs in Old Europe, and the inscribed artifacts are predominantly objects associated with religious (nonsecular) contexts (i.e., figurines, miniature altars, votive offerings, ritual vessels). At present, more than 900 inscribed artifacts are known that have been retrieved from over a hundred sites. The connection between women and the Old European script, in a ritual context, can be established with certainty because the association of female activities with writing at this particular site is but one among manifold settings reflecting the significance of this intriguing facet of Old European society. Since women were in the center of ritual activities associated with figurines and altars and also involved with the production and ornamentation of ceramicware, it is reasonable to assert that women were also responsible for instrumentalizing the sacred script—that is, for inscribing artifacts with religious inscriptions. Certain domains of Old European literacy distinguish themselves through their close association with women’s agenda and activities. Harald Haarmann See also: Prehistoric Religions: Burials; Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Neolithic Female Figures; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices Further Reading Haarmann, Harald. Ancient Knowledge, Ancient Know-How, Ancient Reasoning: Cultural Memory in Transition from Prehistory to Classical Antiquity and Beyond. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2013. Marler, Joan, ed. The Danube Script: Neo-Eneolithic Writing in Southeastern Europe. Sebastopol, CA: Institute of Archaeomythology, 2008.

SHAMANISM Since prehistoric times, women have served as shamans. Records of these women’s shamanistic roles can be found in rock art, sculptures, burial mounds, and other relics from prehistoric communities. The term shaman comes from the Tungus people of Siberia, but the concept is found across the world. Shamans are known for entering the body of an afflicted person, either through a trance, hypnotism, or the use of intoxicants. They also serve as conduits between the living and dead, fortunetellers, and performers of rituals.

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Today, there are debates about how to define prehistoric shamanism. Some scholars restrict the definition to “religious and cultural specialists from indigenous societies in Northern Eurasia and Northern North America” (Schmidt 2000, 226). Other scholars claim that the defining characteristic of shamanism is the use of hallucinogenic plants to induce a trance. These scholars then claim that cultures that did not use or have access to hallucinogenic plants did not have a culture of shamanism. However, other scholars argue that the use of hallucinogenic plants is difficult to prove when examining prehistoric graves—because the plant matter of the hallucinogen would have decomposed long ago. While shamanism is found throughout the modern world, and we can simply ask modern shamans how they define themselves, when speaking of prehistoric shamanism, we are forced to look at the archaeological sites. As such, much of our knowledge about prehistoric shamanism is based on burials, rock images such as petroglyphs, statues, and oral histories. Some of the earliest evidence of shamanism comes from the caves of reindeer herders in France and Spain in the form of 18,500-year-old petroglyphs. These petroglyphs are part of a long tradition, which includes the Selva Pascuala mural (province of Cuenca, Spain), believed to be 6,000 years old, which depicts human and animal figures. This mural records evidence of shamanistic practices, such as a human taking animal form. In addition, the mural depicts small mushroom-like plants, possibly evidence of shamanic use of mushrooms to induce trances. The Selva Pascuala mural does not tell us much about the gender of the shamans. Indeed, regarding gender, historic records indicate that many shamans were not bound by strict gender roles and were able to use tools associated with multiple genders. As such, when looking at petroglyphs, it is not always possible to determine the gender of the shaman. However, we are able to learn about women’s role in prehistoric shamanism when looking at burials and statues. For example, the oldest grave of a shaman, thought to be 12,000 years old, contains the body of a woman from the Natufian culture. Found in Israel, this woman’s grave contains turtle shells, pig bones, and a human foot. This burial is very different from other Natufian graves in that it does not contain everyday tools but instead contains ritualistic items, leading scholars to believe that this woman was a revered shaman within her community (Milstein 2008). In China, evidence of prehistoric female shamans is found in the form of statues. These statues are often found in archaeological digs, alongside burials, or next to trade routes. By studying the way that people and animals are interacting and moving in the statues, archaeologists can learn how ancient humans worked and lived in their communities. For example, during the late Zhou era (1046–256 BCE), sculptors created figures of dancing women known as the Wu. The Wu could become invisible, speak the language of spirits, and move the air around them. These shamans were known for their ritual dances done before sacrifices and rainmaking ceremonies (Dashú 2011). Other prehistoric evidence of female shamans is found in written texts that record older oral histories of shamanism. For example, Herodotus’s The Histories (written in 440 BCE) records historical accounts of shamans throughout the Middle East, Asia, and northern Africa. The Histories is a valuable historic text that is comprised of the



Shamanism

collected memories and stories of communities. In this way, historians were able to write down as much information about illiterate people who lived under conditions of prehistory (without the use of writing) as they could find. One example provided by Herodotus is Sarmatian shamans, many of whom were women, living in the area that was controlled by the Scythians. Some scholars believe that Sarmatians are the source for Greek myths about Amazons. Sarmatians worshiped the sky, earth, and fire, and evidence of these practices has been found in their burials (Vedder 2004). In northern Russia, Evenk community cemeteries include shaman tombs. One tomb, estimated to be some 2,000 years old, was designed to mimic a whale’s body and contained grave goods from women’s activities as well as shamanistic rituals. The combination of everyday and ritualistic grave goods indicates that the buried woman may have been a shaman. The Evenk, and other prehistoric Siberian communities such as the Yukagirs, had a strong tradition of women serving the community as shamans (Fitzhugh 2004). In South America, archaeological studies of preclassic and classic Mayan periods (2000 BCE and 250 CE) have unearthed stones carved to resemble mushrooms, which may be evidence of hallucinogenic-induced trances used by male and female shamans. In other parts of South America, tobacco was central to shamanist rituals. Similarly, in North America, shamanistic trances were induced either by smoking pipes or drinking hallucinogenic drinks. Scholars point out that among some Native American societies, community members with an intermediate or ambivalent gender identity were spiritually powerful. This means that women could be shamans, but so too could those who identified as half-man/half-woman. Similar gender transitions are found among some Siberian shamans. Allison Hahn See also: African Religions: Priestesses and Oracular Women; Ancient Religions: Shamans in East Asia; Indigenous Religions: Nature (Native American); Sacred Place (Native American); Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures; Shamans in Korea; Prehistoric Religions: Sacred Script; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices Further Reading Akers, Brian P., Juan F. Ruiz, Alan Piper, and Carl A. Ruck. “A Prehistoric Mural in Spain Depicting Neurotropic Psilocybe Mushrooms?” Economic Botany 65, no. 2 (2011): 121–28. Dashú, Max. “Wu: Female Shamans in Ancient China.” Lysistrata Project, 2011. http:// www.lysistrataproject.org/Wu-FemaleShamansofAncientChina_MaxDashu.pdf. Fitzhugh, William. “Evenk Burial.” Arctic Studies Center, 2004. https://naturalhistory​.si​ .edu/arctic/features/croads/ekven1.html. Milstein, Mati. “Oldest Shaman Grave Found; Includes Foot, Animal Parts.” National Geographic, November 4, 2008. http://news.nationalgeographic.com​/news​/2008​/11​ /081104-israel-shaman-missions.html. Schmidt, Robert A., and Barbara L. Voss. Archaeologies of Sexuality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Vedder, James F. “Greeks, Amazons, and Archaeology.” The Silk Road 2, no. 2 (2004). http:// www.silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/vol2num2/greek.html.

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U P P E R PA L E O L I T H I C F E M A L E F I G U R E S The Upper Paleolithic era encompasses a very long span of time, at least 35,000 years. This era dates from between 43,000 and 39,000 BCE to about 10,000 BCE, according to the calibration of the radiocarbon time scale as of 2016. The earliest period of the Upper Paleolithic is the Aurignacian. The female figures of the Upper Paleolithic era were found in eastern, western, and Central Europe. Figures have been found in Italy; Spain; France (in Lespugue, Haute-Garonne; and Laussel, in the Dordogne); Willendorf, in lower Austria; Germany; Dolní Veˇstonice, in Czechoslovakia; Ukraine; and Siberia, among other locations from western to eastern Europe. Because of this broad geographic and temporal frame, it must be assumed that the female figures discussed represent many phenomena. There is diversity in the female images. Some are realistic, while others are abstract. Some are depicted singly, while others are in groups. Throughout western and Central Europe, human, animal, and hybrid representations were crafted. There are many scholarly interpretations of these female figures. Some believe that the artists were women who were looking down (or over their shoulders) at their own bodies. Some earlier male scholars believed that the female figurines were pornographic, depicted for the sexual delectation of the males of the societies. Many contemporary scholars, male and female, believe that these figures held mythical and religious connotations and that they represented the sacred. According to Jill Cook (2013, 61), senior curator in the Department of Prehistory and Europe at the British Museum, throughout Europe, 160 sculpted female figurines dating to the Upper Paleolithic have been found thus far. Olga Soffer and her colleagues (2000) count over 200 such figurines, but these include fragments and figurines that lack overt gender identification. Female figures, incised, sculpted, and painted, far outnumber male figurines (Cook 2013, 99). Female figures are found in large sculptures, small to tiny figurines, and wall paintings; they are sometimes associated with animals in what are likely mythological scenes that we do not have the ability to objectively interpret. Tiny figurines may have been used as amulets (some have perforations) worn around the neck or held in the hand. The feminine was often depicted in wall paintings in caves as pubic triangles and in large carvings on cave walls. Some of the caves give evidence of being ritual spaces—places in the sacred realm—so the female figures found in them may have depicted the Divine Feminine. Many figures have been given the designation “Venus,” but there is no evidence that they had anything in common with the (Greco-) Roman Goddess of Love. When entire female figures are represented, those from western and Central Europe are often full-bodied rather than slender; many are pregnant. The emphasis is generally on the breasts, buttocks, and pubic triangles rather than on the face. Some female figurines have been sculpted without heads at all. Almost all Upper Paleolithic female figurines are nude, but some show decorative elements, such as headgear, especially in eastern Europe. Olga Soffer and her colleagues (2000) studied decoration on both eastern and western European female figurines and found evidence of woven plant fiber used for headgear and bandeaux; weaving has been an occupation of women in the Upper Paleolithic and beyond.



Upper Paleolithic Female Figures

Although some female figures may indeed represent fertility, birth (and perhaps rebirth), and life, not all female figures appear to represent young women in the prime of fertility. Others seem to represent other phases of life, from mature woman to old woman. We cannot know what functions they represented, without texts, but it is likely that the birthing function is only one among many that hunter-gatherers would have thought important. Perhaps the obviously older female figures represented ageing, death, wisdom, and many other possible functions. In addition to carvings and figurines, cave paintings give examples of possible female symbolism: cup marks, hands, and pubic triangles. Studies have been done on the hand markings, and they are now thought to have belonged to women (see Hughes 2013). Nudity would not have represented naturalistic dress because mostly cold temperatures prevailed throughout Eurasia during this era. Dwellings in this period included camps under rock overhangs, tents, and houses with skin walls. Where wood was not readily available, supports were made of mammoth bone and tusks. There were some semisedentary settlements. Ceramics had their beginnings in this era, and they rose to a level of high sophistication later, in the Neolithic. Upper Paleolithic Female Figures

A female figure dating to the Aurignacian period was carved on a limestone outcropping on the ceiling of the Salle du Fond, the furthermost gallery of Chauvet Cave, in the South of France. The female figure consists of only a huge pubic triangle and legs. She does not have feet, similarly to many other Upper Paleolithic figures. She may have been depicted to protect the gallery, because throughout prehistory and history, female figures displaying their genitals, as well as the genitals themselves, have had protective and apotropaic (warding off evil) functions (see Dexter and Mair 2010; 2013). The gallery also contained paintings of lions, beginning an association of protective, apotropaic female “display” figure and feline, which then continues for tens of thousands of years, throughout Eurasia and elsewhere. Sometime after the female figure guarding the Salle du Fond was carved, a bison was superimposed on her, leading some authors to see this as representing a union between the bison and the human female. However, the two carvings are from different eras; in her original form, the pubic triangle stood alone. Upper Paleolithic art consisted of figurines as well as cave drawings. The oldest female figurine yet discovered is the tiny female figure carved from a mammoth tusk, found in September 2008, in the Swabian Alb mountains of southwestern Germany in a cave called Hohle Fels. The figure dates to about 40,000 BCE. In place of a head, the figurine has a perforated protrusion, which may have allowed her to be worn as an amulet. She has a pronounced navel. A flute made from a vulture bone was found just over two feet from the female figure. The combination of music and female figure may well give evidence that this was a ritual space. A tiny human-lion figure, just under one inch tall, was also found in Hohle Fels cave, again associating female figure and lion.

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Women and Sacred Rites in Prehistory What constitutes evidence of women and religion in prehistory? The earliest signs of human symbolic activity are seen in visual marks scratched on stone around 77,000 BP (before present), with cave art and figurines showing links between the feminine and the sacred as far back as 40,000 BP. In that period, the Upper Paleolithic, female figures with large pubic triangles, often called “Venus” figures, were sculpted and painted on the walls of caves. The oldest yet discovered, dating between 40,000 and 30,000 BCE, is the tiny sculpture of a large-breasted female figure with pubic triangle, carved from a mammoth tusk, referred to as “Swabian Eve” because she was found in the Swabian Alb mountains of southwestern Germany. From the same period and found in proximity (70 cm) to this figure is a flute made from a vulture bone. The combination of music and sacred female figure very likely indicates a ritual space. Certainly, the link between music and sacred (indicated by the shape of the) female figure connotes ritual activity, which is known to be a feature of all religions. More evidence of ritual activity linked with the Sacred Feminine in prehistory has been found from the Neolithic period (8000 to 3500 BCE), including numerous female figurines, some with masks, some with ceremonial clothing, and one from about 6000 BCE of a woman seated on a throne.

In Stadel Cave, also in the Swabian Alb region, pieces of a sculpture were found, again fashioned from mammoth tusk. The pieces were assembled to form a 12-inch-tall sculpture of an anthropomorphic lion. The combination of animal and human characteristics of this figure has led some researchers to interpret the sculpture as a representation of a shaman taking the form of a lion. The lion seems to be standing on tiptoe, perhaps an indicator of a shamanic dance. The gender of the lion figure is not at all clear. There is a small plate on the abdomen that was originally interpreted as a “penis in a hanging position.” However, a horizontal crease runs across the lower abdomen, a feature typically belonging to female figurines and one that is more common to figures of this period. The shape and musculature of the figure have also been cited as belonging to a human male, but these could as easily refer to that of a lion, female or male. Although many pieces were missing from the original find in 1939, approximately 1,000 more pieces have been found in a new investigation of the cave that took place between 1997 and 1998. The lion figure is now usually called a “lion-human” or a “lion-woman” instead of a “lionman,” as it was earlier termed. Red ochre covers both female figures and human skeletons in the Upper Paleolithic; when it was used as a pigment to cover figurines and humans, it may have had a spiritual significance. Since red is the color of blood, it may represent the blood of birth and/or rebirth. One of the most famous Upper Paleolithic female figures with apparent reference to the Divine Feminine, the 17-inch-high “Venus” of Laussel, was found at Laussel, in the Dordogne region of France. She was carved into a limestone block at an overhanging rock shelter, covered with red ochre, and



depicted holding a bison horn carved with 13 lines. She points to her stomach, which seems to protrude. The four-inch-tall “Venus” of Willendorf figurine is full-bodied. She, too, was covered with red ochre. The “Venus” of Lespugue, made of mammoth ivory, is more ab­stract than the Laussel and Willendorf figures. Her body seems to consist of multiple eggs and, as such, may represent the potentiality of birth in a sacred context. She has what appears to be a patterned textile hanging below her buttocks. Twenty-nine female figures, found in Mal’ta, near Lake Baikal in Siberia, date to about 21,000 BCE, mostly carved from mammoth ivory. Most have flat, elongated bodies and emphasized genitalia. Unlike the figures from Europe, which have mostly undefined faces, these often have detailed faces and hair. The figures are tapered at the bottom, perhaps to be placed upright in the ground or elsewhere. Pre-Neolithic Female Figures

Upper Paleolithic Female Figures

This figurine found in Willendorf, Austria, and dating to between 28,000 and 25,000 BCE, is four inches tall and was originally covered in red ochre. The Venus of Willendorf, as she has been named, is one of approximately 160 sculpted female figurines from the Upper Paleolithic found throughout Europe. Female figurines, including those sculpted, incised, and painted, far outnumber male figurines during this period. (Ali Meyer/ Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)

The “pre-Neolithic” figures belong to cultures that just precede the advent of agriculture and animal domestication. The pre-Neolithic period in Eurasia dates from about 10,000 BCE through 6000 BCE (earlier in some areas). Some groups of people seem to have built ritual gathering places. One such place was the site of Göbekli Tepe, in southeast Anatolia. The excavator, Klaus Schmidt, believed that it was a ritual site for regular gatherings of seminomadic peoples. It was a preagricultural site, dating to as early as 9000 BCE, and thus attended by peoples who hunted and gathered for their sustenance. A dancing female display figure, dating to about 8000 BCE, was found in level II of the site. She crouches, and her legs are bent in an M position. One arm is up and the other is down; her breasts are depicted on either side of her torso. Somewhat later, Neolithic female figures are depicted thus; the stance or dance may be a magical, shamanic one. The female figure was carved on a stone slab on a shelf or bench in the Lion Pillar building, between pillars containing depictions of

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felines. She was very likely apotropaic, protecting the worshippers who entered the building. The Lion Pillar building may well continue the iconography of lion galleries in Upper Paleolithic caves. Several female fish sculptures, dating to about 6800 BCE, were found in the prehistoric site of Lepenski Vir in the Iron Gates region of the Danube River in eastern Serbia. The beginning dates for Lepenski Vir are somewhat contested, ranging from about 9500 BCE to 7200 BCE. The people who built the site were pre-Neolithic; their primary source of protein was fish. The houses were arranged in a geometric fashion; burial places were mostly organized in a cemetery outside of the dwelling area, although some older people were buried behind fireplaces in the dwellings. The female fish sculptures were found in the later layers of the site. One such sculpture crouches; her arms reach down to indicate a deeply incised vulva; by the hands one can see two tiny breasts, perhaps representing those of an adolescent girl. Some scholars see a continuity between the female images of the southeast European Neolithic and those that have Upper Paleolithic origins in western, Central, and eastern Europe (see Marshack 1981, 37; Gimbutas 1974). Miriam Robbins Dexter See also: Prehistoric Religions: Burials; Neolithic Female Figures; Shamanism; Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Spirituality and Gender in Social Context Further Reading Clottes, Jean. “France’s Magical Ice Age Art: Chauvet Cave.” National Geographic (August 2001): 104–21. Conard, Nicholas J. “A Female Figurine from the Basal Aurignacian of Hohle Fels Cave in Southwestern Germany.” Nature 459 (May 14, 2009): 248–52. Cook, Jill. Ice Age Art. London: The British Museum Press, 2013. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Victor H. Mair. “Sacred Display: New Findings.” Sino-Platonic Papers 240, September 2013. http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp240​_sacred​_display.pdf. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Victor H. Mair. Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2010. Gimbutas, Marija. The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 6500–3500 BC: Myths and Cult Images. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974 (Re-published as The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1982). Hughes, Virginia. “Were the First Artists Mostly Women?” National Geographic, October 9, 2013.  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news​ / 2013​ / 10​ / 131008​ - women​ -handprints-oldest-neolithic-cave-art/. Marshack, Alexander. “Epipaleolithic, Early Neolithic Iconography: A Cognitive, Comparative Analysis of the Lepenski Vir/Vlasac Iconography and Symbolism, Its Roots and Its Later Influence.” Paper presented at the International Symposium on the Culture of Lepenski Vir and the Problems of the Formation of Neolithic Cultures in Southeastern and Central Europe, Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Cologne, February 18–25, 1981. Schmidt, Klaus. “Ritual Centers and the Neolithisation of Upper Mesopotamia.” Neo-Lithics (February 2005): 13–21. Soffer, O., J. M. Adovasio, and D. C. Hyland. “The ‘Venus’ Figurines: Textiles, Basketry, Gender, and Status in the Upper Palaeolithic.” Current Anthropology 41, no. 4 (August–October 2000): 511–37. Srejovic´, Dragoslav. Lepenski Vir. New York: Stein and Day, 1972.



Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices

WOMEN IN PREHISTORIC RELIGIOUS PRACTICES The term Old Europe was coined by the Lithuanian American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas to refer to the earliest agrarian societies of Neolithic Europe (ca. 6500– 3500 BCE) that developed throughout southeastern Europe. These were peaceful, highly creative, egalitarian cultures that Gimbutas described as “matristic”—female centered in social structure and in religious life. The tremendous production of female imagery that typifies Old European societies had its roots in the Upper Paleolithic Ice Age. During that early period, female sculptures carved of mammoth ivory were carried for thousands of years along the big-game corridor of Ice Age Eurasia between the Pyrenees and Siberia. Some have been found in situ near the hearths of mammoth hunters or in special niches, suggesting protective functions and women’s ritual activities. In Siberia, where Ice Age conditions lasted longer than in Europe, ancient traditions continued. Indigenous Siberian peoples experience the natural world as alive with female powers. In the mythology of the Finno-Ugrians, the earth, forests, water, wind, and fire are believed to contain the living presence of female deities, while the Divine Ancestral Mother of the Uralians is considered the creatrix of all life. The Evenki people have traditionally kept a sacred sculpture in every tent, symbolizing the spirit of a female ancestor guardian who protects the fireplace and is responsible for the well-being and shelter of the family. The Chukchee people of the Siberian northeast maintain the custom of giving a figurine dressed in special attire to the bride, symbolizing a protective female ancestor (Haarmann 2000). In these and other Siberian cultures, the important roles of prominent women as female shamans have also been preserved. The warming of the Northern Hemisphere at the end of the Ice Age brought ecological transformations, inspiring cultural and spiritual developments as well as continuities during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition. By the eighth millennium BCE, the Iron Gate/Danube Gorge (between present-day Romania and Serbia) was a beehive of intensive interaction between the indigenous hunter-gatherers and the growing profusion of plants and animals. The entire Iron Gate region functioned as a sacred landscape, a vibrant laboratory for the application of ancient knowledge with the development of new knowledge and skills entwined with ritual activities. The deepening of women’s sacred relationship with the cultivation and harvesting of wild plants is reflected in an egg-shaped boulder stone carved with a vulva-like form that appears to be sprouting. A woman’s torso carved of bone is also engraved with plantlike forms sprouting from her womb. On a river terrace overlooking a huge whirlpool (Vir) in the Danube (a shamanic portal between worlds), 50 identically shaped structures with reddish triangular/ trapezoidal foundations were used for seasonal rituals and subfloor burials for nearly 1,000 years (ca. 7200–6300 BCE) at the site of Lepenski Vir. Marija Gimbutas observes that these foundations resemble the shape of a woman’s pubic triangle with womb-like interiors, and almost every object found within them is marked with symbols of regeneration—labyrinths, spirals, nets, and fish. One of the eggshaped boulder stones found at a central hearth is engraved with the breasts and

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vulva of a woman, the face of a fish, and the claws of a bird of prey. This hybrid image can be seen as metaphoric of the cyclic realities of birth, the inevitability of death, and the cosmic powers of regeneration of the self-renewing Goddess of Nature. The women who tended the temples at Lepenski Vir were not only dedicated to the perpetuation of life but also tended the dead who were buried within these sacred ancestral sites. Evidence of women’s ritual activities and hybrid imagery of women as shape-shifters between human, plant, and animal realms continued into the Neolithic/agricultural period. After the arrival of domesticated plants and animals from the Near East during the seventh millennium BCE, the distinctive Old European societies that developed throughout southeastern Europe became long-lived, mature culture systems typically lasting 800 to 1,000 years or longer. This could only have been achieved by entire communities working in concert with nature’s ability to sustain life. At the core of this remarkable longevity was a cohesive world view that honored women at the center of culture, that was deeply rooted in an abiding spirituality and a sensitive responsiveness to the changing conditions of complex ecosystems. In primal cultures such as these, women are mothers, grandmothers, and leaders transmitting ancestral knowledge; women are also midwives, healers, herbalists, weavers, artists, musicians, craftswomen, and potters who inscribed their spindle whorls with sacred signs and symbols. The enormous ceramic production of female figurines, portable altars, ritual equipment, and female-shaped offering vessels provides visual evidence of women’s essential presence in Old European religious life. The painted pottery produced within every Neolithic farming community of Old Europe features dynamic geometric designs, rhythmic interconnecting spirals, and serpentine lines in coherent, undulating movements. These designs express a consistent consciousness of the interconnection of all things within the cosmos and the continual flow of the cyclic processes of nature. They are also the floor patterns of traditional dances still performed in Balkan village contexts into recent times. Female sculptures with special costumes and ritual gestures are found throughout Old Europe. Women enacting ritual dances, sometimes accompanied by plants, deer, snakes, or other creatures, are painted, incised, or rendered in relief on Old European pottery, celebrating the life force. A series of pots from Neolithic Romania are sculpted to resemble a circle of naked dancers fused side by side into a close-knit vessel. Dancing women with their arms lifted in an energetic posture, accompanied by smaller, ithyphallic males, were painted on the walls of Magurata cave sanctuary in northwest Bulgaria (ca. fifth millennium BCE), suggesting a spring ritual of hieros gamos (sexual ritual of sacred marriage). Primal peoples have always made music and danced to celebrate the seasons, as blessings, initiations, and rituals of healing, and to honor the dead. Before 5000 BCE, when cemeteries appeared, women and children were buried under house floors to remain close to their loved ones. The graves of elder women were honored with special offerings, sanctifying the homes of the living as places of the ancestors. Ancient laments and solemn dances for the dead, sung and danced by women, are documented into the historic period.



Women in Prehistoric Religious Practices

Two remarkable ceramic ensembles of 21 seated female sculptures—most with no arms, perhaps representing Snake Goddesses—with 13 special chairs were found at the pre- and early Cucuteni sites of Poduri and Isaiia in eastern Romania (ca. fifth millennium BCE). Their mouths are open as though they are singing or chanting together in ceremony. Their similar shapes and identical numbers indicate an intentional ritual formality. A ritual assemblage from the Karanovo VI site of Ovcˇarovo, northeast Bulgaria (mid-fifth millennium BCE) contains four figurines painted with ritual markings with raised winglike arms as though part of a ritual dance. They are surrounded by three miniature table altars with offering vessels, eight round-backed chairs, three log drums, and three ceremonial screens painted with signs and symbols. It is not hard to imagine societies of women, whose bodies are painted with sacred designs, meeting to chant, make music, and dance in a ritual space such as this. Many figurines from various Old European contexts are elaborately painted or incised with signs and symbols suggesting that women’s bodies may also have been ritually marked, each contour amplified with sacred power. Sculptures of pregnant Goddesses are associated with places where grain is stored, ground into flour, and baked into bread. Indoor and outdoor hearths, ovens with nearby altars, and ritual pottery indicate a seamless interconnection between women’s ritual practices and ongoing domestic activities. Remains of vertical looms (from surviving loom weights), grinding stones, ovens for baking sacred bread, and special rooms for the production of ceremonial pottery have been found in sanctuaries and temples as well as in village houses. Open-air temple models show women tending various functions, while in other models, the temples—as centers of sacred activities—are crafted as the body of the Goddess, with her head or entire upper torso rising from the roof. Masks are ubiquitous throughout Old Europe. A life-sized terra-cotta sow mask created to be worn in ceremony survived from the Vincˇa culture as did a female figurine in a special costume holding a human mask in one hand and a flask in the other (fifth millennium BCE). Repeated motifs, such as figurines with women’s bodies and long necks and masks of water birds, suggest mythic characters well known from songs and stories. Bird Goddesses, rendered in distinctive cultural styles—naked or wearing specific ritual costumes and masks—suggest a shamanic exchange of consciousness between human and bird, or human and snakes, frogs, and other animal kin. The seated mother who is nursing her baby can be a human as well as a bear mother nursing her cub. This sacred sensibility of kinship with all of life characterized women’s religious practices throughout Old Europe. Joan Marler See also: Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Prehistoric Religions: Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Neolithic Female Figures; Shamanism; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Sex and Gender; Spirituality and Gender in Social Context

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Further Reading Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Haarmann, Harald. Ancient Knowledge, Ancient Know-How, Ancient Reasoning. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2013. Haarmann, Harald. “The Soul of Mother Russia: Russian Symbols and Pre-Russian Cultural Identity.” ReVision 23 (2000): 6–16. Ilieva, Anna, and Anna Shtarbanova. “Zoomorphic Images in Bulgarian Women’s Ritual Dances in the Context of Old European Symbolism.” Journal of Archaeomythology 1 (2005): 2–12.

Shinto

INTRODUCTION Shinto is the indigenous religion of Japan. Visitors to Shinto shrines enter by passing beneath the torii, or gate. The shrines include not only the building but the surrounding forest, mountain, or other natural area, believed to be occupied by Shinto deities, called kami. It was the kami, according to sacred narratives, who created the islands of Japan. The highest kami is the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu Omikami. In the entry “Kami,” Emily B. Simpson discusses the importance and worship of kami in Shinto traditions, rituals, and celebrations. And in “Amaterasu Omikami,” she relates the myths of the Sun Goddess’s birth, conflicts with her kami brothers, and her creation of other kami. The Sun Goddess is also central to State Shinto, discussed in the entry of that title. Women have made significant contributions and performed various roles within Shinto. In “Priestesses,” Simpson discusses the many roles of women, including shamaness, oracle, shrine maiden, and priestess. In “Shamans and Ritualists,” Simpson relates important shamanesses in the history of Shinto, including Queen Himiko, Empress Jingu, and Yamatohime. The latter communicated with Amaterasu and founded worship at the famous Ise Shrine in 4 BCE (still in existence), where a high priestess was installed, a practice that continues to this day. Women have also founded new religions that blend Shinto with other features of the Japanese religious landscape. The entry “Founders of New Religious Movements” examines several new religions (shin shu-kyo-) founded by Japanese shamanesses. One of these new religions, Tenrikyo-, is also discussed in the entry by that title. Purity is a central facet of Shinto. Once inside shrine grounds, worshipers perform ritual purification in the cho-zubachi, a basin filled with water, to wash away pollution. While the notion of purity affects people of all ages and genders, it can significantly affect the freedom and independence of women in particular. As Judit Erika Magyar notes in “Filial Piety,” women are considered impure during menses and for up to 72 days after giving birth. This has led to women being barred from the most sacred spaces in Japan, a practice that continues in some areas even today. The contradiction in Shinto (and in some other religions as well) of belief in the power of female spirits and the placement of social barriers on women demonstrates the apparent ease with which high Goddesses coexist with the low status of women in society. In “Feminine Virtues,” Magyar discusses the status and expectations of women in Japanese society, relating historical changes. She notes that, while women now enjoy greater independence, there is a push within contemporary Shinto to return women to more traditional roles. In “Kinship and

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Marriage,” Magyar further discusses women in Japanese society in a brief history of marriage in Japan and its links with Shinto beliefs and practices. Also, in “Shinto Weddings,” Magyar relates feminine ideals in marriage and the history of the Shinto marriage ceremony. General Bibliography—Shinto Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Blacker, Carmen. The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanic Practices in Japan. London: Routledge, 2004. Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen. A New History of Shinto. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Hardacre, Helen. Shinto: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hay, Jeff. Shinto. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2006. Kawahashi, Noriko. “Gender Issues in Japanese Religions.” In Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions, edited by Paul Swanson and Clark Chilson, 323–38. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. Nelson, John. A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Okuda, Akiko, and Haruko Okano, eds. Women and Religion in Japan. Translated by Alison Watts. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. Reader, Ian. Shinto: Simple Guides. London: Kuperard, 2008. Turnbull, Stephen R., and Giuseppe Rava. Samurai Women 1184–1877. Oxford: Osprey Pub, 2010. Yusa, Michiko. “Women in Shinto: Images Remembered.” In Religion and Women, edited by Arvind Sharma, ch. 3. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.

A M AT E R A S U O M I K A M I Amaterasu Omikami, “the Great Heavenly Shining Deity,” is a central deity (kami) in Shinto. Often referred to as the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu is also the progenitor of the imperial line and therefore has long been associated with the imperial family and the Japanese state. Amaterasu was born after the female kami Izanami died and her husband, the kami Izanagi, failed to bring her back from the underworld, resulting in the need for purification. As Izanagi bathed himself in a river, various kami were born from this purification process, and Amaterasu was born when he washed his left eye. Amaterasu’s brother Tsukiyomi was born from washing the right eye, and her brother Susanoo from washing his nose. Among the myths centered on Amaterasu, many feature her conflicts with her brothers, particularly in response to injuries to other female deities. Her brother Tsukiyomi, Moon God, killed Uke-mochi, Goddess of Food, prompting Amaterasu to reject him and therefore separate day and night. She also had a famous battle with Susanoo, where they each birthed new Gods from an object of the other’s, and Amaterasu claimed to have won, producing five Gods as opposed to three Goddesses by Susanoo. Yet Susanoo declared his victory and went on a rampage, destroying rice fields and attacking her weaving house, which killed one of her attendants. In anger and grief, Amaterasu hid in a heavenly rock



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cave, and her absence deprived the world of sunlight. The other kami finally persuaded her to leave by piquing her interest through an erotic dance by the Goddess Ame-no-Uzume and a mirror showing Amaterasu her own brilliance. Then Susanoo was banished from heaven. These two episodes show Amaterasu emerging triumphant, but only after struggle with her male siblings. These myths and others related to Amaterasu appear in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki, two eighth-century chronicles of myth and history that highlight the divine ancestry of the imperial family (the Yamato clan) while marginalizing the kami of other clans. For example, acc­ ording to these chronicles, Nineteenth-century illustration of Amaterasu OmiAmaterasu sent her grandson kami, the “Great Heavenly Shining Deity,” who is the Ninigi down to rule earth and highest of the Shinto kami (deities). She is also seen bequeathed to him the imperial as the progenitor of the imperial line, associated with regalia of the Japanese throne: a the imperial family and the Japanese state. (Pictures mirror, jewel, and sword. Ninigi’s from History/Bridgeman Images) great-grandson became Emperor Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan. Amaterasu is primarily worshipped in the Inner Shrine of Ise Grand Shrine in Mie Prefecture, one of the most famous and holiest Shinto sites. The shrine halls are representative of early Japanese architecture and have been rebuilt every 20 years since at least 690 in a ritualized process of renewal. Various festivals surround the building of the new shrine and dismantling of the old shrine in two side-by-side sites, which are rarely open to public viewing. Ise Shrine has historically been served by an imperial princess as priestess and was a place where Buddhism and Buddhist words were considered taboo in spite of the general religious syncretism of premodern Japan. However, like many prominent kami, Amaterasu was identified with a Buddhist deity, the cosmic Buddha Mahavairocana. Connections between Buddhist and Shinto institutions and traditions were sundered in the early Meiji period, when the two religions were separated to make way for State Shinto. During the years of State Shinto, the office of head priest was filled by the emperor and Ise established as the most important shrine in Japan, with worship of Amaterasu paramount. After World War II, ideological use of Shinto by

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the state was forbidden by the Occupation forces, but Ise was allowed to continue serving as a key shrine. Ise remains a popular destination for tourists and pilgrims, and Amaterasu has a presence in popular culture, including in manga, anime, and video games, as well as in the Japanese pantheon. Emily B. Simpson See also: Ancient Religions: Shamans in East Asia; Sun Goddess; Shinto: Kami; Shamans and Ritualists; State Shinto Further Reading Aston, W. G. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972. Chamberlain, Basil Hall. Translation of “Ko-ji-ki” or “Records of Ancient Matters.” Kobe: J. L. Thompson, 1932.

FEMININE VIRTUES Japan has always been styled as a uniquely consensual nation in which people have their place in a social hierarchy guided by superiors at various levels of society. The codes constructed the family as a local and patrilineal entity and encouraged filial piety as the foundation of national social order. Shinto inherited these values mostly from Confucian ethics as there is little agreed “dogma” in the set of ancient Japanese beliefs. Femininity was mainly defined in modes of behavior, speech, countenance, and conduct that served as moral principles for women. The core ideas were incorporated in the 18th-century Maxims for Women (Onna Daigaku) and prescribed complete submission and obedience to men. It was based on the writing of a Neo-Confucian scholar and consisted of 20 entries. The list contained items that argued against disobedience, discontentment, jealousy, and stupidity as predominantly feminine character faults that make women inferior to men. Marriage was based on the presupposition that the spouses conduct themselves in a chaste manner, although this often applied only to the female party, and monogamy did not enter the Japanese mind-set until the late 19th century. Another ideal stated that married women should at all times worship, obey, and serve their husbands and their in-laws, and they should go about their daily business with utmost reverence, humbleness, and courtesy. Obedience was the strongest link for women to their family members, especially to three male figures: the father before marriage, the husband, and her son, the latter upon becoming a widow. All in all, women occupied a generally subordinate position in society. However, Japanese women were not entirely oppressed until the emergence of the patrilineal household, which emphasized that the head of the household held absolute power over its members, and each individual had to submit to the needs and interests of the family. From the ancient through the medieval and early modern periods, marriage patterns shifted considerably, although most available information only refers to socioeconomic elites and less data are available about farmers and the lower social strata. What seems sure is that women in ancient Japan were more integrated into their birth families, but by medieval times



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they lost the right to inherit land and became more economically dependent on their husbands and their families. The Civil Code did not redefine marriage as a monogamous arrangement until 1898, when it also tried to do away with the system of concubines. At the same time, households became more hegemonic and hierarchical, mostly because the focus shifted to the married couple and amplified the differentiation of roles in the patrilineal family. In the postwar era, marriage was redefined again, and by constitutional law it became an agreement between mutually consenting adults rather than between two families. With enhanced urbanization and the increase in the number of nuclear families, many couples moved away from their extended household, at least as long as the husband’s parents were still healthy. The new era brought about greater freedom for the wives, although they remained financially dependent on their husbands. The ideal of the full-time homemaker and mother has still not taken on the same marginally negative connotation in Japan as in other industrialized countries and is encouraged by many religious organizations. That said, many women have chosen to work rather than have children, and their financial independence has allowed them to seek divorce more frequently, especially because until a few years ago, Japanese women could not walk away with half of the wealth the couple amassed during their married years. As a counterbalance to this phenomenon, Shinto shrines emanate a different feminine ideal and would like to see women return to the sacredly selfless motherhood and self-effacing devotion of the prewar era. A similar view is shared by conservative politicians who belong to the Liberal Democratic Party and among whose strongest supporters is the Association of Shinto Shrines, which criticizes the ideas of gender equality and individualism. Many suggestions call for the reinstitution of traditional Japanese family values and would like to see women in less influential positions both in an economic and political sense, relegating them to strongly hierarchical household roles reminiscent of past centuries. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Shinto: Kinship and Marriage; State Shinto Further Reading Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Koyama, Shizuko. Ryo-sai Kenbo-: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013. Swanson, Paul Loren, and Clark Chilson, eds. Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.

FILIAL PIETY Filial piety in Shinto can be defined as obedience to the rules of Shinto and patrilineal virtues that governed Japanese families in previous centuries. It generates gendered allusions in Japanese society, and, while women are an integral part of the setting, their roles on the whole are defined by obedience: their bodies, spirits, and their individuality—or lack thereof. Filial piety also relegated women to second-class

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citizens, though this has changed in the postwar era thanks to legal modifications in the constitution. However, the social perception of women, especially in the workplace, still leaves much to be desired. From the Tokugawa era (1603–1867) through Meiji (1868–1912), Taisho (1912–1926), and even beyond, paternalism was a pervasive force that provided the basic social cohesion in all human relations in Japan. It was an intrinsic part of the late Tokugawa cosmology, its focal ideas deriving from Neo-Confucianism, which emphasized binary pairs such as heaven and earth, rulers and ruled, fathers and sons, men and women. In the Meiji period, the nation was rebranded and perceived as one big family. Shinto beliefs sanctified the new national setting by a top-down quality of sacredness, and texts at the beginning of the 20th century demanded filial piety and obedience infused with emperor loyalty from all members of the nation. (It would be far-fetched to speak about “citizens” in this context as of yet, since women did not acquire voting rights until later.) Further to women being categorized as second-rate nationals, in Shinto there is the notion of defilement (kegare), which can happen either as a result of death or blood. This notion was interpreted against women by associating them with impurity. Such ritual uncleanliness with regard to blood developed in connection with both childbirth and menstruation, and as a result, women were regarded as sinful. This brought about their being excluded from various areas of life and created the tradition of “no females allowed.” Women—when in the state of impurity—were forbidden to take part in rituals and festivals as well as to enter places such as Shinto shrines and visit mountains called reizan that are revered in Shinto. Since Mount Fuji is regarded as a holy mountain, it was off-limits to women until the late 19th century. Furthermore, females were banned not only from fishing boats and construction sites but also from sake breweries and sumo rings. Although the government tried to change the practice when the first foreigners appeared in great numbers in the Meiji period (1868–1912), nevertheless, the tradition of excluding women lingers on in present-day Japan. For example, Mount Omine in Nara, south of Kyoto, is one of the well-known reizan where women are not permitted to climb to the top. They are also explicitly asked to stay away from tunnels under construction so as not to anger and arouse the jealousy of the Goddess of Mountains. Moreover, women are not allowed on the island of Okinoshima in the south of Japan, a location that has recently been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Similarly, some Shinto shrines ban women from walking under their gates (tori) for 72 days after childbirth or at least during the first month after delivery. However, not only ordinary citizens are subjected to these rules but also the miko and the itako—unmarried, young female staff at shrines who perform rituals and assist Shinto priests in ceremonies—are required to take hormone medications so that their monthly cycles will be controlled. Otherwise, they would be regarded as unclean and hinder the success and holiness of the rituals. As for popular Japanese attractions such as sumo tournaments, the Japan Sumo Association insists that the tradition of not allowing women in the ring must be upheld at all costs so that the purity of the premises will remain intact. Also, floats



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in several festivals are off-limits to female participants: they are not to carry them or stay in the band. However, in both cases, enthusiastic female spectators are welcome in great numbers. Filial piety and acceptance of one’s inferior status in Japanese society is increasingly challenged by modern social norms that have given women considerably more individual freedom in the recent past. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Shinto: Feminine Virtues; Priestesses Further Reading Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Koyama, Shizuko. Ryo-sai Kenbo-: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013. Swanson, Paul Loren, and Clark Chilson, eds. Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.

FOUNDERS OF NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS A fascinating phenomenon in Japanese religions is the astonishing emergence of new religious movements (shin shu-kyo- in Japanese) from the early 19th to the early 20th century. That was a time when Japan was experiencing a major political change from the feudal Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868) to the imperial restoration of the Meiji era (1868–1912) and its systematic state support of emperor-centered Shinto beliefs. It was also a time of rapid modernization and adaptation of Western ideas after some two centuries of near complete isolation from the rest of the world. Such sociopolitical and institutional changes were conducive to the emergence of a number of shin shu-kyo- that offered alternative modes of religious faith and belonging to distinguish from the traditional religions. These were typically established by a prophetic foundress experiencing a revelatory experience, a shamanic practice that traces its history back to Japanese folk traditions. Women had long functioned as mediums and dancers at Shinto shrines, while blind shamanic diviners and folk healers helped the general populace. However, with the Meiji regime promoting the adoption of Western medicine, in 1873, a new imperial order officially prohibited independent shamans from conducting exorcisms and performing divination and healing rituals. Consequently, folk healers and those shaman-like foundresses of newly established religious groups faced continuous harassment and systematic eradication by authorities. During this transition, they integrated into established religions, mainly Shinto structures, to avoid suppression by authorities who feared heterodox healing practices and their idiosyncratic accounts of gender roles; we find perhaps the most interesting religious use of gender and gender crossings in groups that arose in the 19th century. Most Shinto-related groups that emerged at that time and that remain active to this day, such as Tenrikyo- (see “Tenrikyo-”) and Omotokyo-, along with those established in the early 20th century, such as Tensho- ko-tai jingu-kyo-, Enno-kyo-, and

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Sekai shindo-kyo-, were initiated from their foundresses’ shamanic experience of possession but later integrated into the Shinto tradition. Deguchi Nao (1837–1918) founded Omotokyo-in 1892 after she experienced spirit possession (kamigakari) by a divinity that would ultimately restore the ideal future world after its destruction. Deguchi Nao practiced chinkon kishin, rituals of healing of sickness aimed at calming malevolent spirits. In 1893, she was incarcerated, and upon her release, Nao unsuccessfully tried to affiliate with extant religious movements to legitimize her own teachings. It was with her adopted son-in-law, Deguchi Onisaburo-, a trained saniwa (Shinto medium), that the movement gained legitimacy and was eventually recognized as a Shinto sect. During her life as foundress and leader, Deguchi Nao showed great persistence in millenarian thoughts revolving around groundbreaking ideas of gender as distinct from physical sex. Living in a culture that kept women subordinate in social and religious roles, Nao’s response was the idea of herself as the Transformed Male (henjo- nanshi) who had a male nature in a female body and therefore the unique capacity to endure world renewal while subordinating herself to the divine will. Nao believed that only a female accustomed to hardship would endure great and prolonged suffering to complete a renewal of the world. Her son-in-law, conversely, was the Transformed Female (henjo- nyoshi) who would collaborate with the Transformed Male in the accomplishment of the world renewal. Deguchi Nao used this gender construction to challenge the Meiji feminine ideal and to wield control over masculinizing institutions and imperial orders regulating religious activities. Tensho- ko-tai jingu-kyo-, also known as the dancing religion, is a movement centered around the dance of the “non-self” (muga). The movement was founded by Kitamura Sayo (1900–1967) in the 1940s after experiencing her first divine possession by a dual-gendered divinity called Tensho- ko-tai jingu-, a composite of the female Shinto divinity Amateratsu Omikami and the male divinity Ko-tai Jin. In the state of possession, Kitamura criticized the emperor and predicted the disastrous end of the war. She fiercely rejected other forms of religion, particularly Buddhism for its discrimination toward women based on the concept of five obstacles and three obediences. However, her teaching incorporated concepts from Buddhism, Shintoism, and Christianity, and the movement was eventually incorporated into Shinto in 1947. Enno-kyo- was founded by Fukada Chiyoko (1887–1925) in 1919 after receiving a divine revelation that directed her to serve as the messenger of the Gods and their vessel on earth. She had an eclectic approach to both Shinto and Buddhist traditions to focus on family life and care for ancestors based on esoteric rituals, which led the group to be dismantled in 1941. It acquired the status of Shinto-related religious corporation in 1952. Sekai Shindo-kyo- is a new religion deriving from Tenrikyo- and founded by Aida Hide (1898–1973). After joining Tenrikyo- and putting her energies into proselytizing, she experienced several divine visitations. Soon after, she began to transmit these revelations and started her personal mission, seeking to re-create the ideal world of heaven on earth and establish a divine era based on the notion of the transformation of the spirit. The group was legally registered in 1946 as a Shinto-related movement.



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Many others were established during prewar and in the immediate postwar Japan, very often as offspring of earlier new religious movements. Among them were Shinri jikko- no oshie, which was founded in 1952 by Honjo- Chiyoko (1902–1957), a trained reino-sha (medium) who practiced a secret ritual of faith healing known as otekazu; Shinji shu-meikai, founded by Koyama Mihoko (1910–2003), is a third-generation movement that emerged in 1970 from Omotokyo-. She was trained in the practice of jo-rei, a type of spiritual healing where practitioners claim to channel light and warmth into the receiver by having giver and receiver conjure an image of sunlight. All these are examples of the ways women interpreted elements from Japanese religious traditions in new ways that incorporated responses to rapid modernization and rapid social change and voiced people’s concerns about the social instability and changing gender structures that political, societal, and economic changes were bringing about. Paola Cavaliere See also: Shinto: Filial Piety; Shamans and Ritualists Further Reading Cavaliere, Paola. “Female Leadership in Japanese New Religions: The Case of Deguchi Nao of Omoto-kyo-.” Conference paper, The Italian School for East Asian Studies, Kyoto, 2005. The Encyclopedia of Shinto. Kokugakuin University. http://k-amc.kokugakuin.ac.jp/. Susumu, S. From Salvation to Spirituality: Popular Movements in Modern Japan. n.p.: Trans Pacific, 2004.

KAMI Kami, often translated as “Gods” or “spirits,” refers to a wide range of deities celebrated and worshipped in the Shinto Religion. The worship of kami long predates the institutional organization of Shinto and encompasses great regional and historical variation. From kami revered as the ancestors of the Japanese imperial family to local kami worshipped at a single shrine, from deified humans and animals to individual rocks and trees, kami populate the natural and spiritual landscape in Shinto practice, continuing today. While the term megami refers specifically to female kami, kami is a gender-neutral word, and the use of megami is relatively uncommon when referring to female Shinto deities. Women kami have always held a prominent place in Shinto mythology and, like kami in general, may be either benevolent or malevolent forces. The Goddess Izanami descended to earth alongside the male deity Izanagi, and together they created the islands of Japan and numerous deities. However, Izanami died giving birth to the fire deity, and though Izanagi descended to Yomi, the land of the dead, to bring her back, he broke a taboo in looking at her dead body, and she chased him out of Yomi. Izanagi then set a barrier between Yomi and the world and purified himself. This story illustrates not only the separation between pure and impure, living and dead—both key themes in Shinto—but also the productive and destructive power of kami.

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Arguably the most important kami is the Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, born from Izanagi’s purifications after returning from Yomi. She presides over the kami’s realm, Takamagahara, and sent her grandson Ninigi down to rule earth, where his descendants later became the emperors of Japan. In a famous myth, Amaterasu hides herself in a cave after arguing with her brother Susanoo and is finally coaxed back into the world by the erotic dance of another female kami, the Goddess Ame-no-Uzume. This particular Goddess and her dance are often cited as the origin of shamanism and performative practices such as kagura, sacred dance, and the masked Noh theater. These kami all appear in the Kojiki, the Record of Ancient Matters, a chronicle of Japanese myth and early history presented to the court in 712. They may be considered the ujigami, or clan Gods, of the Yamato family. However, not all kami belong to the imperial lineage, nor do all kami have Japanese origins. For instance, Benzaiten, Goddess of Language and Arts, originates from the Hindu Goddess Saraswati, while Kishimojin, protector of children, is derived from the demon Hariti from the Lotus Sutra, who ate children until converted into a protector by the Buddha. Both of these deities have clear connections to Buddhism as well; in fact, there is much overlap between Buddhist and Shinto traditions in Japan, including their deities. For instance, Amaterasu is also identified as Dainichi Nyorai, the cosmic Buddha Mahavairocana. Humans can also become kami. Many early rulers became kami, such as Empress Jingu-, who lived in Japan from 169 to 269 CE and who is enshrined at many Hachiman and Sumiyoshi shrines for her connections to battle and to the sea. While Shinto declined in social importance after World War II, many Japanese today continue to visit shrines, pray to kami for benefits, and celebrate festivals associated with kami. Emily B. Simpson See also: Shinto: Amaterasu Omikami; Filial Piety; Shamans and Ritualists; State Shinto Further Reading Aston, W. G. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972. Breen, John, and Mark Teeuwen. A New History of Shinto. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Chamberlain, Basil Hall. Translation of “Ko-ji-ki” or “Records of Ancient Matters.” Kobe: J. L. Thompson, 1932.

KINSHIP AND MARRIAGE The idea of a Shinto marriage is a relative newcomer to the Japanese ideal. Prior to the 20th century, it was the single, extended family that celebrated weddings, and marriages were often arranged by the older generation. Shinto marriage is initiated with a wedding that includes a prayer by the couple that follows in the footsteps of the divinities of creation, Izanagi and Izanami, who are said to have been the first to have a marriage ritual in Shinto cosmology.



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These divinities mutually complemented each other like the sun and moon, and mountains and rivers, and their union implies that females have a complementary role to play in such a relationship. The prayer further emphasizes the couple’s tasks in managing the household, such as dedicating themselves to raising offspring and cultivating a family spirit. The bride and groom pledge to uphold the divinities’ intentions and hope to receive their protection for the household. Thus, the marriage is conceived as a tiny cell of the patrilineal household and, in a broader sense, the nation-state. The Western notion of personal, individual fulfilment and happiness do not enter the equation. Further to the rite’s material allusions, the liturgy emphasizes the so-called natural roles for both males and females and in earlier times began with an utterance of gratitude for the arranged marriage by stating that the union of the bride and the groom came about through the mediation of a go-between. In case of a love marriage, the same evocation would be addressed to a nominal member of the wedding party. Since the new bride has to be formally integrated into the husband’s household upon marriage, the wedding ritual conveys that intention. In certain parts of Japan, the joining of the two families is symbolized by the gift of three embroidered pieces of cloth (minofuroshiki) to the new wife. These then become one of her most precious possessions during her married life and are placed on her urn at her funeral. Since women are severed from their birth families at marriage, the bride has to be gradually initiated into her new family and customs so as to overcome the so-called hearth taboo, which signifies that women of two different lineages would use the same kitchen. This system places the newcomer in an inferior position to all members of her new environment, and her duties fall directly under the supervision of the mother-in-law. However, her sole most important task is to produce healthy children, her firstborn preferably being male. However, while Japanese concepts of gendered kinship practices unquestionably represent continental influences and the ideological agendas of the ruling elites, the perception of domestic member roles has gone through changes in the past centuries. By the 1800s, the temple parishioner household (danka) system was strengthened so that it became the single unifying organism of government control. Typically, all household members belonged to the temple of the patriline (the father’s), and brides who entered the household would switch their affiliation upon marriage. This custom was further developed during the Shinto shrine unifications at the end of the 19th century. Under the family (ie) system, the eldest son became the head of the family and not only inherited the property to maintain the lineage but also exercised absolute authority over family members. The patriarchal family system was the smallest entity and foundation of the pre–World War II hierarchical structure that ensured the continuity and unity of Japanese society. Between 1868 and 1945, marriage was redefined as monogamous and was ideally supposed to consist of a dual partnership between the husband and one wife, yet the patrilineal household became more hegemonic than ever. Women were encouraged to represent the ideal of the good wife and wise mother and were in return excluded from politics and the public sphere. After 1945, religious organizations such as the Association of Shinto Shrines used these concepts to create policies that covered the roles and rights of women within their institutions. Many

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other Shinto organizations also chose to adhere to prewar definitions of the family, rejecting individualism and propagating an identity based on the household. Some women opted to embrace these domestic roles and performed them dutifully, and others decided on ultraconservative gender roles that might serve their own ideals in society as socially perfect wedded females. Those who did not accept these norms were the ones who drove the reforms on gender equality. Yet, the demographic realities are coming down hard on women today, and the lucky ones who can have dual roles find it increasingly difficult to juggle marriage and career. By the late 1990s, the ideal Shinto marriage—or any paper union for that matter— gave way to more single women choosing to live alone or with their parents. These virtual freeloaders along with high-achieving professional counterparts defaulted on having children and perpetuating the family image of female subordination. As for divorce, in the Edo period it was pervasive both among samurais and commoners, and it occurred more frequently in urban areas or in eastern Japan more than in the western part of the country. While women could not legally initiate the divorce, they could ask for help from their birth families and get additional assistance from local officials or the initial matchmaker, who would negotiate the divorce if the husband did not give his consent. Considering penal law, it took the Shinto gender differences for granted in a way that made a wife’s offense against the husband’s parents a graver sin than the husband’s against hers. Also, the latter’s abuse and physical violence toward his wife was not punishable as long as he did not kill her, but if he assaulted her parents, she could divorce him. A husband, on the other hand, could have various reasons to divorce his wife, such as spreading damaging information about her in-laws or attempting to harm them in any way. He also had the right to divorce her for several reasons, among them failure to bear a son or serve her in-laws, committing adultery, being jealous, or simply falling gravely ill. The wife, however, had no similar, corresponding right. Since World War II, the divorce rate has climbed to new heights, reflecting the recent change in law that allows for women to walk away with half of what the couple amassed during their marital relationship. Due to the increasing number of love marriages placing higher expectations on wedded life, the number of divorces is likely to increase. Just as more people are making a marked shift away from traditional values in this respect, the Shinto ceremonies are also showing a decreasing trend as the ideal nuptial and seem to give way to a more Western, Christian-style celebration that is sometimes performed in English rather than Japanese. With regard to burial customs, in the postwar era, the family was no longer defined as exclusively patrilineal—again based on the Shinto ideals—but final rites still upheld the tradition. Although the majority of Japanese still prefer to be buried with their spouses, a growing number of women now buy their own future graves in advance. To further this aim, some of them formed burial associations that emphasize the fact that they prefer informal ties over conjugal or family ones. These groups then make arrangements in the event of the death of their members. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Shinto: Feminine Virtues; Shinto Weddings; State Shinto



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Further Reading Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Koyama, Shizuko. Ryo-sai Kenbo-: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013. Swanson, Paul Loren, and Clark Chilson, eds. Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.

MARRIAGE See Kinship and Marriage PRIESTESSES Priestesses in the Shinto Religion have taken a variety of names and forms throughout Japanese history. Although the term miko is sometimes used as a generic word for women priestesses, there is no single Japanese term to indicate a female religious specialist within Shinto. Yet women have long played a prominent role in the veneration of kami, the spirits or deities in Shinto, as shamans, oracles, shrine maidens, and formally installed priestesses. The earliest written record about Japan, appearing in the third-century Chinese chronicle Weizhi, mentions a queen named Himiko who ruled over multiple clans. According to the Weizhi, Himiko practiced the “way of the demons,” perhaps a disparaging reference to early Shinto. Living a secluded life with female attendants while her brother attended to affairs of state, Himiko appears to have been a religious leader. While we know little about the nature of her religious practice, one interpretation of her name is that it is actually a title, with hi meaning “sun” and miko meaning “priestess.” Although we can only speculate as to the existence of sun worship led by women, the Weizhi does state that when Himiko died, a burial mound (kofun) was raised over her tomb, an important indication of status and religious veneration of the dead. Another early female religious figure in Japan is Empress Jingu-, who appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki. According to these chronicles, she lived from 169 to 269 CE and served as a shaman in the imperial court. At the death of her husband, Emperor Chu-ai, Jingu- was possessed by the kami and, at their instruction, led a fleet to conquer the Korean peninsula. Throughout her journey, she sought omens and aid from kami whenever she encountered problems and returned triumphant to Japan, where she bore a son, the future Emperor o-jin, and ruled until her death. The chronicles’ description of her possession trances and frequent contacts with the deities point to her status as a priestess of the kami. While both Himiko and Empress Jingu- are often considered shamans in English, they are also identified as early examples of miko, a Japanese word that can be translated as “shaman,” “priestess,” or “shrine maiden,” reflecting the changing role of miko in Japanese society. When Buddhism and other continental traditions took hold in Japan during the Asuka (538–710) and Nara periods (710–794), government control over religious institutions extended to miko, who had to associate with a particular shrine to practice ecstatic trance. While some shrine priestesses came

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from the imperial lineage and held high status, such as the miko of Ise and Kamo Shrines, many shrine miko held no formal office and were restricted to domestic tasks and entertaining the kami through music and dance. Miko practicing outside the shrines were subject to arrest and exile, but many women continued to practice as shamans, mediums, and folk healers, especially as official patronage of shrines and temples declined in the volatile medieval and warring states periods. Traveling groups of shamans often featured matrilineal training and leadership. Some groups, like the katsurame, funcMiko, or shrine maiden. Female shrine attendants tioned as both priestesses and can be seen at Shinto shrines performing a variety of prostitutes, with no perceived functions and wearing the characteristic white haori dichotomy between their sexual (jacket) and red hakama (wide, divided trousers). and spiritual services. (MIXA Co. Ltd./Getty Images) During the Edo period, the emer​gence of women’s religions allowed for some women to serve as shrine priestesses yet again. For example, in the Awashima Religion, women were the primary religious specialists until the middle of the Edo period (1600–1868). However, in the Meiji period (1868–1912), government efforts to create State Shinto, centered on the worship and priesthood of the emperor, led to legislation specifically targeting miko and forbidding their practices as superstitious and harmful. This forced many women to abandon their profession or go underground, no doubt leading to the decline in shamanic practices throughout Japan. Today, the term miko refers primarily to shrine maidens, who perform a variety of functions at Shinto shrines. Wearing the characteristic white haori (jacket) and red hakama (wide, divided trousers), a miko may assist at shrine ceremonies, perform ritual dance, and sell fortunes, protective charms, or other souvenirs. They have a visible presence in Shinto shrines and are often characters in anime and manga, though usually with spiritual powers. Women may also serve as kannushi (shrine priests), but their number remains relatively few. There are many other religious women who may fall into the category of Shinto priestess. Some of the new religions that have sprung up in Japan since the Edo period feature a female charismatic leader who falls into trances and communes with kami, harkening back to the ancient miko. There are also some remaining female shamans in northern Japan, most notably the blind itako on Mount Osore in Aomori Prefecture. As in much of Japanese religion, these female practitioners



Shamans and Ritualists

may invoke either Shinto or Buddhist deities, making it difficult to pin down exclusively Shinto priestesses outside of the shrine system. Though difficult to define and changing throughout history, the Shinto priestess has played a vital role in Japanese religion for thousands of years. In the form of the miko, she remains an iconic figure, featured in popular culture as well as shrine visits today. Emily B. Simpson See also: Shinto: Kami; Shamans and Ritualists; State Shinto Further Reading Ambros, Barbara A. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Blacker, Carmen. The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. London: Mandala, 1975. Kidder, J. Edward. Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Kingdom of Yamatai. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Kunimitsu, Kawamura. “A Female Shaman’s Mind and Body, and Possession.” Asian Folklore Studies 62, no. 2 (December 2003): 255–87.

SHAMANS AND RITUALISTS Shamans, ritualists, and religious performers have been important actors in the veneration of kami, deities worshipped in various Shinto traditions, and many of them have historically been women. Yet, for much of Japanese history, the boundaries of different religious traditions have been blurry at best. Shinto as a distinct religion did not emerge until relatively late and has undergone several notable shifts. The titles of these religious specialists have also changed over time and in accordance with new trends and activities, making it difficult to pin down what constitutes a “Shinto shaman.” Nonetheless, gender forms a particularly important category of analysis when considering these specialists, as some are exclusively women; some exclusively men, though sometimes playing women’s roles; and some formed a partnership with clear delineation of responsibility along gender lines. Thus, women have been key actors in religious performance throughout Japanese history. A shaman is generally defined as someone who is able to communicate with, and potentially influence, the world of deities. While shamanic traditions differ greatly across cultures and time, some common features include a period of stress or sickness as a catalyst for opening communications with the spirit world, ascetic practices, initiation processes, and periods of isolation. Shamans were clearly thought to exist in ancient Japan, and the first ones we know of were women. The earliest written record about Japan, appearing in the third-century Chinese chronicle Weizhi, mentions a queen named Himiko, who ruled over multiple clans. According to the Weizhi, Himiko practiced the “way of the demons,” perhaps a disparaging reference to the worship of kami. Living a secluded life with female attendants and remaining unmarried, Himiko appears to have kept herself isolated.

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Though she was queen, her brother attended to affairs of state, suggesting a dual polity of religion and state. While we know little more about the nature of her religious practice, the Weizhi does state that when Himiko died, a burial mound (kofun) was raised over her tomb, an important indication of status and veneration of the dead. Another early female religious figure in Japan is Empress Jingu-, who appears in the Kojiki and the Nihon shoki. According to these mytho-historical chronicles, she lived from 169 to 269 CE and served as both imperial consort to Emperor Chu-ai and court shaman. At her husband’s behest and after his death, Jingu- was possessed by the kami and relayed their instructions. In the Kojiki, male priests summon and interpret the kami’s words, while in the Nihon shoki, Jingu- is both priest and shaman. This points to an important difference between shamans who control their own trance and those who serve as the mouthpiece of the deities, requiring another ritualist to call the spirits in. In both chronicles, the kami direct Jingu- to conquer the Korean peninsula, which she accomplished through omens and aid from kami whenever needed. Unlike Himiko, Empress Jingu- was both married and pregnant, giving birth to the next emperor after her return to Japan. Yet, descriptions of her possession trances and frequent contacts with the deities point to her status as a shamanic figure. Both Queen Himiko and Empress Jingu- have been considered examples of a dual-gender ruling system in ancient Japan, in which a woman leader controls spiritual affairs while a man handles political rule. While there are too few examples to definitively support the existence of this system in early Japan, there was such a system in the culturally distinct Ryu-kyu- kingdom, now Okinawa. In the cases of Himiko and Jingu-, it is clear that they both held ruling power and that it was predicated on their shamanic capabilities. The two women are also considered early examples of miko, a Japanese word that can be translated as “shaman,” “priestess,” or “shrine maiden.” Although the term miko is sometimes used as a generic word for women who specialize in sacred arts, there is no single Japanese term to indicate a Shinto female religious specialist. Yet, there are other early examples of women who communicated with kami, such as Yamatohime, who heard the voice of Sun Goddess Amaterasu and established Ise Shrine for her worship. This myth became the basis for installing a close unmarried female relative of the emperor, often his daughter, as the high priestess (saio- or saigu-) of Ise Shrine, who performed three main rituals a year on behalf of the imperial family. Yet these women were appointed due to family ties rather than shamanic ability. In addition, many shrines relied on oracles to convey the will of the kami, and these oracles were often women. The female oracles of Usa Hachimangu- Shrine made pronouncements on behalf of the kami Hachiman, one of which suggested that the Buddhist monk Do-kyo- become emperor instead of Empress Sho-toku in 766. This oracle was subsequently contradicted by another oracle affirming the status of the imperial household, but this episode and subsequent challenges of “fraudulent oracles” shows both the growing power of Buddhism as well as increasing distrust of shamanic women.



Shamans and Ritualists

As Buddhism and other continental traditions took hold in Japan during the Asuka (538–710) and Nara periods (710–794), government control over religious institutions extended to shamans, who had to associate with a particular shrine to practice ecstatic trance. However, many itinerant shamans continued to communicate with the deities on behalf of paying customers. Many women who communicated with the deities doubled as entertainers or sex workers, demonstrating both the need to diversify in an increasingly controlled society as well as a possible connection between shamanic trance and sexual union. Itinerant shamans have been both male and female and vary widely in their titles and practices. Some have attained connection with spirits through hardship and a visionary dream or journey, while others have actively sought the power. Many of them are affiliated with shugendo-, a diverse set of traditions that are often called “mountain asceticism” for their association with particular sacred mountains and the ascetic practices they embrace. Like many religious traditions, shugendoincludes Shinto, Buddhist, and other continental and local traditions and thus was persecuted in the early stages of Japanese modernization, when Shinto was held up as the national moral code. Yet shugendo- has enjoyed resurgence after the war and in recent years, with many women often taking part in mountain pilgrimages and ascetic practices. In the northern regions of Tohoku and Hokkaido, shamans have generally been women, some of whom are blind. Sighted shamans typically go through a life crisis, a period of healing, and then initiation by a more experienced shaman before entering the profession. In contrast, blind women historically became shamans by default, as this occupation was one of only a few open to them. Such shamans still exist today; particularly well known are the blind shamans called itako, who communicate with the dead through the aid of either Shinto or Buddhist deities. Both kinds of northern shamans may work alone or in groups or marry an ascetic priest and work together as medium and priest. The titles and practices of these women vary widely, but like most shamanic traditions throughout Japan, their remaining numbers are few. Although many shamanic practices are dying out, some have enjoyed a resurgence in the form of new religions, a term that comprises new religious groups in Japan that emerged in the 19th century in response to Japan’s modernization or in postwar Japan. Many of these groups have charismatic leaders who share many shamanic characteristics, including visionary visitations by deities after hardship and ascetic practices, communication with deities, and prophetic pronouncement. Early examples include Nakayama Miki of Tenrikyo- and Deguchi Nao of Omoto-kyo, both women leaders with shamanic powers. While not Shinto sects, these two new religions are strongly influenced by Shinto ideas. Due to the immense variety of shamanic practices in Japanese religion, it is difficult to determine who exactly counts as a ritualist. In many cases, shamans perform their own rituals to communicate with the divinities and respond to the needs of their supplicants. In some cases, a Buddhist priest performs an exorcism with a female medium as assistant and vessel for the offending spirit. In this case, the priest drives the ritual, but which religious actor is the shaman? Perhaps more

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important than the clear delineation of shamanic actors or Shinto shamanic figures is the recognition of the diversity of shamanic practice in the Japanese islands. Emily B. Simpson See also: Ancient Religions: Shamans in East Asia; Shinto: Amaterasu Omikami; Founders of New Religions; Kami; Priestesses; State Shinto Further Reading Ambros, Barbara A. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Blacker, Carmen. The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. London: Mandala, 1975. Ivy, Marilyn. “Ghostly Epiphanies: Recalling the Dead on Mount Osore.” In Discourses of the Vanishing, 141–91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Kidder, J. Edward. Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Kingdom of Yamatai. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. Kunimitsu, Kawamura. “A Female Shaman’s Mind and Body, and Possession.” Asian Folklore Studies 62, no. 2 (December 2003): 255–87.

SHINTO WEDDINGS Brides in Japan did not used to have the extravagant community wedding characteristic of other cultures. In Tokugawa Japan, weddings were not held at religious sites or conducted by their personnel present but were celebrated as family rituals. However, sometimes elderly female helpers assisted with the ceremony and were to protect the bride from demonic harm on her passage into the bridegroom’s household. Nevertheless, the idea that religious professionals should officiate Shinto weddings is distinctly modern. The initial ritual manual with instructions was published in 1872, and the first recorded Shinto weddings took place in the 1880s. These gained popularity only after the imperial wedding of Crown Prince Yoshihito, later known as the Taisho Emperor (1879–1926), and his 15-year-old bride, Kujou Sadako, later known as Empress Teimei (1884–1951) in Kashikodokoro in the imperial palace in 1900. About a year later, the Hibiya Daijingu in Tokyo offered the first Shinto wedding for the urban citizens. The motivation behind the new custom was partly economic: state support for the shrines declined, and the Shinto priesthood was in dire need of raising funds to maintain the premises. In the postwar era, when the religion could not secure any state funding, wedding ceremonies reached their peak in popularity. Thus, although priestesses were allowed to reenter Shinto rituals in this period, their numbers are only a mere trickle compared to those of their male counterparts. Despite their recent origins, Shinto weddings are perceived as traditional and as demonstrations of Japaneseness. The ceremonies have become highly standardized, and women are the less active participants in the rite, the event reflecting the gendered ideals in Japanese society: the groom reads the marriage vow while the bride only offers silent acquiescence—emanating the feminine ideal of a demure and obedient wife. During the Shinto wedding ceremony, which is a short and uncrowded affair, the



State Shinto

couple drinks sake offered from three cups—the bride only drinks alone from the second one and shares the third one with the groom—by the miko, the shrine maiden. The latter also performs a sacred dance before the couple place their individual Japanese evergreen on the altar, which represents gratitude to the spirits who gave their blessings on the union. According to another manual, the couple merely raise the first two cups—small and medium in size—to their lips and drink only from the third, bigger offering. The ceremony is concluded by the families sharing a round of sake among them. Traditional Japanese wedding garments do not allow for a lot of variety and suppress the individuality of both the bride and the groom. The bride wears a traditional white kimono—sometimes with red accents—often complemented with a wig and white paper hat, which is to hide the “horns” of jealous demons and also symbolizes the future wife’s intention of becoming a gentle and cooperative spouse. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Shinto: Kinship and Marriage; State Shinto Further Reading Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. De Mente, Boye Lafayette. Etiquette Guide to Japan. North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle, 2015. Swanson, Paul Loren, and Clark Chilson, eds. Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.

S TAT E S H I N T O State Shinto was established as distinct from Sectarian Shinto, which also arose in the second part of the 19th century. Both forms were instrumental in creating a sexist stance toward women’s image and the consecutive disownment of their spiritual power in the religion. Between 1868 and 1945, Shinto practices were not seen as religious customs but rather as simple nationalistic fervor, part and parcel of being a good citizen. For the female segment of society, this meant becoming increasingly subservient. Although the ancient Japanese religion in its original form recognized the centrality of women by allowing them to actively participate in the rituals, it cannot be ascertained whether priestesses preceded priests as no written sources support either claim. What seems definite is the fact that both female and male elements—or rather, interlocutors—were needed to convey the will of divinities to the believers, and increasingly, women procured focal responsibilities when the religion underwent a shift toward the magical and mystical. However, even before the onset of State Shinto, the role of females was weakened by factors such as the introduction of the Chinese legal system, which was male oriented, and the religion’s intensifying coexistence with Buddhism, which emphasized the uncleanness of women. At the beginning of the Meiji Restoration—when “pure” Shinto as the national religion was established—several of the abovementioned magical and mystical rites were abolished, which limited the options for female participation. The emerging, centralized religion called for a collective category for religious organizations identifying as Shinto, and women’s roles changed alongside the transfer process. The

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prescribed responsibilities typically promoted ideals of femininity that reinforced the “good wife, wise mother” concept, which became dominant in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This notion was two-sided: it empowered women by providing them access to education and a new public role when officially they were banned from the public sphere; at the same time, it constrained females to the domestic arena and allowed them only supporting responsibilities. The concept of “men superior, women inferior” pervaded all social strata during the Meiji period (1868–1912): the Civil Code of 1898 legitimized the household system that was based on the family of the samurai class between the Kamakura (1185–1333) and Edo years (1603–1867). Women’s maternal role was the most important to the state: they were to secure a steady future population for the army and the navy. Thus, while in the Edo period, the roles of women during Shinto ceremonies encompassed tasks such as taking up the position of the master celebrant—held by females of a leading clan—and as leaders of the divine procession from the old to the new shrine buildings during customary reconstructions of the premises. After the Meiji Restoration, a male member of the imperial family was designated for this role, a practice that lasted until the end of World War II. At the grassroots level, women were also prohibited from serving as priestesses at village Shinto shrines because—as was mentioned above—they were not permitted to hold public office. They also lost their functions as shamanic mediums and dancers in 1873; they were not allowed to conduct exorcism or perform divination. Thus, Shinto priesthood was largely masculinized, which was most apparent at the Ise Shrines despite the fact that several prominent advocates campaigned unceasingly for deeper consideration of previous historical roles by females in Shinto. With regard to women participating in rituals as wedding partners, the rite was not popularized until the Taisho period. The emperor not only married his empress in a Shinto ceremony but also only had one consort. By 1913, several major shrines offered weddings to commoners, and the number tripled to 1,550 per year between 1908 and 1915. A decade later, other urban centers also saw the trend multiply in their neighborhoods, although a great number of weddings were still organized at home. Further to the quantity of Shinto wedding ceremonies, the  gathering became more and more lavish since it was seen as an investment in the couple’s future. Contemporary logic dictated that a more costly and extravagant gathering would result in an increasingly stable and committed union when compared to a fiscally lenient nuptial. Judit Erika Magyar See also: Shinto: Amaterasu Omikami; Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety; Kami; Priestesses; Shinto Weddings Further Reading Ambros, Barbara. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Koyama, Shizuko. Ryo-sai Kenbo-: The Educational Ideal of ‘Good Wife, Wise Mother’ in Modern Japan. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013. Swanson, Paul Loren, and Clark Chilson, eds. Nanzan Guide to Japanese Religions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005.

– TENRIKYO

– TENRIKYO Tenrikyo- is a religious organization located in Tenri City, Nara Prefecture. It bases its doctrine on the revelations its foundress, Nakayama Miki (1798–1887), had over the years between 1838 and 1887. Nakayama experienced spirit possessions by a male kami (deity) who called himself Tsukihi (Sun and Moon), a name suggesting the union of genders that the heavenly spheres symbolize. The deity proclaimed himself as the “true and original God” (Tenri O no Mikoto) and decided Nakayama Miki’s task, which was to relieve people from suffering in preparation of the coming of a perfect divine kingdom (kanrondai sekai) in which all human beings would enjoy blissful life (yoki-gurashi) in union with Tenri O no Mikoto. The deity made continuous revelations to Nakayama, later recorded in the Mikagurauta (1866–1875) and the Ofudesaki (1868–1882). She came to be called oyasama (the beloved parent) and hinagata (divine model). Nakayama attracted many female followers as they relied on her charms for safe childbirth, healing practices, and ritual dance services that involved the mingling of the sexes. The rapidly expanding popularity of the movement drew the attention of the authorities. To avoid suppression, Nakayama Miki changed her healing practices to allow only men to perform so that it more closely resembled Shinto rituals and could be integrated into the Shinto tradition. In 1908, the movement was eventually recognized as a Shinto sect. Tenrikyo- publications emphasize that Nakayama rejected the stance of a gendered division of labor that assigned just the submissive role of good wife and wise mother to women. She showed a tendency toward a gender distinction based on skills and attributes that resisted the ideas of biological determinism. She also rejected the traditional idea of women’s body as impure, as she considered the human body, male or female, as a thing lent by the deity, and conception and birth serving the work of the deity, not a polluted process as her Neo-Confucian and Buddhist contemporaries thought. Still, she supported the idea of complementary relations between husband and wife, which conformed to the one husband, one wife system set down later in the Meiji Civil Code of 1898, and emphasized women’s role in family, child-rearing, and children’s education. Therefore, while resisting the hegemony of the patrilineal household and its traditional notions of female impurity and inferiority, Nakayama focused on women’s roles according to traditional ideals of femininity and expected tasks and social roles. Over time Tenrikyo-, whose leadership has thereafter been held by male successors, has assigned women well-defined roles and places to find ways to be publicly active in care activities while nominally fulfilling their expected roles of invoking feminine ideals. Those activities provide a crucial place for women within the religious organization and in society at large, according to the changing institutions of family, work, and education and their gendered expectations. Paola Cavaliere See also: Shinto: Feminine Virtues; Filial Piety; Founders of New Religions; Kami

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Further Reading Ambros, B. Women in Japanese Religions. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Okamoto, M. “Tenrikyo and Its Teaching of Husband and Wife as the Origin to Settle the Family.” Periodica de re canonica. Roma: Pontificia Universita’ Gregoriana 100 (2011): 637–44. Tenri Oyasato Research Institute. “Theological Perspective of Tenrikyo.” Commemoration of the Centennial Anniversary of Oyasama. Tenri, Japan: Tenri University Press, 1986.

Sikhism

INTRODUCTION Founded in India by Guru Nanak (1470–1540), Sikhism is a monotheistic religion with about 24 million members. While the vast majority of Sikhs reside in India, the largest populations of Sikhs outside of India can be found in Europe, Canada, and the United States, regions to which Sikhs emigrated and attracted converts. Sikh women can be recognized by a circular steel bracelet worn around their right wrist. Although short hair is becoming more popular with young Sikh women, the usual hairstyle is long, either neatly braided or put up in a bun. Sikh women can also be distinguished by their clothing, which includes a salwar (loose pants), kameez (shirt to the knees), and dupattas (long, sheer scarves). They can also be recognized from their surname—“Kaur” meaning “princess,” which remains with each woman whether she is married or not. Sikh culture is family and community oriented, with traditions of hospitality and inclusivity. Sikh hospitality is visible at meetings and conferences where Sikhs gather together with others and offer langar (communal meals) free of charge. An example of this was seen at the 2015 Parliament of World Religions where 10,000 people of all faiths were in attendance: Sikhs offered daily langar at the conference to anyone who wished to share in the meal. Unfortunately, due to prejudice and ignorance, hate crimes have been perpetrated against Sikhs. Due to similarities in men’s dress, Sikhs outside of India are often mistaken for Muslims, and crimes have been committed against Sikhs in retaliation for terrorist acts that were committed by Islamic extremists. Sikhs worship with scripture readings, hymns, chants, prayers, and sermons, as well as with food rituals and communal meals. Daily worship at home is also common. Sikhs greet one another with folded hands and with exaltation to “the all-encompassing Timeless One (Sat Sri Akal).” In the entry “Rituals and Festivals, Women’s Roles,” Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh relates women’s participation in worship, rites, and celebrations. Women are important in Sikh history and community. During its founding in 16th-century Kartarpur, India, three women inspired the Sikh founder, Guru Nanak—his mother, Tripta; his sister, Nanaki; and his wife, Sulakhni; these women helped shape the social and religious consciousness of Guru Nanak. Also, in the first Sikh community that developed around Guru Nanak women were equal partners. Working together, they formulated the fundamental Sikh institutions of seva (voluntary service), langar (community meal), and sangat (congregation), and formed a democratic congregation without priests or ordained ministers. They listened to and recited sacred hymns together, and cooked and ate langar without

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distinction of gender, caste, class, or marital status. Women’s participation in the founding of Sikhism is discussed in “Guru Period,” and the importance and roles of women in the faith are described in “Sikh Scriptures and Women.” Many Sikh women are accomplished. In “Art and Performance,” Singh discusses some significant Sikh women. Today, there are diverse forms of Sikhism with teachings that are unique to each group, although Sikhs associated with the Khalsa (five ks) are the most numerous. Another change happening is a loss of gender equality among Sikhs. In her article “Feminist Issues in Sikhism,” Singh discusses this problem and some of its causes. She refers to steps being taken by Sikh leaders and reformers, noting the importance of faith and reform strategies in the goal of returning to the Sikh egalitarian core. General Bibliography—Sikhism Axel, Brian. The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Bhachu, Parminder. Dangerous Designs: Asian Women Fashion the Diaspora Economies. London: Routledge, 2004. Elsberg, Constance. Graceful Women. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Jakobsh, Doris. Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Kaur, Kanwaljit. Sikh Women: Fundamental Issues in Sikh Studies. Chandigarh, India: Institute of Sikh Studies, 1992. Mahmood, Cynthia, and Stacy Brady. Guru’s Gift: An Ethnography Exploring Gender Equality with North American Sikh Women. Mayfield, KY: Mayfield, 2000. Murphy, Anne. The Materiality of the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Rait, Satwant Kaur. Sikh Women in England. Stoke on Trent, UK: Trentham Books, 2005. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. The Birth of the Khalsa: A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. Of Sacred and Secular Desire: An Anthology of Lyrical Writings from the Punjab. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. “Refeminization of Ritual.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 16, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 63–85. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. Sikhism: An Introduction. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011.

ART AND PERFORMANCE Sikh women have and continue to contribute to raising social consciousness through their work for the Sikh community and in their public works. Some examples of innovative and effective female poets, novelists, artists, filmmakers, and scriptural scholars follow. Amrita Pritam (1919–2005) authored numerous novels, collections of short stories, and volumes of poetry. She is the first woman recipient of the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award and the first woman to receive the Padma Shri as well. She was awarded the Jnanpith for her lifetime contributions to Punjabi literature in 1982. In her works, Pritam questions modern assumptions about identity and



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culture. With deep feminist empathy, she discloses multiple scenarios in which Indian women are objectified and victimized. Her subtle critique of seemingly lovely rituals and customs strikingly pinpoints the sexism festering in Indian society. Her death on October 31, 2005, was an enormous loss for the South Asian literary world. Shauna Singh Baldwin (b. 1962) writes in the genre of the “empire writing back.” She focuses on the “forgotten” religion of the Sikhs and makes an important contribution by introducing this north Indian religion to the reading public. She is the acclaimed author of English Lessons and Other Stories. Her first novel, What the Body Remembers, received the 2000 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region. Her works span many crossings and capture the predicament of Sikh migrants. Rupi Kaur (b. 1992) is an Indian-born Canadian-national activist, artist, and author of the New York Times best-selling poetry collections Milk and Honey (2015) and The Sun and Her Flowers (2017). Her bite-sized free-verse poetry coupled with simple illustrations is characteristic of the new age of Instagram poets (“Instapoets”). Minimalist though her style may be, Kaur manages to capture the pain and abuse in the lived experience of womanhood across cultures and centuries. She can disclose not only the silence imposed on women worldwide but also the damaging process of internalization: “When my mother opens her mouth / to have a conversation at dinner / my father shoves the word hush / between her lips and tells her to never speak with her mouth full / this is how the women in my family / learned to live with their mouths closed” (Kaur 2015, 35). In a few bare words, she conveys the enormous guilt women have carried in their psyche for centuries: “Perhaps / I don’t deserve / nice things / cause I am paying / for sins I don’t remember” (Kaur 2015, 147). Rupi understands her own writing to be cathartic, to be a limb, an extension of her being. Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was the daughter of a Sikh father and a Hungarian mother. In her short life-span, Sher-Gil transformed the course of Indian art. The prodigious young artist took upon herself the challenge of bringing a bold new aesthetic with an existentialist realism to Indian painting. Fiercely outspoken, she publicly denounced the Orientalized romanticism dominating the Indian art scene. She brilliantly succeeded in heralding a modern movement where the individual artist had the freedom to depict reality from his or her own perspective. In her paintings and letters, Sher-Gil raised questions of identity, autonomy, and authenticity. Her women subjects are vitally complex. On Sher-Gil’s canvas, these ordinary women in ordinary situations articulate the extraordinary harshness of reality that words simply fail to express. Even so-called happy moments, like swinging with friends and marriage rites, display a deep emotional dislocation. Sher-Gil is the most celebrated icon of modern Indian painting. Her works constitute the core collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Her ability to combine the classical artistic traditions of India with her Parisian training led to several inventive works that showed the way for many succeeding generations of Indian artists. Arpana Caur (b. 1954), the daughter of the renowned author Ajit Caur, embodies the best of humanity. Drawing upon the Punjab Hills for figuration, color,

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and line, she explores the subjugation of Indian women, political violence, and environmental issues. She weaves social tragedies with philosophical themes of time, life, and death. By superimposing her modern sensibility on traditional folk drawings, Arpana creates powerful psychological and visual tensions. Her works appear surrealist, almost Dada-like. They provoke serious reflection and critical thought. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, and her works are displayed in museums in Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Singapore, Hiroshima, Dusseldorf, Stockholm, Bradford, London, Boston, and San Francisco. Arpita Kaur (b. 1937) has been a prolific painter and winner of numerous awards. Her visual translations appropriately depict the female figure at the center of Guru Nanak’s imagination, which is often neglected or even overturned into male syntax by translators and exegetes. In the Barah Mah hymn, it is the woman who pulls the Timeless Beloved into her personal and historical world. Arpita’s scenes validate female bonds and human relationships vital to the Sikh world view. She replays the scriptural affirmation that the feminine is a category of being with essential values and strength; she is the one who has the quest for her divine lover, and her adornment serves as a vital metaphor for spiritual refinement. Amrit and Rabindra Kaur Singh (b. 1966) are twin sisters who collaborate together. The Sikh diasporic experience acquires an exciting new multicultural perspective in their paintings. They have created a genre they call “Past Modern,” a skillful reworking of the traditional Indian miniature style and techniques developed in the Mughal imperial court. They were born in a Sikh home in London and attended a Catholic school. Close family and community ties were crucial in their development as artists. During postgraduate work on religion and the arts, the twins were struck by the lack of non-Western aesthetic models in their curriculum. Because of their multiple identities—British, Asian, Sikh, and women—their sensibilities are exceptionally refined. Using the universal medium of colors and lines, the twins offer a perceptive portrayal of displacement and hybridization that immigrants across cultures and ethnicities can easily relate to. They have already become highly successful, exhibiting their works in several solo and group shows in the United Kingdom and abroad. Gurinder Chadha (b. 1960) was born in Kenya and brought up in the United Kingdom. She is the first British South Asian woman to direct feature films. A “twice migrant,” her father worked for Barclays Bank in Kenya, but his Sikh turban and beard were deemed unsuitable for British customers. Subsequently, he set up a family business in Southall, where the family lived, and so Chadha grew up in the midst of a large net of working-class South Asians. She started her career as a news reporter for the BBC and directed several award-winning documentaries. Without any formal training in filmmaking, Chadha has been a remarkable success with films like What’s Cooking (2000), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Bride and Prejudice (2004), Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008), It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), and Viceroy’s House (2017) under her belt. Bend It Like Beckham was made on a tiny budget and without any established stars; it grossed over $77 million. As in many of her other films, Chadha’s camera sensitively explores ethnic, racial, religious, and gendered identities. This classic coming-of-age comedy with its feel-good quality



Feminist Issues in Sikhism

is acutely sharp: “bending the ball” is actually bending one’s conventional roles so that dreams can come true. The images of Guru Nanak and David Beckham are frequently flashed on Chadha’s screen, juxtaposing the protagonist’s Sikh heritage with her Western dream. The Bamras want their daughter Jaswinder (Jess for short) to get educated and married and to take care of domestic matters, but Jess wants to play soccer. Her father’s experience of racism and exclusion when he wanted to join the cricket team on arriving in Britain is replayed when Jess is called a “Paki” during a match. The airplane flying above their home is a trope for their relocation. Chadha’s powerful films disclose the complexities of migration and cultural integration not just for Sikhs but for diasporas across the board. The present author, Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, has been devoted to a feminist hermeneutics of Sikh scripture. She studies the basic texts and tenets of Sikh Religion and demonstrates the female aspect in the sacred text, daily prayers, dress code, and rituals of the Sikhs. Through her books, The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent (1993) and A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity (2005), her translations, The Name of My Beloved: Verses of the Sikh Gurus (2001) and Of Sacred and Secular Literature (2012), her numerous published articles, her lectures at both community and academic venues, and her teaching at Colby College in Maine, she promotes an existential correlation between Sikh scripture and Sikh praxis. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh See also: Sikhism: Feminist Issues in Sikhism; Guru Period; Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles; Sikh Scriptures and Women Further Reading Ananth, Deepak. Amrita Sher-Gil: An Indian Art Family of the Twentieth Century. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2007. Archer, W. G. The Paintings of the Sikhs. London: Victoria and Albert, 1966. Kaur, Rupi. Milk and Honey. Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2015. Stronge, Susan, ed. The Arts of the Sikh Kingdoms. London: Victoria and Albert, 1999. Twin Perspectives: Paintings by Amrit and Rabindra KD Kaur Singh with contributions by Julian Spalding Raj Pal, and Dr. Deborah Swallow. London: Twin Studios, 1999.

FEMINIST ISSUES IN SIKHISM With the combination of ancient patriarchal values and new globalization, gender equality in Sikhism is deteriorating rapidly. Women are increasingly devalued in Sikh families, while sons are deemed essential for carrying on the family name, property, and land. From the moment of birth, the son and daughter are chartered out different roles and given a whole different set of obligations. Parents regard sons as their social security and financial insurance and as religious functionaries who will eventually perform their funeral rites. Meanwhile, daughters have become a financial burden to parents, who are severely pressured by dowry demands—be it cash, jewelry, furniture, cars, or property. Because the quantity and quality of what is hosted

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for or given to the daughter reinforces the power and prestige of her father, Sikh weddings have become extremely opulent, dowries extravagant, and gifts to the daughter and her in-laws for every rite, ritual, and festival exorbitant. Their desire for sons is so great that modern technology is abused to abort female fetuses. In spite of the recent economic boom in India, and better laws to protect women and girls, the proportion of baby girls is declining rapidly. The selective abortion of females is increasingly practiced through the use of new technologies, exacerbating the devaluation of girls and further entrenching gender prejudices. In the diaspora, patriarchal formulations become even more stringent. With their spirit and love of adventure, Sikhs travel to distant corners of the world. Since immigrant Sikhs maintain transnational ties with their families and friends in the Punjab, the ancient feudal customs and values from home are quickly exported to diasporic communities. How to preserve Sikh identity in our contemporary world is a vital concern for diasporic Sikhs across the globe. Since women are literally the reproducers of the community, the preservation of “Sikhness” falls primarily on them. As a result, Sikh women are subjected to manifold restrictions. Control over their reproductive rights leads to the reproduction of the family’s identity and that of the Sikh community at large. Honor (izzat), which is identified with manliness and belongs to a hierarchical, patriarchal, and feudal system, has come to be a central code of the Sikhs. Wanting to be seen as a model community, Sikhs try to cover up female feticides, dowry deaths, physical and psychological abuse, and even “honor killings,” which are on the rise. The egalitarian and liberating message of Sikh scripture has yet to be applied in daily life and fully experienced by men and women alike. The Sikhs are beginning to take steps toward gender justice. Sikh Rahit Maryada, an ethical code developed by Sikh reformers in the middle of the 20th century, is an attempt to formalize the message of the gurus. It provides several rules to combat female oppression. Twice it makes the point that Sikh women should not veil their faces. It prohibits infanticide and even associating with people who would practice female infanticide. It allows for widow remarriage and underscores that the ceremony be the same as that of the first marriage. It prohibits dowry. The Rahit Maryada calls on Sikhs to free themselves of all superstitions and not refuse to eat at the home of their married daughter. Again, many of these explicit rules are just not followed. Out of “respect” for their daughters, Sikh parents will not accept even a penny from their working daughter nor accept any gift (“not even a sip of water”) from her married home. She is their prized “object,” and so the ancient androcentric codes continue to govern Sikh life. Inequality is recognized as an issue by the chief Sikh administrative body (Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee), political leaders, and nongovernmental organizations. They are implementing new plans and policies to eradicate gender, socioeconomic, and disability barriers. They are forging important infrastructures for the protection, welfare, education, and employment of girls and women. Campaigns are geared specifically against female feticide and are trying to raise mass awareness in both rural and urban areas that daughters can support



Guru Period

their families—just like sons. Several organizations are actively working toward the protection of baby girls and the environment. There are incentives of fixed deposits for financially weak parents of newborn girls. To respond to the pain and victimization of any woman in any part of the world is a moral obligation for every citizen in the global village. Collaborating together, Sikh men and women can fight against gender injustice, bring about a change, and live the egalitarian and liberating life intended by their gurus. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh See also: Sikhism: Art and Performance; Guru Period; Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles; Sikh Scriptures and Women Further Reading Jakobsh, Doris. Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and Identity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. The Birth of the Khalsa: A Feminist Re-Memory of Sikh Identity. Albany: State University of New York, 2005.

GURU PERIOD The Sikh Religion originated and developed historically and culturally within the Abrahamic tradition of Islam and the predominantly Hindu world of the Indian subcontinent. Between 1469, when Sikh founder Guru Nanak was born, and 1708, when 10th guru Gobind Singh died, northern India went through a succession of conquests by Muslim Turks, Afghans, and Mughals. Women’s lives were affected by the old Hindu caste society and then by the new Muslim regimes. Under the first, they were subjugated to their husbands, and under the second, they were confined to purdah (veiling of women). As a result, all Indian women, both Hindu and Muslim, suffered from both forms of subjugation. Witnessing the multiple oppressions of Indian women, the Sikh gurus empathized with their condition and aspired for gender equality. Throughout the guru period (1469–1708), women and men led the Sikh institutions of sangat and langar, recited sacred poetry, fought boldly against oppression and injustice, and generated liberating new rituals. These women, who participated in vital and diverse ways, are deeply significant to Sikh history. Mata Khivi (1506–1582), wife of the second guru, is fondly remembered for her liberal direction of community meals. With Mata Khivi’s generous supervision and her plentiful supply of kheer (delicious rice pudding), langar became a real feast rather than a symbolic meal. Women were assigned leadership roles by the third guru. To consolidate the growing Sikh faith, he created a well-knit ecclesiastical system and set up 22 dioceses, covering different parts of India. Women served as supervisors of these communities along with men. Bibi Bhani (1535–1598), the third guru’s daughter, married his successor, the fourth guru, and became the mother of the fifth guru. Bibi Bhani is remembered as a strong woman with immense moral fervor. In her various roles of daughter,

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wife, and mother of the gurus, she had a tremendous impact on the development of Sikh values. The Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, was compiled by her son, Guru Arjan, whose sublime verse contains a wealth of feminine images. Mata Gujari (1624–1705) was mother of the 10th guru, Gobind Singh, under whom the Sikh ideal of Oneness became effective as a vital social reality. He created the Khalsa in 1699, the community of the pure, which was to discard all divisions of caste and class. Sikhs pay homage to Mata Gujari at the two shrines dedicated to her near the town of Sirhind: Gurdwara Mata Gujari, where she spent the last four days of her life, and, just a mile away, Gurdwara Joti Sarup, where she was cremated. Mai Bhago (late 1600s–early 1700s) was a courageous woman who assisted Guru Gobind Singh in his battles against injustice, rallying men to fight against the imperial forces. She herself fought in battles and accompanied Guru Gobind Singh as one of his personal bodyguards. Sikhs have built shrines in her memory. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh See also: Sikhism: Art and Performance; Feminist Issues in Sikhism; Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles; Sikh Scriptures and Women Further Reading Singh, Nikky-Guninder. Sikhism: An Introduction. London: I. B. Tauris, 2011. Singh, Pashaura, and Louis Fenech, eds. Handbook of Sikhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

R I T U A L A N D F E S T I VA L , W O M E N ’ S R O L E S Guru Granth Sahib

Both at home and in public places of worship, the sacred book is treated with the highest respect and veneration. It is draped in cloth, called rumala, placed on quilted mats, and supported by cushions. A canopy hangs over it for protection, and a whisk is waved over it as a sign of respect. Sikhs everywhere bow before the Guru Granth Sahib and seat themselves on the floor. Shoes are removed, and both men and women cover their heads in the presence of their holy book. Each morning the volume is ceremoniously opened (prakash), and each evening it is closed and put to rest (sukhasan). The Guru Granth is read for all rites of passage, for any family celebration—a new house, a new job, an engagement, and for all times of uncertainty and difficulty—and in cases of sickness and death. Sikh congregations perform and listen to kirtan, which is the singing of scriptural hymns in the accompaniment of musical instruments like the harmonium and tabla drums. They partake in a sweet, warm sacrament (karahprashad) consisting of equal portions of butter, flour, sugar, and water. Their community meal (langar) is vegetarian, which they cook together and eat seated on the floor. Even during the



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preparations, Sikh men and women keep their heads covered and their feet bare and recite hymns from the Guru Granth Sahib. There is no priesthood in Sikhism, so both men and women can directly connect with their sacred text. Both are free to read and recite the sacred verse at home or in public, and anybody from within the congregation can be chosen to lead worship. However, unwritten laws are the ones that govern Sikh life, for public worship is primarily officiated by men. Rites of Passage

In Sikhism there are four rites of passage: name giving, amrit initiation, marriage, and death. The Sikh gurus had rejected elaborate and exclusionary rituals, but current practices do not match up with either the simplicity nor the parity they intended for men and women from all castes and classes. Name giving. Sikh children are named in consultation with the holy book. Often boys and girls do not have different names: the addition of the name “Kaur” (meaning “princess”) for girls and “Singh” (meaning “lion”) for boys indicates the gender of the child. While both boys and girls are regarded as the embodiment of the divine spark, sons are deeply cherished in society. The common Indian blessing “may you be the mother of a hundred sons” resonates in the psyche of most Sikh families. The singing of hymns, readings from Sikh scripture, and partaking of community meals are the central activities for the name-giving ceremony—just as they are for all rites of passage; however, the ceremonies for a son end up being a much more celebratory affair. Amrita initiation. This Sikh rite of passage is open to both Sikh men and women. No particular age is prescribed. According to the Sikh ethical code (The Rahitmaryada), “Any man or woman of whatever nationality, race, or social standing, who is prepared to accept the rules governing the Sikh community, has the right to receive amrit initiation.” Zealous proselytization is alien to Sikhs. The initiation rite essentially replays the moral vision of absolute equality performed by Guru Gobind Singh during his momentous 1699 Baisakhi. The amrita is prepared and sipped in the same manner and defines the new birth and equal membership into the family of the Khalsa. With the 10th guru, Gobind Singh, the Sikh ideal of Oneness became effective as a vital social reality. In 1699, the 10th guru created the Khalsa, the community of the pure, which was to discard all divisions of caste and class. Guru Gobind Singh marked the internal transformation of Sikh men and women with a new identity. The first five initiates sipped amrita, the alchemical nectar prepared by the guru, from the same bowl. As he stirred the water in a steel bowl with his double-edged sword to the accompaniment of scriptural recitations, his wife, Mata Jitoji, added sugar puffs into the bowl, therewith combining the alchemy of steel with the sweetness of sugar. The amrita sipped from the same bowl sealed the pledge of equality and faithfulness. Through the drink, the initiates were physically and psychologically nourished to fight against oppression and injustice and uphold freedom and equality.

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Sikh women and men are both equally enjoined to wear the emblems of the Khalsa, popularly known as the five ks: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kesha or uncut hair, denoting natural order of the human condition Kangha, a comb tucked into the kesha to keep it tidy Kara, a steel bracelet worn on the right arm Kaccha, short breeches Kirpan, a sword symbolizing self-defense and the fight against injustice

The five ks are basic to the construction of the individual subject: they serve as a means of refining the physical and the psychological self; simultaneously, they constitute a social practice and are a means of intensifying relationship among the Sikhs. Sikhs celebrate Mata Jitoji as an active copartner in the creation of the Khalsa. When they drink amrita, they enter the family of the Khalsa and declare themselves to be the direct descendants of Guru Gobind Singh and Mata Jitoji, their two equally important spiritual parents. Men are given the surname of Singh, meaning “lion,” and the women “Kaur,” meaning “princess.” Their rebirth into the order represents an annihilation of their family (caste) lineage, of their confinement to a heredity occupation, and of all their stifling beliefs and rituals. Women are liberated from tracing their lineage to their father or adopting a husband’s name after marriage. As Singh and Kaur, Sikh men and women are enjoined to help the weak and fight the oppressor. Wedding. When a woman marries, she takes part in the Anand Karaj (anand meaning “bliss” and karaj meaning “event”), the Sikh rite of wedding. This is a very simple ceremony. No words or gestures are directly exchanged between the bride and groom nor any legal formalities performed between their families. Circling four times around the sacred volume in the accompaniment of the wedding hymn (lavan) and bowing together to the sacred text marks their acceptance of each other. They are solely—and equally—bound to the sacred word rather than to any legal or social authority. The lavan hymn underscores the value of equal partnership and describes marriage as a rite of passage that launches the couple into higher and higher circles of existence. However, in practice, the scriptural verse “bride and groom are one spirit in two bodies” lacks efficacy, since it is taken for granted that the daughter leaves her natal home and joins her husband and his family. Divorce is legal in Sikhism, and both men and women can remarry. However, divorces are few, and it is rare that a widow would remarry. Death. When a woman dies, no matter what age or stage of life she may have been at, it is her natal family’s responsibility to supply the meal following the cremation. From her birth till her death, the daughter is a debit; the son is credit. Sikhs emphasize family unity and, even in the modern nuclear family system, couples often continue to live with their children and parents, thus bringing together three generations under the same roof. Children grow up with their old grandparents, and often the elderly die at home. When a woman dies, she is carried on a stretcher by the closest male relatives and friends of the family to the funeral grounds, where



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she is cremated. As customary from ancient times, the pyre is lighted by the oldest son. The body returns to the elements it is made up of: fire merges with the fire that is lighted, air to air, earth to earth, and the ashes and bones (called phul, literally, flowers) are immersed in flowing waters of rivers and streams. Celebrations

True living for Sikhs involves remembering the One Reality as often and as intimately as possible. There is the urge to link daily rhythms of life with historic memories, seasonal moods, and human transitions. Annually, Sikhs celebrate Gurpurabs (literally the days of the guru), which include birth anniversaries of their gurus, important historical events, and the martyrdom of their heroes. During Gurpurabs, uninterrupted readings of scripture take place, intellectual symposiums are held, and musical performances are organized. All over the world, Sikhs joyously celebrate the birth of Guru Nanak, the installation of the Guru Granth Sahib, and the birth of the Khalsa. Baisakhi, which is also the first day of the Sikh calendar, commemorates the momentous initiation of the Khalsa by the 10th guru. Huge Sikh processions with colorful floats carrying the sacred text and depicting different aspects of Sikh life are becoming a familiar sight all across the globe. The Punjabi folk dances, gidda and bhangra, are popular performances during sociocultural celebrations. Gidda, choreographed in gentle and lithesome movement, is the typical folk dance for Sikh women and was very popular during engagement and wedding celebrations. Like bhangra, gidda celebrates nature and her bountiful gifts through the seasons of spring, summer, monsoon, autumn, and winter. Amid sparkling agrarian scenes, gidda captures simple activities that form a rich reservoir of Sikh memory. In vibrant and playful colors and sounds, the women re-create scenes left behind in Sikh woman performs the Punjabi folk dance, gidda. the Punjab: how the mothers The dance, performed by women at festivals, celeand grandmothers milked brates cultural memory with joy and grace. (Creative cows, cooked mustard seeds, Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images)

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did needlework, fanned their children in the summer heat, bought glass bangles, churned milk in the morning, carried water in earthenware pitchers sturdily balanced on heads, and helped with ploughing and harvesting. While evoking nostalgic memories, gidda also affords women a mode of dancing out their oppressive life. The patriarchal structure of Punjabi society, combined with the rigidity of the joint family system, becomes restrictive for women even in Western countries. Gidda opens up ways for a woman to articulate her oppression and her hopes and dreams. Bhangra is traditionally performed by a group of men, but in modern times it has become extremely popular with women as well, with the result that gidda is being eclipsed. Bhangra dates back to the 14th century, originating in a region in West Punjab (now a part of Pakistan). Dressed in bright colors, the group dances in an elemental rhythm to the beat of a large drum and sings songs celebrating Punjabi village life. The vigorous steps and sounds create a primal connection with the earth. The audience encircles the dancers, clapping and joining in with the dancing and singing. With the migration of Sikh communities into the West, this Punjabi folk dance has become the latest rage with young music lovers in Britain, Europe, and Canada. The modern form of bhangra combines northern Indian folk music with a kaleidoscope of contemporary styles, including reggae and Western pop. While maintaining the foundations of their own faith and culture, Sikhs participate in traditions such as Easter, Thanksgiving, Chanukah, and Christmas. Thus, they promote pluralism in an essential way. For Thanksgiving, Sikh men and women prepare vegetarian meals in Gurdwaras and serve them to the needy and the homeless in their communities. They incorporate Chanukah and Christmas into Diwali, the Indian Festival of Lights; Chanukah candles and Christmas trees are making their entry into Sikh homes. Sikhs joyously interact with their American neighbors and friends—exchanging gifts and sharing sweets. Keen to share their heritage, Sikh women and men relay kirtan and Sikh discourse on local television. For Sikhs, sacred space and sacred time merge into the singular experience of the sacred that is beyond all space and time. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh See also: Sikhism: Art and Performance; Feminist Issues in Sikhism; Guru Period; Sikh Scriptures and Women Further Reading Cole, Owen, and Piara Singh Sambhi. The Sikhs: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices. London: Routledge, 1978. La Brack, Bruce. The Sikhs of Northern California 1904–1975. New York: AMS, 1988. Myrvold, Kristina. Inside the Guru’s Gate: Ritual Uses of Texts among the Sikhs in Varanasi. Lund, Sweden: Lund University, 2007. Singh, Harbans. The Heritage of the Sikhs. New Delhi: Manohar, 1985. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. “Refeminization of Ritual.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 16, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 63–85.



Sikh Scriptures and Women

SIKH SCRIPTURES AND WOMEN Just before he passed away in 1708, the 10th guru ended the line of personal gurus by passing the succession to the Guru Granth Sahib, the holy book of the Sikhs. From that time on, Sikhs have revered their scripture as their ever-present guru, deriving their guidance and inspiration from the textual guru. Thus, the message and the mission begun by Guru Nanak continued through nine more gurus and culminated in the Guru Granth Sahib. The Guru Granth Sahib is the focus of Sikh life. It is the core of Sikh philosophy and ethics, the center of all Sikh worship and ceremonies. And importantly, the Guru Granth Sahib promotes gender equality in meaningful ways. The sacred text opens with the fundamental theological expression Ikk Oan Kar (One Being Is), which is reiterated throughout its 1,430 pages. This unique and expansive configuration spells out the infinity of the singular Divine. By designating the Divine as numeral “One” at the very outset, Sikh scripture discards centuries-old images of male dominance and power and opens the way to experiencing the infinite One in a female modality. The first guru’s numerical configuration is ecstatically extended by his successors. Guru Amar Das declares, “The Divine is itself mother, itself father” (GGS: 921). Similarly, Guru Arjan states, “The One is my brother, my friend too is the One, the One is my mother and father” (GGS: 45). Rather than an exclusive monotheistic patriarchal God, the authors of the Guru Granth Sahib reach out to the singular Being transcending every binary, every category in personal relations, and passionately embrace that One in numerous relationships. This sense of plenitude strips off patriarchal stratifications and blots out masculine identity as the norm for imaging the Divine. It stretches the imagination, producing new emotions and new ways of interacting in society. The Guru Granth Sahib regularly turns attention to the primal home—the mother’s body, the ontological base of every person. It offers multivalent womb imagery in which the female process mirrors divine activity. Conceived by different poets with different emphases and in different contexts, it is an extremely fertile ground inspiring a wide range of responses. The womb is celebrated as the matrix for all life and living. However, it also serves as an eschatological expression for the return of the self into this world. According to Sikh scripture, birth is rare and precious like a diamond, but it can be frittered away for naught. An immoral life generates a negative rebirth, and the mother’s womb in that instance is pictured as a scorching and painful mode of being—empty of the Divine. Under positive circumstances, however, the womb is a vital space permeated with the Divine, and the fetus functions as a symbol for cultivating morality, spirituality, and aesthetics. Overall, the text offers a vast range of feminine symbols and imagery: the ontological ground of all existence is mata, the mother; the divine spark within all creatures is joti, the feminine light; the élan and vital longing to unite with the Transcendent One is suhagan, the beautiful young bride; the benevolent glance coming from the Divine is the feminine nadar, grace. Sikh scripture continuously provides readers with a multivalent and complex feminine imagery. This variety, in turn, presents a host of options through which men and women can become who they choose to be.

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Images of conception, gestation, giving birth, and lactation are unambiguously and powerfully present. The holy book of the Sikhs is unique in world scriptures in celebrating the centrality of menstrual blood (GGS:1022; GGS: 706). Often shunned as private and shameful in other traditions, menstruation is acknowledged in Sikh scriptures as an essential, natural, creative process. Life itself begins with it. In fact, Guru Nanak reprimands those who stigmatize as polluted the garment stained with menstrual blood (GGS: 140). The Guru Granth Sahib also condemns the idea of pollution associated with childbirth and customs of purdah and sati (widow burning). The Sikh gurus were men, but they expressed their love for the Divine in the female gender. From what we read in the Guru Granth Sahib, they do not repress or stunt themselves in male-female dualisms. Feeling the Infinite intensely within, they openly identify with the female person, her psyche, her tone, and her sentiments, and they trace the singular Divine as both father and mother, male and female. Inspired by the Infinite One, their verse spontaneously affirms woman’s body, her activities, her dressing up, her tenacity, her emotions, and her spirituality. Throughout Sikh scripture, she is the model in forging a sensual and palpable union with the Transcendent. In both praxis and poetry, the Sikh gurus created a window of opportunity for women, an opening through which women could achieve liberty, equality, and sorority. Unfortunately, though, over the centuries, interpreters, communicators, and translators of the Sikh sacred text have primarily been the male elites, and with their androcentric lenses and intellectual habits, they have not been able to discern nor convey the progressive message of the gurus. The egalitarian vision of the Sikh gurus and their invigorating overtures remain unseen and unheard. The exegetes and translators have simply deemed it unnecessary to remember her body or our origins, and so the unique emphasis of the Sikh gurus on the divine constitution of female physiology and of our integrated subjectivity has been lost. Consequently, the liberal ideals of the Sikh gurus do not come into play in the everyday life of the people. Sikhs make up less than 2 percent of the Indian population, and the weights and veils of ancient codes from diverse Indic feudal traditions prevail in Sikh societal codes and practices. The scriptural womb-respecting, birth-oriented glimpses and melodies must be remembered so that their lingering can make each of us more wholesome and our world a better place. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh See also: Sikhism: Feminist Issues in Sikhism; Guru Period; Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles; Sikh Scriptures and Women Further Reading Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcendent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. The Name of My Beloved: Verses of the Sikh Gurus. New Delhi: Penguin, 2001. Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur. “Refeminization of Ritual.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 16, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 63–85.

Spirituality

INTRODUCTION The term spirituality in this section title is perhaps best understood by the phrase “spiritual but not religious.” In the global, postmodern world today, this describes individuals who are self-directed and embrace eclectic beliefs and practices. These practices may be conducted individually at home or, if in groups, often don’t require commitment, membership, or progress toward a higher goal. Yoga is one example. In India, yoga is traditionally seen within a religious system and world view developed over thousands of years as one path among many to reunion with the Divine. In the West, yoga is practiced by millions of individuals who may or may not know anything of Hinduism and may or may not have higher spiritual goals. The difference is in the ability to choose something beneficial that may or may not be part of a religion. Spiritual but not religious is not the only definition of spirituality, however; it can also mean the impulse to turn toward or open to receive something beyond the mundane. In this meaning, spirituality is a central aspect of all religions and spiritual pathways. Either of these meanings, both, or others may be assumed by contributors to this section. Continuing with yoga as an example, in “Yoga,” Rachel York-Bridgers notes the origins of yoga in the creativity and spirituality of women. She also discusses the feminine aspects of yoga, such as the female energy of kundalini and the Feminine Divine, Shakti. These features represent three things central to contemporary women’s spirituality—(1) choice: the ability of women to make their own choices in spiritual practice, (2) authority: women’s self-directed capacity, creativity, and confidence in developing spiritual pathways for themselves, and (3) the feminine as sacred: women’s recognition of their spiritual being as women and their connection with the Divine. Today, women’s religious and spiritual choices are wide open, though this was not always the case. Institutional religions have structures of hierarchy and standardized doctrines, especially relating to gender, which are difficult to change despite what may be happening in the surrounding culture. In the 1960s and 1970s, second wave feminists began advocating for change and came up against a brick wall of tradition. In “Radical Women’s Spirituality,” Vicki Noble discusses how the period saw a radical rejection of organized religion by those feminists who felt their needs were not being met. This rejection was exemplified on Sunday, November 14, 1971, when radical feminist Mary Daly led an exodus of women out of Harvard’s Memorial Church. In her book Gyn/Ecology (1978, 39), Daly explained, “Patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet. . . . All of the so-called religions legitimating patriarchy are mere sects subsumed under its

306 Introduction

vast umbrella/canopy.” Many others shared her view, renounced their traditions, and sought or created new ones. Many women of color sought change, and many left the Christian churches. But Native American women, African American women, Latinas, and others whose religions had been colonized under imperialism, conquest, and slavery often sought a return to inherited traditions rather than a new spirituality. In her entry “Women of Color,” Arisika Razak relates some of the ways women of color have created, renewed, and revitalized their spirituality through activism, art, music, scholarship, and the renewal and creative development of inherited spiritual or religious traditions. As Razak explains, some traditions have early matricentric beginnings that not only honor the female but also offer a central place for women in leadership and practice. One change with far-reaching effects that has been the result of women’s spiri­ tuality movements—the revival and centrality of the Feminine Divine—is now a significant feature of many women’s spiritual practices. In “Goddess Spirituality,” Patricia Rose traces developments in women’s spirituality movements which have led millions of women and men to worship the Divine in female form(s) where this was previously unheard of. For those whose inherited religions do not include female divinities, increased awareness and study of female deities in cultures across the world and across the span of history and prehistory, presents thousands of examples to embrace or to explore in the ongoing processes of creating and blending new spiritual images, narratives, and practices. The Feminine Divine and its connections to women’s reproductive and nurturing bodies, has often been expressed in art. Artist Lauren Raine discusses these connections in “Art and Performance.” An especially relevant example is God Giving Birth, painted by Monica Sjöö in 1968. Considered blasphemous at the time, today it is one of a great many artworks that connect women’s bodies, nature, and a nurturing Mother Goddess. Additional entries to this section describe many of the ways women’s spirituality manifests, including, for example, women’s drumming, sacred song or kirtan, meditation, divination, and healing practices. Women’s spiritualities have embraced the human female form as representing the Divine. For Ecofeminists (ecological feminists), there is another issue, that of the Divine as spirit rather than body. In “Ecofeminism,” Susan de-Gaia relates how Ecofeminists take issue with the idea that spirit and divinity are disembodied. Ecofeminists deconstruct binary systems like human/nature, male/female, and spirit/body, exposing the inferior values these systems place on nature, the female, and the body, especially in patriarchal constructs where God is male and disembodied. Spiritual Ecofeminists reclaim the power and importance of the natural world as a manifestation or embodiment of the Divine. Hierarchies are also the subject of “Spirituality and Gender in Social Context,” in which Riane Eisler discusses how patriarchal religious and gender constructs have supported patterns of domination and violence. She sees in contemporary Spirituality a “modern movement toward partnership,” an egalitarian way of life that is the opposite of “authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated, punitive social organization[s] held together by fear and force.” Katherine Clark Walter also discusses gender constructs in religion and spirituality, in “Sex and Gender.”



Introduction

General Bibliography—Spirituality Armstrong, Karen, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers. San Jose, CA: iUniverse, 2001. Bonheim, Jalaja, ed. Goddess: A Celebration in Art and Literature. New York: Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1997. Christ, Carol P. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Routledge, 1998. Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon, 1973. De Groot, Joanna, and Sue Morgan. Sex, Gender, and the Sacred: Reconfiguring Religion in Gender History. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Vicki Noble, eds. Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries. Amherst, NY: Teneo, 2015. Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Orenstein, eds. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988. Eller, Cynthia. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. New York: Crossroad, 1993. Facio, Elisa, and Irene Lara. Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2014. Faulkner, Mary. Charlottesville: Women’s Spirituality: Power and Grace. Hampton Roads Publishing Inc., 2011. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide. The Dancing Goddess: Principles of a Matriarchal Aesthetic. Boston: Beacon, 1991. Goode, Starr. Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power. n.p.: Inner Traditions, 2016. Grahn, Judy. Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World. Boston: Beacon, 1993. Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper, 1980. Harris, Melanie L. Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths. New York: Orbis, 2017. Hye-Sook Hwang. The Mago Way: Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia. n.p.: CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2015. Iyengar, Geeta. Yoga: A Gem for Women. Kootenay, BC: Timeless Books, 2002. King, Ursula. Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest and Promise. London: Macmillan, 1989. Monaghan, Patricia. The Goddess Path. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn, 1999. Noble, Vicki. Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess through Myth, Art, and Tarot. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Orenstein, Gloria Feman. The Reflowering of the Goddess. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon, 1989. Plaskow, Judith, and Carol Christ. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. New York: HarperCollins, 1989. Razak, A. “Sacred Women of Africa and the African Diaspora: A Womanist Vision of Black Women’s Bodies and the African Sacred Feminine.” International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 35, no. 1 (2016): 129–47. Razak, A. “Her Blue Body: A Pagan Reading of Alice Walker Womanism.” Feminist Theology 18, no. 1 (2009): 92–116.

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Redmond, Layne. When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm. New York: Three Rivers, 1997. Reid-Bowen, Paul. Goddess As Nature: Towards a Philosophical Thealogy. London: Routledge, 2016. Rose, Patricia, and Tricia Szirom. Gaia Emerging: Goddess Beliefs and Practices in Australia. Brisbane: Gaia’s Ink, 2007. Ruether, Rosemary Radford, ed. Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996. Ruyle, Lydia. Goddess Icons: Spirit Banners of the Divine Feminine. Boulder, CO: Wovenword, 2002. Shiva, Vandana, and Maria Mies. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 2014. Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1987. Spretnak, Charlene, ed. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982. Wade-Gales, Gloria, ed. My Soul Is a Witness: African American Women’s Spirituality—A Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Teish, Luisah. Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985.

ART AND PERFORMANCE Many women in the fields of visual art, performance art, ritual, and traditional and experimental theater have contributed, within the past 50 years, to the evolution of the contemporary women’s spirituality movement. Many have also been deeply engaged in feminism, ecofeminism, and Goddess thealogy, although not all have publicly or explicitly stated that they were thus influenced. Feminist art historians have analyzed the spiritual imagery of women painters of the early 20th century, among them the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who before she moved to Mexico lived in France with the surrealist painter Max Ernst. She was a visionary for the magical realism of nature and often personified in her paintings the presence of a potent female intelligence underlying the natural world. In a time when the art world was almost purely a male domain, the surrealist painters, not surprisingly, objectified the female image as the “femme enfant,” an adolescent “pure” muse for contemplation and consumption. Carrington (who later would help found the feminist movement in Mexico) reversed this view and often engaged the viewer with potent mythic figures of the Goddess, sometimes transforming into animals or birds or emanating leaves. Her imagery abounds throughout her work, with female forms whose hair becomes roots or the branches of trees, which may represent the intelligence of the Great Mother in nature. In the painting The Pomps of the Subsoil (1947), three figures, one emanating a tree from her head, preside at a “picnic” with many other animals. At the center of their attention is a seed sprouting a little tree. In Giantess—the Guardian of the Egg (1947) a great female figure in a ceremonial robe holds an egg while birds emanate from her being. Beneath and around her immense presence is a landscape that includes animals, fish, people, and vegetation. The later Dream of Sirens (1960),



Art and Performance

a triptych very much like a religious shrine, presents three female deities with mermaid tails—one is white, one red, one black—the mother, maiden, and crone. The call of the sirens thus may be seen as the call of the hidden Goddess from the underwater/underworld realm, the “other shore” hidden from patriarchy. In the late 1970s, New York artist Mary Beth Edelson, working with the Heresies Magazine Collective, had a major traveling exhibition called Your 5,000 Years Are Up! (Rituals and Works to Celebrate the New Time). Curated by Arlene Raven, the installation and ritual/performance event traveled to Los Angeles in 1977 and included collaborative performance with members of the Women’s Building of Los Angeles. Inspired by her interest in symbol and myth as well as the work of Merlin Stone, Edelson, like her colleague Judy Chicago, initiated inclusive works that came to be characteristic of many feminist art forms. With an emphasis on community (“circling”), one of the significant artistic gestures she made was to include others in her process and, importantly, acknowledge their participation, commenting in an interview that she wished to pursue content that allowed her to “encompass” rather than exclude. In 5,000 Years, she included ceremonial fire rings as part of a “sacred site” for rituals, and a sculpture installation titled Mourning Our Lost History was included in the exhibit. In her public rituals, she communed with Goddess through the medium of her own naked body, embodying a thread that extended from the prehistoric past into the world of today. This same aesthetic goal of inclusivity as fundamental to feminine consciousness can be seen in the monumental projects of Judy Chicago, perhaps best known for The Dinner Party and The Birth Project. Chicago instituted epic collaborative works and explicitly incorporated iconic vaginal and womb imagery into her work to express, explore, and resanctify the spiritual dimensions of women’s embodied experience in The Birth Project, Through the Flower, and The Dinner Party. Chicago found that very few images of birth existed in Western art, a striking omission as birth is central to women’s lives, a realization that became the starting point for The Birth Project. Seeking to fill this void, she made many images of birth, some drawn from worldwide mythologies of Creatrix Goddesses that were then translated into needlework, a medium trivialized by the almost exclusively masculine art world of the time. This same aesthetic of shared/collective creation, as well as the power of mediums traditionally dismissed as “women’s crafts,” was also seen in the fabric quilts of feminist fiber artist Miriam Shapiro. An artist who used womb/vagina imagery explicitly as devotional work dedicated to the Goddess was printmaker Judith Anderson. Mandorla of the Spinning Goddess (1982) shows a cave-like vaginal opening presided over by a crone figure and surrounded by animals, birds, plants, and human figures at different stages of life. Anderson’s Her Runes of Earth and Stone (1987) was inspired by visiting the ancient Pagan holy sites of England and shows snakes, standing stones, and a labyrinth superimposed on a woman’s body, the living Goddess beneath everything. In the performing arts, since the 1970s, many women have incorporated ritual into work devoted to both the Divine Feminine and the sanctity of the earth, often inspired as well by the work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia hypothesis, which proposed that the earth was a living being, self-regulating and

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interdependent. Among these was the premiere experimental performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, founder of the Instant Theatre and one of the founders of Womanspace in Los Angeles. In her LOW in Gaia (1985) performances, as well as the 1989 Pangaean Dreams, she gave “voice” to Gaia, Earth Mother, speaking of her suffering and imagining her evolution. Community arts projects are fundamental to the “circling” aesthetic of the women’s spirituality movement, and there have been, and continue to be, many such collaborative projects. Perhaps one of the most significant is the collection of banners created by Lydia Ruyle, a prolific and dedicated artist-scholar whose devotional banners literally circled the globe for 20 years and generously continue to do so after her death in 2016 at her bequest. On the faculty of the University of Northern Colorado, her personal quest for archetypal images of the Divine Feminine to be found in mythology and archaeology took her on an international quest that included women’s pilgrimage journeys that she led to numerous sacred places, among them Turkey’s prehistoric Gobekli Tepe. Based on her research, Ruyle created over 200 Goddess Icon Spirit Banners, which she made available to many communities, including the Goddess Spirit Rising, Goddess Conferences in California and the United Kingdom, and the Parliament of World Religions. Her first 18 banners were created for an exhibition at the Celsus Library in Ephesus, Turkey, in 1995. As the collection grew, they were taken to many sacred sites,

Three of the 300-plus Goddess Icon Spirit Banners created by Lydia Ruyle and shared interna­ tionally at gatherings, conferences, sacred sites, and public venues. From left: Nuestra Senora La Virgen de Guadalupe, Hecate, and Sophia Wisdom. Many women have contributed to the women's spirituality movement through art that engages with feminism, ecofeminism, and Goddess thealogy. (©Lydia Ruyle/Courtesy of Lydia Ruyle Revocable Trust)



Art and Performance

gatherings, libraries, temples, and cathedrals, and even a women’s prison. They were designed to renew the symbols of the ancient Goddesses, emanating their blessings, like icons or sacred relics, as they traveled. The Goddess Icon Spirit Banners collection represents images of the Divine Feminine from many cultures, both contemporary and prehistoric. Each image was revered at some time and place in human history, and Ruyle’s work both honored and sought to reintroduce these primal symbols of the Great Mother while further enhancing the connection to traditional female art forms by including rug weaving, felting, and embroidery in their construction. The Reclaiming Community of San Francisco Bay Area, a Pagan collective active since the early 1970s and sponsor of the annual Spiral Dance public ritual, has produced many innovative celebrations of the Great Goddess as community ritual arts. In 1999, artist Lauren Raine created 30 Masks of the Goddess for the Invocation of the Goddess at the 20th Annual Spiral Dance at Fort Mason Center. Inspired by her studies of sacred temple mask traditions in Bali, she created the collection as contemporary temple masks devoted to the Divine Feminine. Drawing from multicultural iconography of Goddesses, the masks were worn in a processional at the event. By offering to “aspect” each Goddess, women who wore the masks provided a blessing for all gathered as the narrative was told with musical accompaniment. Since then, the collection has traveled to communities throughout the United States, used by ritualists, playwrights, storytellers, and dancers to embody the Goddess. Most recently, they were at the Parliament of World Religions (2015) and the Women’s March (2017). The Goddess of antiquity is arising in today’s world through the devotion of scholars, archaeologists, activists, and artists. This article has named only a few of those showing and performing within the context of Goddess thealogy or in the general art world, reclaiming ancient symbols of the Great Mother for today’s world and re-mything culture by rediscovering and reinventing these symbols and archetypal stories to empower women and restore the sanctity of women’s embodied existence. Lauren Raine See also: Paganism: Ritual; Wicca; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality Further Reading Bonheim, Jalaja, ed. Goddess: A Celebration in Art and Literature. New York: Stewart Tabori and Chang, 1997. Lippard, Lucy. Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Madsen, Catherine. “In the Dark Speech of Praise and Birth: The Prints of Judith Anderson.” Cross Currents Magazine 49, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 237–50. http://www.crosscurrents​ .org/Madsen2.htm. Raine, Lauren. “The Masks of the Goddess: Sacred Masks and Dance.” Blurb.com. 2008. http://www.blurb.com/b/504345-the-masks-of-the-goddess. Raine, Lauren. “Rachel Rosenthal: Living in Gaia.” Interview, unpublished manuscript. 1989. http://www.laurenraine.com/rachel-rosenthal.html. Ruyle, Lydia. Goddess Icons: Spirit Banners of the Divine Feminine. Boulder, CO: Wovenword, 2002.

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ASTROLOGY Like many other systems of magic, astrology uses the concept of gender, dividing a range of phenomena, including planets and zodiacal signs, into feminine and masculine aspects. In the Western tradition, signs are alternately masculine and feminine through the course of the Zodiac, which leads to some paradoxical results—Taurus is a feminine sign in Western astrology despite the constellation of Taurus being a bull, usually a classic icon of masculinity. While half of the 12 signs are feminine, there are only two feminine planets out of the seven traditional planets (in the astrological sense of planet, which includes the sun and moon): the moon and Venus. Neptune and Pluto, discovered long after the canonical astrological texts were written, are also usually viewed by astrologers as feminine, despite being named after male Greco-Roman Gods. The positive or negative nature of planets is separate from their gender—in traditional astrology, Venus is benevolent, associated with love, and the moon malevolent, associated with change and instability, although many modern astrologers avoid distinctions between benevolent and malevolent planets. Many of the asteroids, which were incorporated into astrology following their discovery in the 19th century, are both named after classical Goddesses and considered feminine, including the four largest: Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygeia. Astrology began as a learned profession requiring mathematical and astronomical education, and few women were able to become professional astrologers until the late 19th century, when several women astrologers became prominent. In the United States, the first notable astrologer in the early 20th-century revival of astrology was Evangeline Adams (1868–1932). Her successors include Jeanne Dixon (1904–1997) and Joan Quigley (1927–2014), the astrological counselor of Nancy Reagan. Quigley’s British equivalent as a female astrologer who counseled a leading woman in public life is Penny Thornton (b. 1946), best known as Princess Diana’s astrologer. Belief in astrology has become gendered as a feminine trait in Western popular culture, and surveys indicate that women are somewhat more likely than men to believe in astrology. Horoscopes are frequently located in the women’s sections of newspapers and websites. The 20th century saw the development of feminist astrology, often associated with the New Age movement and emphasizing the spiritual aspects of astrology rather than predicting future events. Feminist astrologers see themselves as challenging a male-dominated astrological tradition as feminists challenged male authority in other fields. Feminist astrologers such as Geraldine Hatch Hanon (1947–2011) associated both astrology and women with cyclic time rather than the linear time of the patriarchy, particularly the time-scheme of the Abrahamic religions from creation to apocalypse. They correlate the lunar cycle with the menstrual cycle, arguing that women are particularly attuned to celestial rhythms and therefore particularly suited to astrology. Feminist astrology is often associated with Goddess Spirituality, and some have identified the origin of astrology in early Goddess-oriented cultures. Feminism has also contributed to a desire to imbue more celestial objects with a feminine identity to represent a broader range of female roles and possibilities than the moon and Venus. In addition to the planets and asteroids discovered in modern times, many feminist astrologers use a



Deep Ecology

concept known as “Lilith” or the “Dark Moon,” named after the first wife of Adam in Jewish legend. The most common interpretation of Lilith is that it is the focus of the moon’s elliptical orbit not occupied by the earth. It is held to embody a more assertive, feminist concept of female energy than the moon or Venus. (Lilith can also refer to an asteroid named Lilith or a mythical “black moon” that orbits the earth at a farther distance than the moon.) William E. Burns See also: Judaism: Lilith; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality Further Reading Bryld, Mette Marie, and Nina Lykke. Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Zed Books, 2000. Hanon, Geraldine Hatch. Sacred Space: A Feminist Vision of Astrology. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1990. River, Lindsay. The Knot of Time: Astrology and the Female Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.

DEEP ECOLOGY Deep Ecology is a movement founded on a vision of equality and the health of the earth; this vision aligns itself with the role and rights of women, although the originating philosophies of Deep Ecologists did not recognize it as such. Humans in nature, not above it, and equal rights for all are part of an egalitarian ethic central to the Deep Ecology movement. This ethic is also central to women’s rights and women’s lives, as it is antioppression and antisexist. As a social paradigm, Deep Ecology promotes an ethic of care for the body of women and the body of the earth, which derives from its distinction that environment, and the body, is all. As scholar Marti Kheel (1990) notes, women often have a closer relationship to the earth through the body parables (allegorical or universal experiences that convey a truth or a spiritual connection), such as pregnancy, menstruation, and childbirth. Giving and nurturing life through the body are intimate experiences unique to both women and nature. Deep Ecology supports a primal awareness that the human body is connected to the body of the earth. The destruction of complex ecosystems that sustain life on the planet is the result of anthropocentric, dualistic, and utilitarian attitudes toward nature in Western culture, according to Deep Ecology. Deep Ecologists therefore promote a world view that understands the natural world, such as hills, soil, and water, and the life it supports, as living. They see individuals, species, and habitats, both human and nonhuman, as diverse and as requiring the freedom to live and to blossom without interference. They oppose actions that are harmful to life, such as industrial development, resource depletion, and human-made pollution. Despite its egalitarian ethic, Deep Ecology is often criticized for not going deep enough, as failing to address what environmental feminists believe to be an important cause of environmental destruction, the attitude, logic, and practice of the domination of women (Salleh 1984).

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Used as the framework for an array of ecological movements, from Earth First!ers to Greenpeace, Deep Ecology is antidevelopment. It also complements green economics and no-growth and low-growth economic movements. Women activists in support of the Deep Ecology ecological movements include Vandana Shiva, Carolyn Merchant, Stephanie Mills, and Julia Butterfly Hill. Principles of Deep Ecology

The philosophy of Deep Ecology, emerging from Arne Naess’s (1912–2009) article “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” (1976), argues that the environmental movements and ideas of the past dealt only with temporary solutions (shallow ecology) instead of long-term fundamental changes in human relations with nonhuman nature. Deep Ecology is deeper than other forms of environmentalism because it does not support the environment simply as being useful to humans. In Deep Ecology, all species and their ecosystems have an intrinsic value, and their unique experiences are honored. The objective of the Deep Ecology movement is to promote the health of the earth and to look at the root of the problem, which has been the systematic destruction of the land. Deep Ecology rests on eight basic characteristics, and the following four are identified as essential: “(1) The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human Life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes. (2) Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. (3) Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. (4) The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease” (Naess 1986, 14). The “central intuition” (Fox 1995) of Deep Ecology is physical and social, internal and external. It overturns the “I” and the “not-I” of Western traditions and claims the unity of all things. When one accepts that premise, it follows that to poison the air, water, and environment is to poison oneself. This self-realization is central to Deep Ecology. If technological “progress” comes from the domination of nature, Deep Ecologists recognize that it also comes from domination of an inner nature. One of the principles of Deep Ecology is a total relational image of self in the world. Deep Ecology activists believe that the monotheism of Western religions is often anthropocentric and desacralizes nature, and in so doing fosters environmentally destructive behavior. The intuition of knowing within one’s consciousness that one is connected to the earth and all living beings is central to the Deep Ecology movement, but scholar Bron Taylor (2000, 274) notes that there is also a “primal consciousness or spirituality” inherent already among many primal cultures. Activists (Merchant, Shiva) support the life-affirming earth-oriented ritualizing or counterculture spirituality that is central for people in many cultures. Activists feel that Deep Ecology can help people deepen feelings of connection to the “sacred earth and its many manifestations” (Taylor 2000, 271) and as a result promote



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acts of compassion and a love of land and life that rejects the modern Western anthropocentric and monotheistic traditions of control and dominance. Deep Ecology seeks to reunite people with the ground under their own feet and in their own being. It helps deepen “a feeling of connection to a sacred Earth” (Taylor 2000, 271). Feminist Criticism of Deep Ecology

In many ways, Deep Ecology has been closely aligned with the ecological movements of women, such as Ecofeminism, as both attempt to address and overcome anthropocentric tendencies and to promote egalitarianism. Deep Ecology supports the ecological principle that diversity is essential for a healthy ecosystem, for example. Unfortunately, according to the environmental feminists, Deep Ecology does not go deep enough in that it fails to conceptualize the connection between the oppression of women and nature (Merchant 1980; Warren 1994). Critics note Naess’s failure to see the historical and philosophical relationship between the domination of nature by “man” and the domination of women by men. Deep Ecology, as set forth by Naess, does not recognize androcentric and patriarchal tendencies or the commodification of women and the land as originating from a patriarchal system. Feminist scholars have noted a correlation between the patriarchal domination of the body of the earth and women’s bodies. Ariel Kay Salleh, for example, states that Deep Ecology fails to recognize an androcentric, male-centered world view as the root of the problem of the environment. While Deep Ecologists speak of anthropocentrism (human-centeredness) as the root of domination, Ecofeminists go further to identify androcentrism (i.e., male-centeredness) as the real root. According to this view, there is a correlation between the patriarchal domination of the body of the earth and women’s bodies, as hierarchical thinking values a patriarchal conceptual framework for how we see and interact with the natural world. It supports the logic of domination instead of diversity, legitimizing inequality. Men are often identified socially and culturally as belonging to the realm of the mind and women as belonging to nature and the physical world, for example, creating a false logic that is used to support the domination of both women and nature. Another feminist critique of Deep Ecology is in connection with the need to decrease the human population to allow for the subsequent flourishing of nonhuman life. This analysis, however, fails to recognize that ecological problems are intimately related to social and gender problems, such as the lack of equality and control of reproduction; women in much of the world rarely have reproductive freedoms and cannot be held responsible for population increases or decreases. Deep Ecologists support the goal that every person on this planet should have enough food, water, adequate shelter; and should be allowed dignity and life. According to environmental feminists, real deep ecological solutions would address the problematic way in which patriarchal systems contribute to the destruction of the environment. Deep Ecology recognizes that human beings have needs in a socially constructed society, but in a deeply egalitarian world view, women and nature would be autonomous persons rather than commodities and objects. The principle of biospheric equality places all humans on an equal level with all

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other living things. Drawing from the science of ecology, every component of the interlinked web of nature has equal importance. Therefore, a true “biospherical egalitarianism” is one that recognizes the right to life of all people, regardless of race, class, or gender, and to all species as well. To more fully address the question of a healthy earth, critics of Deep Ecology see the need for a new understanding of the self in relationship to the living, interconnected community, instead of a society based on individuality and ego. To understand that we are a part of the web of life is to have empathy and compassion for all living creatures, to seek equal rights for all, and to recognize that we are enriched by the existence of the diversity and ecosystems of the planet. Deep Ecology aligns with this view to the extent that it supports a nondualistic, egalitarian vision where people and nature are treated with care. However, a deeper ecology would support principles of diversity and of symbiosis. With diversity comes greater self-realization and greater understanding that all living beings and the earth itself have intrinsic value. Rachel York-Bridgers See also: Buddhism: Engaged Buddhism; Paganism: Eco-Paganism; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Radical Women’s Spirituality Further Reading Fox, Warwick. “The Deep Ecology—Ecofeminism Debate and Its Parallels.” In Deep Ecology for the 21st Century, edited by George Sessions, 269–89. Boston: Shambhala, 1995. Kheel, Marti. “Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology: Reflection of Identity and Difference.” In Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, edited by Irene Diamond and Gloria Orenstein, 128–37. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature; Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980. Naess, Arne. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16, nos. 1–4 (1976): 95–100. Naess, Arne. “The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects.” Philadelphia Inquiry 8 (1986): 10–31. Salleh, Ariel Kay. “Deeper than Deep Ecology: The Eco-Feminist Connection.” Environmental Ethics 6, no. 4 (1984): 339–45. Taylor, Bron. “Deep Ecology and Its Social Philosophy: A Critique.” In Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology, edited by Eric Katz, Andrew Light, and David Rothenburg, 269–90. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Warren, Karen J. “Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology and Human Population.” In Ecological Feminism, edited by Christine J. Cuomo, 88–105. Routledge: London, 1994.

D I V I N AT I O N Although found in ancient mythology and religions old and new, divination, from the Latin divinare (to foresee, to be inspired by a deity), overlaps profoundly with the various expressions of women’s spirituality, from New Age movements that stress Tarot cards to Goddess, Wiccan, and Pagan spiritualities that include traditional and occult rituals ranging from astrology to the I Ching to aura readings to



Divination

scrying (seeking visual images from crystal balls, mirrors, or natural expressions, including water, fire, or the moon). Divination within women’s spirituality not only offers valuable insight into the notion of self, thereby assisting in individual life choices, but also speaks to a prepatriarchal time when wisdom was tethered to Goddess worship as opposed to gendered hierarchies. Because religiosity and rituals have often been bound to masculinity, patriarchic tendencies, and male symbols, divination within women’s spirituality not only becomes a technique to understand anew but also produces space to practice and actualize rituals that shift religious consciousness from patriarchal monotheism to a feminine spirituality defined by eclecticism, pluralism, and multiculturalism. Reading signs, symbols, events, or omens, divination expresses an attempt to gain direct insight into a specific situation, worldly issue, or divine reality. Often connected to seasonal changes, divination describes processes for uncovering talents, revealing hidden mysteries, recalling the past, and foretelling upcoming realities by interpreting patterns and symbols through elements ranging from clouds to flames to tools including Tarot cards and rune stones. A magical art of discovering the unknown or unseen, divination uses the conscious mind to contact the psychic realm. Although no set model of/for divination exists, diviners often operate within a distinct religious context, which ultimately lends a social character to divination. This is especially true among women practitioners, who often draw from Goddess symbols and metaphors, operate directly within traditions ranging from Dianic Witchcraft to Neo-Pagan Goddess movements, or manifest new modes of divination that speak directly to a feminist spiritual consciousness. Although a ritual unto itself, divination often occurs in tandem with other spiritual processes, emerging, for example, as a means to assess individual talents prior to spell casting. While it is significant to understand the means by which women practitioners develop and transform traditional methods of divination, we must also account for shifts in intent, meaning, and gained understanding. Although traditionally connected to the invocation of disembodied spirits (or female deities), feminist and women-oriented divination offers more than a foretelling of the future. In fact, rather than knowledge of what is to come, divination offers the means to unveil internal wisdom, the capacity to see from within the realm of the spiritual (or “higher”) self. In this way, divinatory techniques return women to their own sense of being, a sense intertwined in often reciprocal ways, including the base understanding that the Goddess is found within. Once realized, the power and understanding discerned through divination outlines the means to move from inner transformation to outward work designed to enhance the material world. Within contemporary Wicca, divination often takes the form of mini rituals designed to prepare the practitioner for the day to come. Whether in the form of rune casting, Tarot reading, pendulum exercises, or vis-à-vis female spiritual affirmation decks, divination offers individual practitioners methods for locating solutions to everyday problems. To be successful, however, divination necessitates not only the cultivation of subtle abilities but also an understanding of divinatory techniques and esoteric systems of symbols. Crystals, long used in forms of contemplative divination or to enhance divinatory techniques, not only offer practitioners

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the capacity to unfold psychic faculties but also, when in the form of a crystal ball, directly symbolize the Goddess herself. Significantly, while runes and Tarot decks hold long histories across cultures and often derive from and incorporate patriarchal perspectives, both assume a vital divinatory role among women practitioners, a role that has led to the development of feminine-specific options. Whether adapting and adopting the Waite-Smith deck within feminist interpretations or using original drawings that reflect historical and contemporary Goddess and earth-based cultures found throughout the world, feminine-specific divination techniques present oracle systems of/for spiritual development that manifest the Divine Feminine while recovering the values associated with prepatriarchal—and preracial—times. Morgan Shipley See also: Paganism: Paganism; Wicca; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality; Radical Women’s Spirituality Further Reading Budapest, Zsuzsanna E. The Grandmother of Time: A Woman’s Book of Celebrations, Spells, and Sacred Objects for Every Month of the Year. New York: HarperOne, 1989. Mountainwater, Shekhinah. Ariadne’s Thread: A Workbook of Goddess Magic. Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1991.

DRUMMING Drumming is a powerful technology found in cultures around the globe with roots reaching into ancient times. From the Sahara to the Himalayas, from oceanic peoples to pastoralists, the drum is found in diverse cultural settings. In traditional cultural contexts, the drum is considered sacred, extending to all its aspects. Among the West African Yoruba, who believe that all within nature is imbued with spirit (ashé), permission must be obtained from the tree chosen for drum making. This permission is ascertained through divination, and offerings of gratitude are made to the spirit of the tree before it is cut. The Yoruba also have a deity associated with the drum itself—Ayan. Therefore, the drum is considered a vital force imbued with ashé and capable of acts of power. Until very recently, drumming was considered the purview of men, and it is still rare to find women drummers. It is estimated that only 1 percent of women in popular music are drummers (Smith 2014). Accomplished drummer and Prince associate Sheila E. (b. 1957) was considered a trailblazer for female drummers in the 1980s. For a large portion of history, it has been considered taboo for women to drum in most world cultures (Brandy 2008). Though this taboo persists within certain cultures, one can also find exceptions. For example, in Niger, Guinea, and the Congo, women drum in official and ritual capacities. However, drumming has not always been the prerogative of men. The earliest drummers were women. The rhythmic sounds of women pounding grain and other foods was very likely the earliest drumming, just as the grain sieve is thought



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to be the basis of the frame drum, whose first evidence of use was during the Neolithic (Smith 2014). During China’s Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) and Sung dynasty (960–1279 CE), female court musicians played drums (Smith 2014). For many First Nations people, the drum is considered the heartbeat of Mother Earth. Drumming is spoken of as a technology because its skillful use can effect change in individuals and the environment. Through drumming, one enters the regions of consciousness not accessed in everyday reality. With its power to elicit transformative experiences, drumming is a vehicle used in the healing of individual and community. Drumming is an experience of communion—with oneself, with one’s community, with the ancestors, with spirit, African woman plays a traditional drum at a folk and with the rhythmic pulse of dance in South Africa. Archaeological evidence the universe. shows that the earliest drummers were women, and Drumming is used to alter while drumming has been taboo for women in many states of consciousness and to cultures since those early times, thousands of women entrain, a state in which the body’s are now reclaiming the power of the drum to connect with the rhythmic pulse of the universe. (TheGift777/ rhythms are drawn into align- Getty Images) ment with the drum’s rhythm— breathing, heartbeat, and brainwaves can all be affected (McNeill 1995). Childbirth can be facilitated by drumming, and the right drum rhythms are believed to affect crop growth. Drumming as technology has great power, and ancient and prehistoric women were the skilled orchestrators of this power. Archaeological evidence of women as early drummers is found on the walls of temples and in the statuary of ancient civilizations, such as Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Crete, Greece, and Rome, to name only a few. The earliest known representation of a drum was found on a sixth millennium BCE shrine room wall in C¸atal Hu˝yu˝k, which was located in present-day Turkey (Redmond 1997). Redmond documents the importance and profusion of women as drummers as well as the fact that in the earliest Goddess-based religions, the frame drum was considered sacred. This sacred instrument was played by women, themselves held sacred because of their ability to bring forth life. Archaeological evidence

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also points to the association between the drum and female deities across several cultures. Goddesses themselves, such as Hathor, Sekhmet, Astarte, Aphrodite, and Cybele, are depicted with drums. The first drummer whose name we know is a Mesopotamian priestess, Lipushiau, who was granddaughter of Sumerian king Naramsin (Smith 2014). Women were the intermediaries to the world of spirit, using the frame drum as the vehicle of connection that induced prophetic trance states. Women held a place of status and power owing to their role as drummers mediating spirit on behalf of their communities. Unfortunately, women were banned from drumming by decrees of the early fathers of the Christian church, primarily because drumming was associated with Pagan rites. These decrees began shortly after the Roman Empire became Christian under Emperor Constantine in the mid-fourth century CE. Drumming and the ecstatic trance states it induced were anathema to the Christian church, especially so because it was women who wielded this powerful technology. Over time, ever more stringent decrees were enacted. The tambourine, an adaptation of the frame drum, was outlawed by Pope John III in the sixth century CE (Redmond 1997). However, women are reclaiming the drum. Examples are Afia Walking Tree, founder of Spirit Drumz, and Carolyn Brandy, founder of Women Drummers International and the Born to Drum Women’s Drum Camp. These women and others have been at the forefront of the movement of women reclaiming the drum. Brandy (2008) believes that the thousands of women who are playing drums worldwide attest to the fact that women are awakening to the need to reclaim their place in the cosmic order if the planet is to survive. Women are reawakening to and reclaiming power in their lives. Reclaiming the sacred technology of drumming is an important component of redressing androcentric imbalance, of finding reconnection with the multiple layers of psyche and environment to which the drum gives us access. Women are recentering the importance of being in rhythm with themselves, their fellow beings, our living planet, the natural world, and the rhythmic pulse of the universe. Annette Lyn Williams See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Priestesses and Oracular Women; Rastafari; Ancient Religions: Shamans in East Asia; Spirituality: Women of Color Further Reading Brandy, Carolyn. “The Global Movement of Women Playing Drums.” June 2008. http:// www.womendrummers.org/global-movement-of-women-playing-drums/. McNeill, William H. Keeping Together in Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Redmond, Layne. When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm. New York: Three Rivers, 1997. Smith, Angela. Women Drummers: A History from Rock and Jazz to Blues and Country. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014.



Ecofeminism

ECOFEMINISM Ecofeminism, a term coined in 1974 by Françoise d’Eaubonne, combines the terms ecology and feminism. It refers to movements that began in the 1970s and combined feminist and environmentalist thought and activism to create new philosophies, theologies/thealogies (study of Goddess), and praxis (theory joined with practice) based on the insight that the oppression of women and the destruction of the natural world are interconnected and can only be effectively addressed together. Viewing gender as a social construct, ecofeminists began to analyze and deconstruct gendered language that described nature as feminine and women as close to nature. These constructs were seen as part of a social and symbolic system used by patriarchal religions and philosophies to reduce women, the environment, and animals to the realm of “nature” or matter. It is a system in which the male is understood to be more rational and closer to spirit and to God than the female, which serves as justification for the subordination of women and the domination and destruction of the natural world. Ecofeminists turned what Rosemary Radford Ruether called the “classical dualisms” on their head, celebrating women’s feelings for nature and arguing that both women and men are embodied and embedded in the web of life. At the end of Woman and Nature, philosopher and poet Susan Griffin (1980) wrote, “This earth is my sister, I love her daily grace” and claimed “we [human beings] are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature” (n.p., italics in original). The growth of feminism and women’s spirituality combined with a growing sense of ecological crisis during the 1980s and beyond. Within ecological feminism, the recognition of oppression as an interlocking system of isms, including racism, sexism, ableism, and others, was seen as linked with the subjection of nature, as not only women but every oppressed group was said to be closer to nature than “rational” white European males. Ecofeminist analysis and activism take place within a wide range of disciplines and exemplify the feminist value of embracing and celebrating diversity. Ecofeminist scholars work in various disciplines, including sociology, women’s studies, philosophy, religion, ecology, science, and history, and may embrace divergent schools of thought, including liberal, Marxist, socialist, and cultural ecofeminisms and ecowomanism (black women’s ecofeminist movement). The diversity within ecofeminism can be seen in a profusion of anthologies, including, for example, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990), Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (1989), and Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion (1996), each containing dozens of articles by scholars and writers from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. Reweaving the World, for example, is introduced as a “chorus of voices reflecting the variety of concerns flowing into ecofeminism” (Diamond 1990, vii). Important as a methodology within feminist studies, diverse perspectives are seen as grounded in differences of social location (standpoint theory), and higher value is placed on the insights of those in less privileged positions of society (Harding 1987). The science of ecology and environmental activism developed concurrently with second wave feminism. The environmental movement began as a response

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to both visible (smog) and hidden (DDT, nuclear fallout) pollutants, which raised concerns about the fate of the planet and people. Environmentalists sought to stop the destruction of forests, bodies of water, grasslands, and wildlife by polluting and unsustainable economic activity. “Shallow ecologists” sought to reduce the effects of this activity with technological fixes and for human purposes, while “deep ecologists” sought to critique and overcome the philosophical and spiritual causes of environmental degradation, and to preserve nature for its own sake. Both Deep Ecology, with its philosophy of the interdependence of all life, and Ecofeminism criticize the view that humans and nature are separate and distinct and that nature is matter without spirit or sacred value, which has been used to justify the domination and destruction of the natural world. Ecofeminists also criticize the gendering of these binaries, where human, spirit, and the Divine are identified with the male, while nature, the body, and matter are identified with the female. Like the natural world, Ecofeminists argue, women are reduced in this thinking to a mere resource to be dominated, controlled, and used. Historians of science like Carolyn Merchant provide important background to these developments. In The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980), Merchant traces the cultural, scientific, and economic transitions— from an agrarian to an industrial economy, from an organic view of the earth and the universe to a mechanistic one—that have contributed to the ecological crisis we face. The mechanistic model, based on the works of 17th-century philosophers, including René Descartes (“I think therefore I am”), is only one of the latest views to arise that justifies human dominance over nature and man over woman; Ecofeminists also note the influence of ancient philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, on Western views of God-man, woman-nature relationships within Christian-dominated cultures. Merchant’s work shows that the philosophical view that nature is merely a machine helped make possible the Industrial Revolution and capitalist economies, which have allowed humans to take plant, animal, and mineral life in unprecedented ways. Merchant also shows how the dominance of men in society and the image of nature as feminine worked together within science to support the use of nature as mere matter instead of mother. Intimately linked with this was the view that men are rational and women are emotional and intuitive. These views combined to support the belief that it is proper for men to dominate and exploit both women and nature, including land, water, minerals, plants/trees, and animals, for the purposes of cultural and scientific evolution, industry, and corporatism. Ecofeminists decry how this thinking, and its resultant environmental pollution and destruction of habitat, have compromised the ability of women, who continue to be the primary caretakers in the majority of households across the globe, to provide clean food, water, and other necessities to their families. Because women give birth and lactate, they are involved with caring for the young more so than men. Women’s biological experiences of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation, are distinct from male biological processes and typically result, through social and cultural forces, in women bearing responsibility for the biological needs



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of their offspring. Ecofeminists work to address these issues from within diverse disciplines and perspectives. Ecofeminism inspires feminists working to change religions from within, to think deeply about the world views disseminating from their religious traditions, and to develop new ways of thinking about the nature of the Divine in relation to humanity, the environment, and women. Others who left the churches, temples, and synagogues, seeing them as stubbornly male dominant, have worked to develop theological and thealogical reflections amid a flowering of feminist spiritual movements. Carol J. Adams’s anthology Ecofeminism and the Sacred (1993), for example, is a collection of essays in feminist ecotheology from a wide range of traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Ecofeminist issues in theological reflection include a broad range of concerns, such as the gender of God or Goddess; the nature of the Divine as immanent in or transcending the physical world; the ways God or Goddess relates to the world with justice, judgment, care, and concern; whether theological reflections on God or Goddess in traditional religions help or harm Ecofeminist ethics and, if not, how they might be revised. The problem of binary constructs such as God over man, culture over nature, man over woman, and spirit over body are of particular concern. Western thought is influenced by Plato’s disparagement of the physical in favor of ideal forms and Aristotle’s “science” linking women with the body as mere matter and men with form as spirit. These ideas have supported the assumption within patriarchal monotheism that men are closer to the spiritual and to God, since God is seen as male and spirit. Western religions also see time as linear and in practice often seem to value spirit and the afterlife over concern for the well being of people and creatures on earth. Countering this are groundbreaking feminist environmentalists who have developed deep insights on the meaning of spirituality, care, justice, love, and Divine-human-nature relations. Carol P. Christ and Sallie McFague, for example, counter Christian views of the superiority of spirit over nature in their work. Instead of spirit as separate and above the body, and God as separate and above humanity, McFague (1993) argues that the earth is the “body of God” in The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Instead of God as all-knowing, unchanging, distant, and male, Carol P. Christ (2003) argues in She Who Changes: Reimagining the Divine in the World for a view that the Divinity she calls Goddess is in the world, caring for it, and changing with it. For some spiritual Ecofeminists, developments in the study of ancient and prehistoric religions provide important evidence and insight. In The Language of the Goddess (1989), Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued that the Goddess of Old Europe (ca. 6500–3500 BCE) symbolized the powers of birth, death, and regeneration within—not outside of—nature. She found archaeological evidence of matrifocal and peaceful societies in prehistory, providing an important corrective to the assumption made by old-school archaeologists, that patriarchy and conflict have existed always and everywhere. Gimbutas’s work made possible the knowledge that male domination of women and nature and the values of competition and war are not inevitable in human life. Not a golden age fantasy, Gimbutas’s work convincingly demonstrates the history embedded in

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ancient religious myths that are scientifically (through archaeological and linguistic studies) linked to prehistoric images of the Feminine Divine. Where the ancient myths tell of a transition from powerful Goddesses to powerful Gods, Gimbutas demonstrates evidence of a historic transformation of societies of the distant past, from matrifocal to patriarchal. This evidence, that patriarchy and its associated war and oppression, are not essential to human life, offers hope that a new transformation can occur, a return to the values of equality, mutuality, and partnership that once existed in Old Europe. Images linking women and nature in ancient times are seen in Earth Goddesses like Isis and Gaia, and in prehistoric times, in cave art and figurines. Some prehistoric artifacts depict the female body merging with plants, trees, and animals, in objects clearly used in sacred ritual; others—in figures of human females suckling animals—show nature as nurturing mother. In these anthropomorphized images of nature, earth is the Great Mother—sacred female, nurturing and life sustaining as well as powerful and destructive. New knowledge of ancient and prehistoric connections between the Feminine Divine, nature, and peaceful civilization has led to a flowering of Ecofeminist spirituality, expressed in prose, poetry, art, dance, scholarship, and activism to promote love and protection of the earth and its creatures and to liberate all women from exploitation and domination. Many see the identification of women with a loving and nurturing Goddess as empowering, and as supporting ecological wholeness in the face of entrenched patriarchal social

Gaia, collage on wood, by Cristina Biaggi, identifies earth as a Divine Mother, and celebrates her as a jewel in the vast universe. Many Ecofeminists embrace the view that humans are embodied and embedded in the web of life within a sacred universe. (Cristina Biaggi)



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structures and a transcendent male God. This perspective has contributed to the blossoming of Goddess feminist, Wiccan, Pagan, and other earth-based spiritual traditions. For some, however, images of nature and the Divine as female are seen as essentialist and as the foundation on which the subjugation of both women and nature was built. Some Ecofeminists reject worship of the Goddess as a restatement of conservative constructs that value “men and culture” over “women and nature.” By continuing to identify women with nature, the body, production, and reproduction, Goddess feminists fail to deconstruct those norms, it is thought. In their struggle against environmental destruction, feminists who embrace nature as Divine and female are said to support the sexist belief that it is the job of women and nature to nurture others and clean up after everyone. Some see this kind of environmental activism as concerned with women’s issues, but not for the goal of liberating women, or of protecting nature for its own sake. Still, ecofeminism has raised awareness of the fact that there are deep connections between the issues women face and the destruction of the environment. While the term Ecofeminist is in less use today, ecological and feminist concerns remain in the forefront. There is an imminent threat to the lives and livelihoods of millions and the possibility that all life on earth will be destroyed due to environmental degradation and climate change. These issues hit minority groups the hardest. Third World feminists and feminists of color have pointed out that toxic chemicals and waste are often dumped in areas where poor people of color live. As the negative impacts of First World development programs on the daily lives of poor Third World women are recognized (Shiva 2014), there is growing understanding about the connection of environmental degradation to the vulnerability of women. In other areas as well, work done by Ecofeminists continues to provide insight. Concepts of relationships of mutuality and partnership were developed (see Eisler 1988) and continue to be explored. Animal liberation has been an important issue within Ecofeminism and continues to be an active concern today due to the impact of the mass production of meat on climate change and the cruelty practiced within that industry. A growing number of people today see veganism or vegetarianism as essential to a correct relationship between humans and nature. Philosophical and spiritual Ecofeminist scholarship supports these trends with models of relationship between humans, animals, and nature that provide alternatives to the classical dualisms and hierarchal thinking inherited from philosophical and theological traditions. Susan de-Gaia See also: Paganism: Eco-Paganism; Paganism; Seasonal Festivals; Wicca; Prehistoric Religion: Crete, Religion and Culture; Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Neolithic Female Figures; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Deep Ecology; Goddess Spirituality; Green Funerals; Healers; Radical Women’s Spirituality; Sex and Gender; Spirituality and Gender in Social Context; Syncretism; Women of Color

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Further Reading Christ, C. P. She Who Changes: Reimagining the Divine in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Diamond, Irene, and Gloria Orenstein, eds. Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990. Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989. Griffin, Susan. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper, 1980. Harding, Sandra, ed. Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987. McFague, Sally. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980. Plant, Judith, ed. Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Santa Cruz, CA: New Society, 1989. Shiva, Vandana, and Maria Mies. Ecofeminism. London: Zed Books, 2014. Warren, Karen J, ed. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

GODDESS SPIRITUALITY Goddess Spirituality emerged in the 20th century Western world as a way of understanding and celebrating the relationship between the deity, the human, and the earth. It honors the Divine as female, often incorporating aspects of historical or mythical Goddess cultures; it celebrates the physicality, creativity, and sacredness of the female body; it is grounded in an attitude of respect and reverence for the earth. While Goddess Spirituality has no fixed doctrines, many elements of belief and practice are common to most practitioners, particularly the Charge of the Goddess, the Wheel of the Year framework around which the seasonal rituals are organized, and the core elements and symbols used in these rituals. The Goddess community is without official leaders or hierarchy; leadership comes from women who are recognized for their work—writing, speaking, acting—predominately at the local level. Practitioners of Goddess Spirituality are mainly, but not exclusively, female. Many Goddess groups are for women only (sometimes described as the Dianic tradition), while others include both women and men. Contemporary Goddess Spirituality has its roots in the second wave of feminism, which saw a reexamination of the role and place of women, both in society and in religion. Feminist theology led many women to believe that reformation of patriarchal religions was not only possible but imminent. When the hoped-for changes did not materialize, disillusion spread. In 1971, the feminist theologian Mary Daly became the first woman to preach in Harvard Memorial Church. She spoke of the devastating impact on women of a male deity, sexist language, and the related power structures that supported the exclusion of women. At the conclusion of the sermon, she led a procession out of the church, a symbolic exodus that prefigured the way in which women would subsequently leave churches and synagogues in vast numbers.



Goddess Spirituality

Patriarchy Patriarchy is a term used by feminists and others to denote societies in which power and authority are held by men. While patriarchal is a value-neutral term when describing social organization, it is value laden when used in protest of that structure and the negative affects with which it is identified, including war and oppression. Patriarchy literally means “rule of the fathers.” In patriarchal societies, men hold authority in many ways, from dominating in government, family, and education, to claiming authority in matters of religion. It is typical of patriarchal societies that the family structure is patrilineal (the lineage is traced through the father and not the mother) and patrilocal (women leave home upon getting married and join the husband’s family). Patriarchy also refers to cultural systems, including religions, that value the male and masculine traits over and above the female and feminine traits, systems that may be associated with suppression of the feminine in religious belief and practice.

Feminism also led to new ways of understanding prehistory, by questioning traditional androcentric interpretations of archaeological finds and suggesting that, prior to patriarchal domination, societies were either matristic or egalitarian, and the deity solely female or equally female and male. Marija Gimbutas—archaeologist, lecturer, and Harvard researcher—directed major excavations of Neolithic sites in southeastern Europe from 1967 to 1980, identifying evidence of widespread peaceful matrifocal cultures before the patriarchal Indo-European culture. The conclusions presented by Gimbutas, similar findings by the German matriarchal scholar Heide Göttner-Abendroth, and the views expressed by Merlin Stone in When God Was a Woman were not universally accepted, perhaps because they challenged accepted patriarchal views. Nevertheless, women were inspired by their work and dreamed of a world and a religion in which they would be equal participants, a world and a spirituality shaped by female values and modes of being. The stage was set for the emergence of Goddess Spirituality. In Britain, the work of Asphodel Long—writer, researcher, teacher—was highly influential in creating awareness about the Goddess. Asphodel was the first Sophia Fellow at the University College of St. Mark and St. John in Plymouth for her work on the Goddess Asherah (1966) and was a founding member of both the London Matriarchy Study Group (1975) and the Matriarchy Research and Reclaim Network (1980). Asphodel continued to write and teach about the Goddess until her death in 2005. Monica Sjöö—artist, writer, feminist, activist, founding member of Bristol Women’s Liberation (1969)—also had a significant, often dramatic, role in the struggle for women’s rights in society and religion. Her most iconic painting, God Giving Birth, a powerful representation of God as female, was censored several times, and Monica was accused of blasphemy. The Goddess tradition emerged in California with the foundation of the Dianic Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One in 1971, led by Zsuzsanna Budapest, who intertwined feminism, Tarot, Witchcraft, and the traditions handed on through the women in her family from her Hungarian background. The separatist tradition

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pioneered by Budapest found practical expression in social action, particularly related to achieving equality for women. Starhawk, an early student of Budapest, brought together feminist Goddess Spirituality and a commitment to ecology. Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance is one of the classic texts of the Goddess tradition. In the early 1980s, Starhawk put her beliefs into broader practice, establishing “Reclaiming,” a movement based on a deep, spiritual commitment to the earth, to healing, and to linking magic with political action. While the feminist Goddess tra­ dition overall does not have a well-developed culture of men and the Goddess, the Reclaiming movement is a model for inclusive groups that acknowledge both Goddess and God. This tradition of Goddess and God is usually described as Paganism, rather than as Goddess Spirituality, although the two forms of spirituality share a reverence for the earth, celebrated in a common seasonal and ritual framework. The development of Goddess Spirituality has always been influenced as much by writers and artists as by academics. Novels such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Barbara Walker’s Amazon, and Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing inspired women in the early, heady days of Goddess Spirituality. The paintings of Monica Sjöö, the Motherpeace Tarot cards, and the Goddess banners of Lydia Ruyle have all nurtured women on their journeys to the Goddess. Women born after the 1970s found a society where membership in a patriarchal religious tradition was no longer required. Exclusive language was becoming the exception in general usage and, within the patriarchal religions, feminism was slowly eroding male-dominated language and frameworks. For many of these women, the language of Goddess was part of their daily lives. They were free to explore their femaleness, their power, and their own intrinsic sacredness. Today, Goddess Spirituality is found around the world. A relationship to the Goddess starts with experience. Beliefs and practices follow. For many women, devotion to the Goddess is linked to, or grows out of, a sense of their own physicality and its intrinsic worth. Where most patriarchal and dualistic religious traditions devalue female bodies (and, frequently, minds also) and have no place for a female deity, Goddess Spirituality removes the deity from the transcendent heavenly realm and firmly grounds her in the immanent sphere: in the earth body and the human female body. Goddess Spirituality, and its expression in rituals that celebrate the seasons and cycles of nature, has brought a deeper awareness of the relationship between the Goddess and the earth and, for most women, a corresponding appreciation of the cycles of their own bodies and their lives. Charge of the Goddess conveys a clear understanding of the intimate link between the Goddess, earth, and nature, expressed in the evocative words of the Star Goddess: “I who am the beauty of the green earth, the white moon among the stars, and the mystery of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me, for I am the soul of nature that gives life to the universe. From me all things proceed and unto me they must return” (Starhawk 1979, 90–91). Despite the centrality of the earth in Goddess Spirituality, and the shared experience of sacred femaleness, there is no one way of describing the Goddess, and it would be neither accurate nor appropriate to speak about “a” spirituality



Goddess Spirituality

of Goddess. Practitioners understand the Goddess in very diverse ways, from a complete identification of Goddess life and personal/self-life to viewing Goddess energy as a part of the energy of self to seeing the Goddess as the sacred energy that flows between every living organism or understanding the Goddess metaphorically as a personification of the creative energy that animates the universe. For many, there is no contradiction between a belief in a Goddess (however understood), in one Goddess with numerous faces and facets—frequently Maiden, Mother, and Crone—or in multiple Goddesses, such as Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, and Demeter. Often it is stories of traditional ancient Goddesses such as these that form the catalyst for a deeper exploration of the deity as female. This may be followed by interest in, and devotion to, those local Goddesses whose stories were buried by centuries of patriarchal religion: Goddesses such as the Native American Spider Woman, the East Asian Mago, the Spanish Lady of Elche, and many, many others. Lydia Ruyle’s banners have brought dozens of female divinities—familiar and unfamiliar—to popular attention. Some Goddess practitioners have a sense of the Goddess as intimately and personally involved in their lives, believing that the Goddess is responsive to prayers and petitions. For others, prayer functions as a way of manifesting personal intent rather than as a call to an external power for action or response. However the Goddess is understood, the way in which Goddess Spirituality is expressed is surprisingly consistent, within the framework of a ritual cycle—the Wheel of the Year—which follows the annual seasonal changes of the earth and embodies aspects of the story of the Goddess. The Wheel of the Year revolves around eight festivals: Beltane (fertility), Lammas (waxing dark, the beginning of winter), Samhain (honoring the ancestors), and Imbolc (waxing light, growth and renewal); the summer and winter solstices; and the spring and autumn equinoxes. The dates of these celebrations vary according to the seasons in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Most practitioners also hold rituals at the full moon; the dates of these are consistent across the globe. A growing number of Goddess temples are being established as places for these regular rituals, as visible symbols of devotion to the Goddess, centers for Goddess studies, and community gathering places. Tours to places sacred to the Goddess have evolved as a way of connecting to the ancient traditions of the Goddess. Crete, Malta, Turkey, France, Britain, Ireland, and Egypt are popular destinations. These tours are frequently for women-only groups and are almost invariably led by women. As well as studying key archaeological sites, the tours facilitate and deepen personal experience of the Goddess, incorporating myths, rituals, meditation, and personal sharing. Goddess conferences, which also include these elements of practice, are held annually in a variety of languages. The longest-running one—and possibly the largest, with over 500 participants annually—is at Glastonbury, United Kingdom, and was established by Kathy Jones in 1995. Other conferences are held across the United States, in Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Australia; the locations are increasing each year as Goddess Spirituality spreads. Patricia Rose

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See also: Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Paganism: Seasonal Festivals; Wicca; Prehistoric Religion: Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Spirituality: Art and Performance; Ecofeminism; Pilgrimage, Goddess; Radical Women’s Spirituality Further Reading Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon, 1973. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-Based Goddess Religion. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.

GREEN FUNERALS Traditionally, funeral work was done by close family members. When a person died, the cleaning and preparation of the body for burial was the responsibility of the family. Exceptions to this were the shrouding women, who would take on the burden of what was at the time seen as women’s work. Caring for the dead was seen as a domestic duty, much like caring for the living. For a wake, bodies were typically placed on blocks of ice to delay decay. With increasing social atomization during the 18th and 19th centuries, the desire of families during the Civil War to have their fallen soldiers returned home to them (often from far away), and the embalming of President Lincoln, embalming became widespread practice in the United States. As death care became more scientific with the application of this process, in addition to the establishment of funeral businesses, women were pushed out of the field. Women’s “nature,” which was seen as delicate and sensitive, precluded them from the graphic work of embalming, and they were denied the scientific knowledge required to perform the work. The burgeoning funeral industry was also exclusively male, as was the business world in general. Modern rhetoric surrounding embalming is typically linked to disinfection. As embalming only delays decay, as opposed to preventing it, embalming is now seen as a means to clean the dead body to prevent spread of infection or disease, and many states have laws in place that not only require a licensed funeral director to care for the body but also require embalming if an open-casket funeral is desired. Green embalming is possible, although not widespread. A green burial involves embalming chemicals that do not have a formaldehyde base (if there is to be a viewing—some families choose no embalming and thus no viewing) and any casing that will naturally biodegrade, such as linen shrouds or bamboo or wicker caskets. Although any funeral home can offer green embalming, not everyone can offer green burial. As most individual funeral homes do not own their own cemeteries, they do not have control over the rules the cemeteries have in place. For example, at most cemeteries, a vault is a required purchase to have your loved one buried there. The argument for it is that the vaults, being made of concrete or metal,



Healers

will not break due to the pressure from the ground above it, so they help avoid sink spots in the land. However, many cemeteries are beginning to provide space for green burials, so people can be buried in linen shrouds, wicker caskets, or anything else that can biodegrade. Most funeral homes will work with people to provide services they desire, including washing and preparing their own dead and participating in cremation, excluding embalming itself, which requires state licensing. People are also allowed to build their own caskets and can create ones that don’t have varnishes or metal pieces like most caskets. The push for DIY and green burials began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s with roots in the death-positive movement spearheaded by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and following the publication of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), Lisa Carlson’s Caring for the Dead (1987), and other texts criticizing the funeral industry for its hand in taking the caring for one’s own dead out of the hands of family members. People like Billy and Kimberly Campbell (Memorial Ecosystems) and the Green Burial Council have pushed for recognition of the ecologically hazardous effects of traditional burial. Connected to this is the spiritual side of caring for one’s own dead. Mainstream religious practices don’t overtly deny mourners the opportunity to take responsibility for the deceased or demand embalming and specific caskets—indeed some require family involvement and do not allow embalming at all, as it is seen as desecration of the body. Thus, many adherents who also have environmental concerns are starting to push for ecofriendly burials. In addition, people whose spiritual practices do overtly call for environmentally conscious practices, including those related to death, have been instrumental in the increasing demand for green burial. Selena Fox, for example, a senior minister and high priestess of a Wiccan community, has established a green cemetery for Pagan practitioners that is connected to her spiritual hub and nature preserve, Circle Sanctuary. Aubrey Thamann See also: Buddhism: Funeral Practices; Paganism: Eco-Paganism; Prehistoric Religions: Burials; Spirituality: Ecofeminism Further Reading Harris, Mark. Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial. New York: Scribner, 2007. Kelly, Suzanne. Greening Death: Reclaiming Burial Practices and Restoring Our Tie to the Earth. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

HEALERS Women and the feminine have held significant roles in healing within traditional cultural contexts and in the modern world as part of new religious movements and spiritual traditions. The idea of the Divine Feminine as a healing force, whether conceptualized as the Magna Mater (Mother Goddess) or as specific female deities

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or female spirits, is to be found across cultures. Women with the power and knowledge to heal have featured prominently in a multitude of religious contexts, from the ancient world to folk religious practices and contemporary forms of spirituality. Some of these women are local practitioners of folk healing, while others are regarded as medical and spiritual specialists within their societies. In many ancient cultures around the world, women were associated with healing knowledge and regarded as the keepers of traditional medical lore and practices. In ancient Egypt, for instance, women often acted as physicians as part of their role as priestesses. In ancient China, women played important roles in traditional medicine including acupuncture. Female practitioners were associated with sacred incantations and healing with herbs in Persia, and many other examples can be found in ancient histories. Mirroring the roles of women as healers in ancient cultures, the mythology associated with those cultures often reflects a Divine Feminine force as a healing one. Specific female divinities in mythological pantheons (deities connected to a particular culture and religion) across the ancient world are associated with healing, whether this be in terms of cosmic balance and well-being or the maintenance of human health and welfare. Examples include the following Goddesses: the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet, who is patron of physicians; the Roman Goddess Minerva, who is associated with medicine; Goddess Ping in Inuit culture, who is connected to knowledge of medicine; the Mayan Goddess Ixchel, whose main qualities are knowledge of midwifery . and healing; the Norse Goddess Eir, who has medical skill; the Slavic Goddess Zywie, who holds power over health; the Greek Goddess Epione, who could soothe pain and whose name means “soothing”; the Gaulish Goddess Sirona, who is connected to healing springs; the Sami Goddess Beiwe, who could restore the mental health of humans driven mad by winter’s darkness and other tribulations; and the Chinese Goddess Jiutian Xuannü, who holds power over the circulation of human breath and general longevity. Many female deities are associated with snakes, and the serpent is a symbol related to healing in a variety of cultural contexts. Some examples include the Roman Goddess Angitia, who is credited with the arts of magic, snake charming, and healing, and the cobra-headed Goddess Wadjet of Egypt, who is believed to have healing and protective power; theories largely based on archaeological finds of figurines that depict a woman holding a snake in each hand speculate about the “Snake Goddesses” of Minoan Crete. Other types of otherworldly female figures are found in myth—for example, the water spirits called miengu who feature in the beliefs of Sawa ethnic groups of Cameroon, beings who can act as intermediaries between humans and the spirit world to cure diseases. As with many of the aforementioned divine female figures, there are cross-cultural associations between the Divine Feminine and the healing powers of water. In the Christian tradition, female saints and mystics are often linked with healing abilities. In some instances, the saint takes on the healing attributes of a pre-Christian Goddess, as in the case of the Irish saint Brigit, who, like her Pagan namesake before her, has healing powers and can conduct miracles to fix physical ailments.



Healers

Indigenous cultures show women as tradition bearers when it comes to healing. From the Native American medicine woman to the curandeira native Latin American healing woman to the ngangkari Aboriginal Australian women healers, there are women fulfilling these roles all around the world in traditional contexts where they strive to heal conditions ranging from the emotional and psychological to the physical. The European context has plentiful examples of traditional female healers, whether they cure ailments with herbs, stones, animal parts, magical formulas or verbal charms, traditional prayers, or ritual actions. Some examples in different traditional cultural milieus are Hungarian women who practice ear-whispering to correct an affliction, Latvian women singing healing songs, carromancy or wax casting (pouring wax into water and interpreting the shapes as having special meanings) in Russia, and other forms of healing divinations. Italian women who used traditional healing methods were called fattuccchiere, meaning “fixers,” while Irish local women with knowledge of herbalism and the fairies were known as mná feasa or “wise women.” Such traditional forms of magical interaction with the otherworld or spirit realm came to be associated with evildoing, consorting with demons, and with the practice of witchcraft, rather than healing, partly due to the influence of Christian understandings of the spirit world. This was particularly the case during the witch trials (a series of witch hunts between the 15th and 18th century) when many traditional healing practices associated with women became recontextualized as black magic and the folk practitioners as witches. With new religious movements such as Paganism and Goddess Spirituality, some women who self-identify as witches act as healers and, for many, this is an integral part of their religious practice. Pagan Witchcraft can involve spellcasting and rituals to raise magical energy that is then sent out to heal a specific individual or group of people. Many contemporary Pagans who identify as Shamans, Druids, or Witches reconnect with traditional healing practices and oftentimes combine these types of practices with ritual forms that are part of the Western esoteric tradition or systems of ceremonial or “high magic,” resulting in new forms of healing practices. Within the New Age movement and its plethora of forms of spirituality, there is an emphasis on holistic health or what has become known as the “mind body spirit” approach. Incorporated in New Age spirituality are healing practices such as angel therapy or Integrated Energy Therapy, Reiki, and other Eastern-derived techniques of channelling energy to heal. Contemporary eclectic spirituality, often described as “alternative spirituality,” combines a diverse range of spiritual healing practices, such as yoga; essential oils and flower remedies; meditation; laughter therapy; healing through sound, dance, and art; and various other practices drawn from different cultural influences and combined in novel ways. Each type of healing practice is believed to be restorative and remedial, and all prominently feature women as practitioners. Jenny Butler See also: Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion; Mesopotamian Religion; Christianity: Mystics; Saints; Indigenous Religions: Medicine Women (Native American); Shamanism in Eurasian Cultures; Paganism: Magic; Paganism; Prehistoric Religion: Crete, Religion and Culture; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality; Syncretism

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Further Reading Achterberg, J. Woman as Healer. Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1991. McClain, Carol Shepherd, ed. Women as Healers: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

K I R TA N Kirtan, or devotional song, is an integral part of traditional Sikh, Jain, and Hindu worship and takes different forms depending on the story or message being conveyed. Sometimes it is performed as continuous repetitions of phrases or divine names and other times as more complex stories. This style of chant, or hymn singing, is typically accompanied by instrumental music and is practiced communally. In the Sikh tradition, women are elevated in status, with founder Guru Nanak (1469–1539) supporting that “it is by woman that the entire social order is maintained” (Fisher 2007, 271). Despite these aspirations for religious gender equality, however, women baptized in the Sikh tradition have recently been excluded as kirtan leaders at Harmandar Sahib (the Golden Temple), the holiest site for Sikh worship in the world. Outside of this sacred site, Sikh women are active kirtan participants, sometimes leading the full community and occasionally meeting for all-female kirtan sessions. Jain interpretations of kirtan take the form of mandal singing, which includes communal, devotional songs accompanied by music and sometimes combined with ritual dance. Being performed in a tradition with lay and mendicant women, Jain song is sometimes practiced by communities that are entirely female, with melodies taken from traditional religious songs and even popular and local folk music. Hindu women also have long helped to maintain kirtan tradition. Arising from a similar ancient Vedic context in India, Hindu kirtan employs similar techniques of repetition and call and response. For Hindu followers, kirtan is part of bhakti yoga, or disciplined devotional practice, with special attention paid to reflecting on the names of the Divine. The adoption of kirtan devotions by white female practitioners has been called into question in recent years, with fears that converts to kirtan practice are appropriating Hindu practices without fully embracing the broader tenets of Hindu tradition. Well-known female Western artists who have produced kirtan for general audiences today include Snatam Kaur (b. 1972), who is a convert to Sikhism, Deva Primal (b. 1970), who sings mantras (repetitions of sacred syllables and phrases) from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and Wah!, who is also known as Wah Devi and claims to have first brought the kirtan style of chant to the West in the 1990s. These female kirtan leaders have made traditional South Asian chant mainstream, taking it outside of the gurdwara, basadi, or ashram and placing it into Western music festivals and yoga classes and raising questions about what constitutes authentic kirtan. Kirtan is also practiced at mixed-faith events, like the 2015 Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City, which was attended by 10,000 people from many faith traditions. It has also become a popular event in mainstream global culture, and kirtan music and voice is now being performed and recorded for enjoyment at home or in group settings (e.g., yoga classes). Emily Bailey



Meditation

See also: Hinduism: Bhakti; Dance; Feminine Divine; Gurus and Saints; Yoginis; Jainism: Ritual; Sikhism: Ritual and Festival, Women’s Roles; Spirituality: Art and Performance; Yoga Further Reading Beck, Guy L. Sonic Liturgy: Ritual and Music in Hindu Tradition. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012. Fisher, Mary Pat. Women in Religion. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. Kaivalya, Alanna. Sacred Sound: Discovering the Myth and Meaning of Mantra and Kirtan. Novato, CA: New World Library, 2014. Kelting, M. Whitney. Singing to the Jinas: Jain Laywomen, Mandal Singing, and the Negotiations of Jain Devotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

M E D I TAT I O N Meditation is a spiritual and secular practice involving concentration of the mind, refinement of the breath, visualization, and other techniques. It is popular among both women and men within contemporary spirituality to increase mental, physical, and emotional health and for spiritual advancement. Meditation practices derive primarily from Asian traditions, especially Hinduism, Daoism, and all Buddhist traditions (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Zen, Tantra). While gender roles often limited women’s spiritual practices within traditional Asian societies, meditation has long been essential for Buddhist and Daoist nuns and Hindu renunciant women. With the spread of Hindu and Buddhist teachings into the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, meditation was taken up by Westerners seeking alternative spiritual paths. Today, it is practiced by millions of women worldwide and is highly accessible, with diverse religious schools and secular organizations offering training and group practice, often for a minimal fee or without cost. The best-known form of meditation, called samatha (calm) meditation by Buddhists, is sitting and concentrating the mind while focusing on the breath. With regular and disciplined practice, the meditator achieves relief from stress, equanimity, and other psychological and physical benefits. Vipassana (insight) meditation is Buddhist meditation with the goal of enlightenment and involves mindfulness and complete awareness of reality as it is experienced in the moment. In Hinduism, meditation is a part of diverse yoga practices that may involve postures, controlled breathing, and chanting mantras like Om, considered the universal sound of ultimate reality. Meditation has the short-term goal of greater health, the long-term goal of dispelling ignorance, and the ultimate goal of realizing one’s true self to achieve spiritual liberation. Other meditation techniques, though less well known than samatha, vary widely. They include repetitive or concentrated sitting, walking, dancing, reciting, devotion, listening, receiving, chanting, and visualization. All are designed to invoke a meditative state, a state of absorption, or experience of union with the Divine. Feminine imagery is used in many traditional and alternative meditation practices. In Daoism, the goal is to achieve reunion with “the Dao”—the ground of all being, which is associated with the feminine—where visualization of female deities

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is common. In the more esoteric practice of Tantrism, which is found within both Buddhism and Hinduism, the goal is to awaken the feminine power of kundalini, a subtle energy that rests coiled at the base of the spine. Following initiation, through concentrated meditation and visualization, the energy can be awakened. With practice, kundalini will rise along the ascending power centers, or chakras, until it eventually reaches the uppermost one, at which point the individual gains ultimate enlightenment. In other Buddhist approaches, the meditator is seen as merging with the deity, or with the Buddhas and Consorts. In Dance of Tara—a Buddhist meditation for women—movements, mantras, and visualizations of Goddess Tara lead to realization of the Goddess within and of the practitioners’ compassion for a suffering world (see “Dance of Tara” in the Buddhism section). In addition to individual health or spiritual development goals, meditation may be used for the greater good. Group meditation may use combined energies of individuals meditating in synchrony to achieve directed goals, such as healing or comfort for those in need. Recipients of meditative healings include not only the homeless, the sick, the dying, and those who have suffered losses but also the earth and other planetary and cosmic entities. In the latter sense, energies may be concentrated to increase loving-kindness in the world or to maintain a positive balance in the cosmos. Women who are drawn to activism and the work of transformative compassion are active in these practices. Among practitioners of Buddhism and Daoism, distinctions are made between laywomen and nuns, with nuns devoting their lives to spiritual achievement. Buddhist nuns, for example, practice meditation as well as fasting, avoidance of money, and other methods of selflessness. In Western societies, meditation is typically but not always a lay practice. Lay seekers may choose training and group practice at a local temple or spiritual center, such as Self-Realization Fellowship, the Transcendental Meditation organization, Insight Meditation Society, or any of the thousands of centers available. Some seekers may become gurus (teachers), masters, or nuns in one of the traditions, depending on the availability of teacher and temple. Many Buddhist nuns and female gurus of various traditions and lineages currently teach meditation as one technique on the path to spiritual development. Linda Johnsen has written about many of Hinduism’s greatest female gurus in Daughters of the Goddess: The Women Saints of India (1994), and female Buddhist teachers abound in Asia and the West today (on the latter, see “Buddhism in the United States”). Meditation shares similarities with contemplative practices found in most world religions. Repetition of divine names is a common form of meditation. In Chris­tianity, contemplative prayer, especially among monastics but also among practitioners of the more mystical Eastern Christian traditions, is believed to bring one into the presence of, or union with, God. Esoteric mystical traditions within Judaism (Kabbalah) and Islam (Sufi) also use techniques with similar unitive results. The Whirling Dervishes of Sufism, for example, experience union with God through ecstatic dance. Kabbalists ascend the 10 sephirot (emanations) along the Tree of Life to the Ein Sof (The Infinite). Meditations based on Asian traditions—including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism—or on a combination of



Pilgrimage, Goddess

traditions and schools, including Western contemplative and esoteric meditative practices, are learned by many women today. In secular contexts, meditation is practiced to attain greater health in general. In spiritual contexts, meditation is used in the quest for transcendence, opening the way to spiritual bliss, enlightenment, or liberation from rebirth. Susan de-Gaia See also: Baha’i: Gender Roles; Buddhism: Buddhism in the United States; Dance; Dance of Tara; Engaged Buddhism; Female Divinities; Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Nuns, Theravada; Sacred Texts on Women; Tara; Tea Ceremony; Therigatha; Zen; Christianity: Founders of Christian Denominations; Monastic Life; Mystics; Widowhood; Daoism: Daoism in China; Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination; Hinduism: Gurus and Saints; Islam: Sufism; Judaism: Kabbalah; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality; Healers; Syncretism; Yoga Further Reading Dasara, Prema, and Jeff Munoz. Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara. Phoenix, AZ: Tara Dhatu, 2012. Dieker, Bernadette, and Jonathan Montaldo, eds. Merton and Hesychasm: The Prayer of the Heart. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2003. Johnsen, Linda. Daughters of the Goddess: The Women Saints of India. Saint Paul, MN: Yes International, 1994. Kaplan, Aryeh. Meditation and Kabbalah. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1992. Sedgwick, Mark J. Sufism: The Essentials. New York: American University in Cairo Press, 2005.

PILGRIMAGE, GODDESS Goddess pilgrimages are a phenomenon of the Goddess movement that arose in the United States, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand as part of second wave feminism in the late 20th century. Goddess feminists take their cue from Mary Daly’s statement that when God is male, the male is God. Having been raised in cultures where it is assumed that God is Lord and King, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in other words, male—Goddess pilgrims are seeking to learn about a time when “God was a woman” and female power was respected and revered. As anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner (2011) have written, pilgrimages share a similar structure. Pilgrims leave home and set out on a journey, entering into “liminal space” that finds them “betwixt and between,” no longer part of the familiar lives they left behind and not yet reincorporated into them. During the journey, pilgrims experience a shared “communitas,” a community that is unstructured or structured only by the common goal of experiencing a rite of passage. After receiving revelation, healing, or transformation in sacred places, pilgrims are reintegrated into their home communities. The destinations for Goddess pilgrimages vary: Crete, Malta, Greece, Turkey, India, Ireland, and France are among the most popular. Feminist scholar of religion Carol P. Christ, who leads the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete, wrote about

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her first pilgrimage in A Serpentine Path (2016). Singer and songwriter Jennifer Berezan, who leads the Women’s Pilgrimage to Malta with historian Joan Marler, recorded her album Returning (2000) at the hypogeum in Malta. Anthropologist Anna Fedele wrote about pilgrimages to Catholic shrines in France and Catalonia in Looking for Mary Magdalene (2012). Some pilgrims are initiated priestesses of Goddess traditions, such as Wicca or Dianic Witchcraft, but most are not. Pilgrims include Christians and Jews, among them nuns, priests, ministers, and rabbis who are looking for female images of divinity. Although Goddess pilgrims are of all ages, the majority are in midlife, at an age when women have time to reflect on the meaning of life and the meanings of their lives. Most Goddess pilgrimages are for women only, but some include men. Though all Goddess pilgrimages include a combination of history and ritual, some of the leaders of Goddess pilgrimages are well versed in the history of the sites they visit, while others rely on nonrational ways of knowing. Some Goddess pilgrimages are explicitly feminist, speaking of the need for women to claim their power after millennia of patriarchal domination. Others employ New Age or Jungian vocabularies that invoke the Divine Feminine as counterpart to the Divine Masculine. Some pilgrims, among them professors and students, have studied Goddess history, while others have not. All are interested in learning from being in the sacred spaces. Many pilgrims report that the experience of community with like-minded individuals is the highlight of the pilgrimage. Most would agree that it is one thing to read about the history of the Goddess and another to connect to the energies of sacred places: meditating on mountaintops or in caves and pouring libations on ancient stones creates visceral knowing. Some say that before they went on pilgrimage, they wanted to believe that Goddess history was true but that after the pilgrimage they know in their bones that another way of living in respect for women and nature really is possible. They say that a strength they never knew has taken root within them. Carol P. Christ See also: Christianity: Mary Magdalene; Paganism: Wicca; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality; Radical Women’s Spirituality Further Reading Christ, Carol P. A Serpentine Path: Mysteries of the Goddess. Cleveland: FAR, 2016. Fedele, Anna. Looking for Mary Magdalene: Alternative Pilgrimage and Ritual Creativity in Catholic Shrines in France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Turner, Victor, and Edith Turner. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

RADICAL WOMEN’S SPIRITUALITY Contemporary women’s spirituality, a nascent force in the early 1970s, had coalesced by the end of the decade into a vibrant collective awakening of radicalized feminist women whose creative response to the sexism and misogyny within traditional



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organized religion was a mass spiritual revolt: they left churches and temples in droves. Sometimes perceived as having no texts (e.g., no Bible or Torah), in fact, early women’s spirituality was built on profound intellectual ideas shared in a variety of ways by feminist writers, thinkers, mystics, and artists of the time. These women thought, spoke, and behaved outside of conventional norms: they were out of the box. Independent research played an important part in the revolution that emerged, beginning with Elizabeth Gould Davis’s pioneering text The First Sex (1971), which introduced the concept of an ancient worldwide religion of the Goddess. Also among the early pioneers, researcher and artist Max Dashú founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970, which houses her voluminous investigative research—the thousands of slide images, anthropological data, and history (“her-story”) she has accumulated and disseminated for four decades. Women working within organized religion were seriously questioning the male dominance taken for granted therein and particularly the seemingly almost universal and unquestioned concept of God as male. Radical feminist theologian Mary Daly first wrote The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and then, in 1971, led a procession out of the Harvard Memorial Church in protest against the ongoing and intractable oppression of women. Finding working within the church to be untenable, she wrote Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973) and her masterpiece, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaphysics of Radical Feminism (1978), a thorough analysis of the “sado-rituals” and atrocities of patriarchy (a worldwide religion in her opinion) toward women: genital mutilation, foot binding, sati, witch burning, and contemporary gynecology. Her later books expressed the profound freedom she found in her own spiritual liberation (falling out of the “patriarchal foreground” and into the “matriarchal background”) and gave voice to a generation of intelligent but alienated “wild” women ripe for radicalization. Ultimately forced out of her 33-year tenure at Boston College for refusing to let men into her classes (she taught them privately), Daly (1996) told The New Yorker, “There will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.” Merlin Stone spent 10 years researching a revised story of civilization and religion, published as When God Was a Woman (1976) and Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood (1979). Charlene Spretnak revisioned Greek mythology with her Lost Goddesses of Early Greece (1978) and organized an anthology entitled The Politics of Women’s Spirituality (1982). Carol Christ wrote Diving Deep and Surfacing (1979) and began to use the feminine-modified word thealogian when describing religious women in her work. Poets were active in developing women’s spirituality: Judy Grahn wrote Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984) and The Work of a Common Woman (1978), whose tag line, “a common woman is as common as a common loaf of bread, and will rise” became a popular affirmation throughout the movement. Susan Griffin’s haunting and poetic manifesto, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1979), confronted the scientific world view and became an anthem for the developing nature-based Goddess Religion. Novelists gave expression to the insights and research of the movement. Marge Piercy published her futuristic Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Alice

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Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Color Purple (1982), which became a Hollywood feature film (1985). Mary Mackey’s first book, Immersion (1972), became the first novel published by a feminist house, Shameless Hussy Press. Mackey, after seriously researching the work of Marija Gimbutas (see below), later wrote The Earthsong Trilogy—The Year the Horses Came, The Horses at the Gate, and The Fires of Spring; in 2016, she wrote a prequel, The Village of Bones. By the 1980s, a whole private industry would emerge to support the ideas and products of radical women’s spirituality. Book publishers, bookstores, distributors, women’s cafés and coffee houses, music labels, festivals, and music production companies created venues for radical women to get their work out to the public. Although most of these entrepreneurial women may not have positioned themselves inside of women’s spirituality, they made it possible to circumvent the homophobic and antifeminist mainstream. The movement went global and multicultural; today it is integrated, intersectional, and pluralistic. Academic theorists and activist feminist women were developing a gamechanging body of secular work during this heady time, kicked off by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1969), Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch (1970), Robin Morgan’s classic anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful (1970), and Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) all provided catalyzing food for thought whose impact was frequently personal transformation and the radical awakening of women who, prior to this, had no language for expressing their grievances. Hungarian-born Zsuzsanna Budapest (a “hereditary witch” by her own definition) founded the first Dianic Wiccan coven, Susan B. Anthony Coven Number One in Venice, California. In 1975, she was arrested and found guilty of “fortune-telling” for reading the Tarot cards. Her lawyers argued for Wicca as a legitimate religion and after numerous appeals, nine years later she was acquitted and California’s fortune-telling laws were thrown out. She published her first book, a manual for contemporary witches, The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows in 1975 and is remembered as a forerunner of the movement. Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel researched and self-published the round Motherpeace Tarot cards (1981), a feminist multicultural revisioning of world history; more than half the images feature women of color. Subsequent books to accompany the deck followed, beginning with Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess through Myth, Art, and Tarot by Noble (1983); in 2017, the new artistic director at Christian Dior, inspired by Noble’s book Shakti Woman (1991), licensed the Motherpeace images to use in a unique line of women’s clothing. Another group of lesbian women in the forests of northern California were synchronously creating a round feminist deck in the late 1970s, the Daughters of the Moon Tarot, published by Ffiona Morgan in 1984. Magic and divination were seamlessly incorporated into women’s spirituality early on, and there was crossover between feminist Wiccan women and those in the Goddess movement, as exemplified by Starhawk, whose 1979 classic, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess, was popular in both movements, as was Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon (1979); in addition to her numerous nonfiction books, Starhawk also wrote visionary novels: The Fifth



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Sacred Thing (1993) and its sequel, City of Refuge (2015). Luisah Teish, by writing the popular book Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (1985), bridged the Euro-American women’s spirituality movement and African American women’s return to their African roots. In England, the Swedish-born artist, writer, and activist Monica Sjöö catalyzed the movement there with her iconic painting God Giving Birth (1968). The painting depicting a woman in the act of giving birth expressed the sacred mystery and magic felt by Sjöö while giving birth to her son; however, she was charged with both obscenity and blasphemy for exhibiting the image. Later, with Barbara Mor, she wrote The Great Cosmic Mother (1986), giving voice to many in women’s spirituality who had become focused on menstruation, resacralizing the lunar cycle and celebrating the seasonal cycles that are central to indigenous people around the planet. An important book to emerge out of this genre was Judy Grahn’s Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1993) and the development of her “metaformic theory.” In France, while living on the land with other lesbians, Musawa founded We’Moon: Gaia Rhythms for Womyn in 1980; the We’Moon calendar remains legendary in women’s spirituality circles. Paula Gunn Allen wrote The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in Native American Traditions (1986). Priestesses in many places authorized themselves to lead seasonal rituals and ceremonies, becoming leaders in the movement: Shekinah Mountainwater in Santa Cruz, California, trained women with her original “Moonwheel” in a “moon hut,” and Donna Henes in New York facilitated public rituals honoring the Goddess holidays on the Wheel of the Year. Brooke Medicine Eagle introduced women to “the power and primacy of the Feminine” from the Native American Moon Lodge tradition. Today there are women’s circles in most U.S. cities and active temples of the Goddess in the United States and countries around the world. Eastern yogic traditions also influenced women’s spirituality. Tsultrim Allione, author of Women of Wisdom (1984), became a Tibetan nun in 1970, although she later gave back her vows, married, and had children. She was recently (2007) recognized by two lamas in Tibet as an emanation of Machig Lapdron, one of the women about whom she had earlier written, and she is now officially Lama Tsultrim Allione. Hallie Iglehart Austen also traveled to Nepal in the 1970s and published WomanSpirit (1983) and The Heart of the Goddess (1990). Buddhist scholar Miranda Shaw became an initiate and investigated female teachers; her book Passionate Enlightenment (1995) catalyzed a new generation of spiritual feminist women. Highly influential for this movement was the Lithuanian-born archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose first book on ancient Goddess civilizations, Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe (1974), caused a stir in the archaeological world that has not died down yet. Already a renowned Bronze Age archaeologist with first an office at Harvard and later a long-term position at UCLA, Gimbutas led her own digs in the 1950s and 1960s. Literate in archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, Indo-European studies, and the Lithuanian folk songs and lore she collected as a girl, she took notice of the more than 100,000 female figurines unearthed from the

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Neolithic (agricultural) period in Europe and identified Goddess temples where prior archaeologists had seen the large houses of “chiefs” or “big men.” Gimbutas revolutionized archaeology, and her contribution to the movement was incomparable; her innovative vision of a peaceful, egalitarian past provided content and documentation for what those before her had pieced together with a lot of intuition. She studiously avoided the word matriarchy, using matristic or gynocentric instead, yet still pointed to a social organization with women at the center holding spiritual (if not material) leadership. From decades of research and archaeological experience, plus her unique interdisciplinary approach, she observed a clear dividing line between the earlier and later prehistoric societies; from that insight, as well as the timely development of carbon-14 dating methods, she developed her Kurgan theory, positing that waves of violent invaders from the Russian steppes had swept in on horseback, overthrowing the civilizations of the Goddess west of the Black Sea. Recent DNA studies have confirmed her assertions. Many originators of women’s spirituality found their inspiration in indigenous peoples around the world, particularly those who still display patterns, values, and social organizational structures of matriliny (descent through the female line) or even matriarchy (beginning with the mother). The problem for independent feminist scholars during the 1970s was that anthropologists, misunderstanding the word matriarchy to mean female dominance, insisted that there were no living matriarchal cultures in the world and that, therefore, one could not say that there ever had been. It was a double bind that caused American feminists to avoid using “the dreaded word,” as African scholar Ifi Amadiume called it in her book Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, and Culture (1997). Heide Goettner-Abendroth of Germany, an independent feminist scholar (and priestess) who had been researching matriarchies since the late 1970s, organized an International Congress on Matriarchal Studies in Luxembourg in 2003. From different parts of the world, Goettner-Abendroth brought women (and a few men) from living, self-described matriarchal cultures. They spoke about the intricate workings of their economies, religions, relationship patterns, social organization, and kinship structures; they told participants at the conference how they thrive within this context. Genevieve Vaughan, an American feminist philanthropist living in Italy, was at the conference and joined with Goettner-Abendroth to host several more international conferences over the next decade. Vaughan has developed a body of work, which she calls the Maternal Gift Economy, describing an alternative to the market economy; this visionary theory represents not only an indigenous approach but also a possible future for the world in which “giving to needs” might replace the problematic exchange mentality of the market economy. Many of the early pioneers of women’s spirituality are still alive and have continued to produce substantive work for several decades. Their essays can be read in Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries (Dexter and Noble 2015). Vicki Noble



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See also: Buddhism: Buddhism in the United States; Female Divinities; Ordination; Hinduism: Matriliny; Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Paganism: Ritual; Prehistoric Religions: Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Spirituality: Art and Performance; Divination; Ecofeminism; Goddess Spirituality; Women of Color Further Reading Christ, Carol. Diving Deep and Surfacing. Boston: Beacon, 1980. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon, 1978. Daly, Mary. “Sin Big.” The New Yorker (February 26 and March 4, 1996): 76–84. Dashú, Max. The Suppressed Histories Archives. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/. Dexter, Miriam, and Vicki Noble. Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries. Amherst, NY: Teneo, 2015. Göttner-Abendroth, Heide, ed. Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present and Future. Toronto: Inanna, 2009. Noble, Vicki. Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983. Piercy, Marge. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Fawcett, 1995. Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1987. Spretnak, Charlene, ed. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.

SEX AND GENDER Spirituality and the Divine Feminine

The earliest archaeological and written records suggest that spiritual practices, though seeking to transcend the world, were very much influenced by social and cultural perceptions of sex and gender. Perceptions of sex and gender have affected spiritual expression with respect to the Divine Feminine, the ways that spirituality has historically intersected with social practices concerning gender, and the diversity of female spiritualty that women expressed as priestesses, saints, and mystics. The scholarship of Marija Gimbutas, who argued that the earliest human cultures were matriarchal and centered on Goddess/fertility religions, has been enormously influential for conceptualizing the Divine Feminine. Although disputed, Gimbutas’s theories articulated important questions about the origins of gender oppression and encouraged subsequent scholars to consider how both men and women in various religious traditions identified with the body and the natural world. For example, precolonial Mexican Nahua culture, though highly patriarchal and socially stratified, worshipped deities that expressed the cosmos as pairs of male and female divinities who represented divine nature as man and wife as well as androgynous and female deities that explained an array of natural and human phenomena. Precolonial African cosmological narratives likewise inscribe both gender interdependence and patriarchal domination within the process of creation.

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In the earliest recorded writings of polytheistic societies, feminized aspects of divine power retained a complicated, yet important, place. Priestly elites articulated and practiced a religious system on behalf of the rest of the society that was centered on deities who represented a combination of natural forces (sky, earth, waters) and human phenomena (sexual attraction, birth, and growth). As societies became more complex and hierarchical, priests increasingly depicted the relationships among their deities within familial and political structures, furnishing the Gods’ legends and rituals with more anthropomorphic qualities. Many primordial Goddesses’ legends were rewritten to assign male consorts to powerful female deities, a pattern that paralleled deepening social and gender hierarchies in many early cultures. Thus the earliest written myths and epics negotiated an ancient understanding about the necessary cooperation of the sexes to create and sustain life with the aspiring authority of more recently created political states. Feminine spirituality was not abandoned but reorganized through images and rituals that used gender to express and promote new perceptions of divinity. This reorganization sometimes created specific spiritual outlets for women but more often empowered men to appropriate an abstracted feminine aspect of the Divine in ways that supported masculine authority. In Judaism, reform-era prophets characterized Israel as Yahweh’s bride (or harlot, when she was unfaithful); the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiasticus, and Solomon likewise expressed a feminine aspect of God. Scholars have suggested that these feminized personifications of Israel and Wisdom compensated for the lost traditions of actual female deities in earlier expressions of Hebrew spirituality while maintaining an exclusively masculine control over state religion. Christianity also appropriated Lady Wisdom, describing the Virgin Mary as the “seat of wisdom” through her role as the Mother of God. Christian scholars also engaged the rich bridal imagery in the Old Testament’s Song of Songs to characterize the feminized soul as the bride of the heavenly bridegroom, Christ. Over the course of the Christian Middle Ages, the term Bride of Christ became a distinctive liturgical element that defined female celibates as embodying the “mystical marriage” between God and the soul (Elliott 2012). Female exemplars were also important spiritual focal points for both women and men. The Virgin Mary channeled and expressed perceptions of sex and gender throughout the Christian era. Mary’s correction of Eve’s original sin provided hope for human salvation, and stories of her direct intercession for human sins in medieval texts and art was an essential component of the medieval Christian clergy’s pastoral care of laypeople. Islam, which hewed to an even stricter monotheism than Judaism or Christianity, admitted the importance of female leadership and example. Hadith, stories about the life of the Prophet and his family, featured stories of women close to the Prophet Muhammad, such as his wives Kadjia and Aisha and his daughter Fatima, and illustrated the principles of devout Islam and offered leadership in the Muslim community. Mahayana Buddhist traditions also created specifically female personas for aspects of Buddhist spirituality. Goddess Tara in Tibetan Buddhism was associated with both wisdom and compassion, and many bodhisattvas, or “enlightened” teachers, revered as guides to individuals’



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enlightenment either originated as female figures (such as Tara) or gained a feminine identity from initially male origins (such as the perception of Goddess of Compassion Guan Yin as an expression of the male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara). Religious Roles for Women: Institutions and Daily Life

Dedicated religious roles for women, such as priestess, saint, nun, and mystic, provided some women with a special outlet for spiritual expression. Early Christian saints and female exemplary figures in Islamic hadith were recognized in their own time for their extraordinary spirituality and provided later generations with pious tra­ ditions and examples for women to admire and imitate. Monasticism in Christianity and Buddhism offered women an alternative path to the traditional roles of wife and mother. Though sometimes convents functioned as a place to put “unwanted” daughters or widows, or facilitated abuse, monasteries also offered possibilities for women seeking an outlet for a genuine spiritual vocation. Medieval holy women’s perceptions of the Divine were often uniquely expressed in terms of Christ’s spiritual body, including a special relationship to the suffering body of Christ and the Eucharistic host. Ultimately, these feminine aspects of God also appealed to some male saints and mystics as well. Both nuns and women living outside of convents sometimes reported intense experiences of the Divine through dreams, visions, or personal encounters. In the early Christian church, women’s ecclesiastical roles had complemented and sometimes paralleled men’s, but these practices were sharply curtailed through efforts of the medieval papacy to extend its authority through the cultivation of an exclusively masculine, celibate clergy. The contemporary Catholic opposition to female priests stems from this view of the cleric as a celibate vessel for God’s sacraments, deeming women unclean and unworthy of any proximity to the altar, especially to the mystical properties of the Eucharist. While this negative perception of women in Christian theology did not extinguish women’s religious devotion—on the contrary, it may have encouraged a trend in women’s mysticism that focused intensely on the Eucharist and Christ’s passion—it separated women from positions of official authority in the church and heightened perceptions of difference and inequality between the sexes in the Christian West. Outside of official religious institutions, gender and spirituality also often intersected in daily life, shaping women’s experiences as daughters, mothers, wives, and widows. Some polytheistic religions of the ancient Mediterranean focused on the particularly maternal duties of women, such as the Roman worship of Juno and the Magna Mater (Great Mother). In the religious traditions of Confucianism in China and the religious requirements of caste in ancient India, the ritual purity and obedience of women within the family became defining features of family virtue. Christian culture valued celibacy above the licit but lesser state of marriage, and the ideal of “chastity”—abstaining from any sex that was not procreative—established norms for female virtue and was exemplified by the Virgin Mary and a handful of female saints whose experiences provided examples for “ordinary” Christian women. In contrast, some scholars have argued that this Christian dualism of body and spirit is absent in the gendered spirituality of Asian religions, such as

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Tantric Buddhism, which found room for the body and human sexuality within its religious teachings. Modern Connections

Whereas “religion” in premodern societies was inseparable from sociocultural practices, modern Western culture (through developments that include the Protestant Reformation and the secular nation-state) produced a novel interpretation of religious practice and belief as separate from the state, situating it rather within the private sphere. Various Christian theologies in the 19th and 20th centuries also shifted their focus from an otherworldly emphasis on heavenly redemption to a “this-worldly transformation of unjust relationships” that included a reassessment of the spiritual equality of men and women (Ruether 1998, 274). In the West, therefore, spirituality both within and without organized religion has taken a more personal turn, permitting some denominations to work actively for gender equality (including the ordination of women and a cultivation of women’s spirituality as part of their pastoral mission), while others retain a strong gender hierarchy in their spiritual orientation. The perception of spirituality as personal rather than institutional has given rise to the concept of being “spiritual but not religious,” a position that rejects conventional religious practices (especially, but not exclusively, Christian traditions) as rigid and dogmatic and instead allows individuals to embrace a more personal spiritual path. In Western culture, this shift has sometimes tended toward embracing non-Western traditions (Buddhism, Sufism, tai chi, and yoga) and practices associated with the esoteric or occult, which are seen as equally accessible to men and women. This perception of spirituality as an alternative to organized religion in some cases seeks to transcend the gender norms often associated with organized religion, and in others, such as some forms of Paganism that reclaim Goddess worship as a contemporary practice, reclaims an ancient matrifocal perspective as a remedy to modern negative stereotyping and gender discrimination. Much of the contemporary discussion of “spirituality” depends entirely on defining it in opposition to institutional Christianity and excludes a broader discussion of how spiritual practices in non-Christian world cultures have changed and developed in response to modernization and globalization. The treatment of the term thus remains overwhelmingly Eurocentric despite the fact that many people who consider themselves “spiritual but not religious” define their personal relationship to the sacred by engaging with elements of non-Western religions. The idea that one is “spiritual but not religious” likewise appears to reject the hierarchies inscribed in traditional Christianity but often ignores the patriarchal elements that are historically embedded in the alternative traditions appropriated from other world cultures. Both official religious practice and alternative ones are deeply entwined with gendered imagery and metaphors that demonstrate women’s participation in spirituality. Even when male authorities dominated a particular religious tradition, female spirituality often appropriated and reinterpreted elements of doctrine; likewise, men sometimes adopted a “feminized” stance in relation to the Divine as



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part of their own religious and liturgical identity. Feminized aspects of spirituality were routinely woven into even what we might now consider repressive religious ideologies and often served both to mediate men’s relationship with the Divine and to explain and express the cosmological role of the feminine—both positive and negative—to the wider society. Spiritual beliefs and practices across world religions often reinforced social norms concerning female subordination but at times empowered women to find forms of expression that undermined or contradicted social norms. Katherine Clark Walter See also: Ancient Religions: Egyptian Religion; Gaia; Greek and Roman Women, Daily Lives of; Inanna; Mesopotamian Religion; Buddhism: Female Divinities; Guan Yin; Nuns, Theraveda; Sacred Texts on Women; Christianity: Hildegard of Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Mother of God; Mystics; Saints; Sex and Gender; Confucianism: Cult of Female Chastity; Filial Piety; Daoism: Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination; Hinduism: Bhakti; Sacred Texts on Women; Indigenous Religions: Medicine Women (Native American); Islam: Fatima; Prophet’s Wives; Qur’an and Hadith; Saints, Sufi; Jainism: Female Deities; Monastics and Nuns; Judaism: Goddesses; Lilith; Sex and Gender; Prehistoric Religions: Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the Religions of Old Europe; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality Further Reading Armstrong, Karen, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014. Elliott, Dyan. The Bride of Christ Goes to Hell: Metaphor and Embodiment in the Lives of Pious Women 200–1500. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Reddy, William M. The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan: 900–1200 CE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Goddesses and the Divine Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998.

SHEELA NA GIGS Sheela na gigs, female figures carved into stone structures, display their immense vulvas on medieval Christian churches. The figure embodies the opposites of death and life: a naked hag pulls open her swollen labia. The era of this startling stone carving spans over five centuries, from the 12th to early 17th century CE. They are set not only on churches but later on castles, tower houses, walls, bridges, holy wells, tombs, capitals, and standing stones. A database compiled in 2007 found that 121 Sheelas still exist in Ireland, 47 in England, 6 in Scotland, and 4 in Wales (Kenny 2007, 13). Efforts continue to find and identify these figures in Europe. For centuries, scholars have puzzled over her purpose. Some art historians hold that Sheelas are incarnations of the devil used to warn against the evils of female flesh. With the rise of feminist scholarship deconstructing entrenched patriarchal

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One of Ireland’s many extant Sheela na gigs, this Sheela was discovered in 1990 at Rahara Church, County Roscommon. Like prehistoric images of vulvas on cave walls, during the 12th to 17th centuries Sheela na gigs served to ward off evil by displaying women’s genitals and being placed prominently near windows and doors, and on building walls. (County Roscommon Historical Society)

concepts, a new analysis of the past views the sexuality of the Sheelas in a more positive light. Her origins can be traced through the art and myth of European history. From Celtic, classical, and Neolithic times, all the way back to Paleolithic cave art, the image of the vulva endures as a symbol of creativity, as part of the legacy of an ancient Great Goddess. The numinous power of the Sheela is rooted in her sexual display. Through a prominent placement by doors and windows, Sheela na gigs became guardians over entrances, watching over the boundary between inside and out. Just as a vulva is a site of entrances and exits, the Sheela herself can be considered a liminal entity who represents a gateway to the Divine or to other states of being. Several Sheela na gigs known as Hags of the Castle were placed high on building walls. The apotropaic or protective power of the displayed vulva was believed to disarm any harmful intent or evil eye from a passing enemy. The presence of the Sheela figures shows a persistent Gaelic belief in the Great Mother. Their potency is a continuum of the energies held by earlier Celtic Goddesses. Sheelas protect the ground that was once protected by the Goddess of Sovereignty in her hag-like appearance. The prominent genitals of the Sheelas represent the apotropaic powers that the local Goddesses were once thought to possess. Over the centuries, many folk customs became associated with the Sheelas. Country people employed the figures to help with fertility, to heal, and to bring good luck. Such traditions are not just local but reflect a universal belief in the sacred energy of the vulva.



Sheela na gigs

In the classical world of Greece and Rome, two strong figures of display can be found: Baubo (or Iambe) and the Gorgon Medusa. How they look and how they act hold a mirror to the energies of the Sheela na gig. Some scholars have interpreted Medusa and Baubo as a classical pairing of female sexual power. In the 20th century, archaeological breakthroughs unearthed the roots of European religion, revealing a multivalent Goddess who ruled over all cycles of life. The Neolithic Frog Goddess, whose squatting body with a marked human vulva resembles the Sheela na gig physically as well as in her functions, is a wielder of destruction and restorer of life. The iconography of the Sheela na gig also links back to the images of vulvas created in Upper Paleolithic caves beginning nearly 40,000 years ago. Renowned Paleolithic scholar André Leroi-Gourhan (1967, 185), in his analysis of thousands of paintings and sculptures from numerous caves, comments on the centrality of female images in the cave. The 1994 discovery of the Chauvet cave in France revealed the oldest cave paintings known to science. In its deepest chamber, a large vulva is painted in black charcoal on an outcrop of rock. In a striking continuity of the powers of display, she watches over a corridor opening just behind her. Four other drawings of vulvas exist inside the Chauvet cave, and each one indicates the entrance to the adjacent chamber. This apotropaic quality, turning away evil or harm, has been associated with the vulva from the beginning of human symbol making. Images of female sexual display manifest as a reoccurring motif across the planet, found in the visual arts and in mythical narratives of Goddesses. Many academics agree that these images are universal patterns or archetypes that rise independently in the minds of humans from widespread cultures. In our current age, with a conscious return of the Goddess, the rebirth of the Sheela na gig as a subject for contemporary artists is part of a new zeitgeist of reverence for the female body. She manifests in the imaginations of visual artists, poets, and musicians and in articles and books by scholars. Sheelas are said to disrupt the repressive narratives of patriarchy when displaying in a bold manner the sanctity of the vulva, which reaches back to the origins of culture. Starr Goode See also: Ancient Religions: Gorgon Medusa; Prehistoric Religions: Neolithic Female Figures; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Goddess Spirituality Further Reading Andersen, Jørgen. The Witch on the Wall: Medieval Erotic Sculpture in the British Isles. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1977. Dashú, Max. “Warding Off Danger: Protective Power of the Vulva.” The Suppressed Histories Archive. 2009. http://www.suppressedhistories.net/. Green, Miranda. Celtic Goddesses: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers. London: British Museum Press, 1995. Kenny, Niall. “The Irish Sheela-Na-Gig—Once Scorned but Now Revived and Celebrated.” Proceedings of the Association of Young Irish Archaeologists Annual Conference. Edited by Brian Dolan, Amy McQuillan, Emmett O’Keeffe, and Kim Rice. Hosted by University College Dublin, 2007, 11–30. Leroi-Gourhan, André. Treasures of Prehistoric Art. New York: Harry A. Abrams, 1967.

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SPIRITUALISM Spiritualism is a movement based on the belief in the possibility of contacting the dead, often through séances and other rituals. It was founded in the 19th century by two sisters from Hydesville in upstate New York: Margaret Fox and Kate Fox. Margaret and Kate claimed to contact a deceased spirit at the family’s home. The spirit communicated by rapping, and the sisters claimed that it was the spirit of a man who had been murdered in the house before the Foxes had moved in. Their married sister, Leah Underhill, became the biggest promoter of their abilities and claimed similar abilities to contact the dead herself. The so-called burned-over district in upstate New York was a center of religious creativity at this time, as other movements that originated there around the same time included Mormonism and the apocalyptic Christian movement of the Millerites. Spiritualism developed in a religious milieu of Quakers, who tended to support women’s emancipation, and Swedenborgians. Spiritualism later developed into an organized religion with numerous Spiritualist churches, some drawing from Christianity as well, although not all practitioners of Spiritualism viewed themselves as members of a church. Spiritualists tended to view the state of the dead as a happy one, in opposition to the emphasis on the fiery torments of hell often displayed by mainstream Christianity in the 19th century. Spirits were pictured as continuing to develop and evolve during the afterlife, as opposed to an unchanging existence in heaven. In its early decades, Spiritualism benefited from the desire of the bereaved mothers, sisters, and widows of the men killed in the American Civil War to contact their deceased sons, brothers, and husbands and be reassured as to their future state. Women as Spiritualist Mediums

The intermediary figure between the living and the dead in Spiritualism is called the medium. The ritual whereby the medium contacted the spirits of the dead is called the séance. In addition to communications from the dead, some mediums claimed that spirits under their mediumship had the power to produce physical manifes­ tations, such as knockings, table tippings, or grasping attendees at the séance. The Fox sisters set the pattern for most mediums being women. The American medium Maria B. Hayden introduced Spiritualism to Britain in 1852, where the movement was very successful. The female medium fit in well with the Victorian idea of women being more “spiritual,” less bound to the material world, than men. The passivity that Victorian elites associated with the “feminine” woman made her an ideal recipient of influences from the spirit world. (Such was the association of Spiritualism and femininity that male Spiritualists were sometimes viewed as suspiciously feminine or effeminate.) Spiritualism enabled women to bypass male religious hierarchies through direct contact with the spirits. (This was among the reasons that Spiritualism was fiercely opposed by Christian churches, although many Spiritualists identified as Christians.) Spiritualist women also practiced as healers at a time when women were barred from the medical profession. Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, practiced mediumship as a way of gaining occult knowledge, but her beliefs were very different from those of most



Spiritualism

Spiritualists. Although women dominated the practical side of mediumship, the writing of Spiritualist books and institutional leadership of the movement were dominated by men. Among the leading American female mediums of the time was Cora L. V. Scott, who became famous for the lectures she delivered in trance state. Scott was one of the few mediums to move from mediumship to a position of institutional leadership in the Spiritualist movement, becoming pastor of a Spiritualist church in Chicago and founder and vice president of the National Spiritualist Association, now the National Association of Spiritualist Churches, the leading body in American Spiritualism. The best-known medium in later Victorian Britain was Florence Cook, who worked with a female spirit known as Katie King. Another famous woman medium, who operated in Continental Europe, England, and the United States, was the Italian Eusapia Palladino. Leonora Piper, a Boston medium, impressed the American philosopher William James, who was keenly interested in Spiritualism and believed Piper was an “honest medium” who avoided the fraudulent techniques of mediums like Palladino. The Spiritualist Movement and Its Enemies

Spiritualism became a phenomenon, with millions of followers and numerous Spiritualist groups and organizations. Spiritualism in the 19th century was frequently associated with the abolition of slavery, social reform, and women’s suffrage and other efforts to improve the condition of women in society. American women’s rights leader Victoria Woodhull was a Spiritualist, among supporters of women’s emancipation, both male and female. Spiritualism met with intense hostility and skepticism. Some of this hostility was based on religion, but some was based on the alleged falsity of manifestations from a scientific perspective. By contrast with female-dominated Spiritualist practice, the anti-Spiritualist movement was heavily, if not entirely, male. The leadership of the British Society for Psychical Research, the leading body investigating Spiritualism in the late 19th century, was composed of leading male politicians and scientists. The conflict between predominantly female mediums and male investigators was a gendered one, and women mediums charged with fraudulence were denounced in misogynistic language as “hysterical.” Women mediums were also charged with using their sexuality to manipulate male clients. Margaret Fox, who suffered from severe alcoholism later in life, eventually confessed to faking the rappings that lay at the origins of Spiritualism by cracking her toes, although this had little effect on the movement. There was a revival of Spiritualism after World War I for the same reason it had been popular in the 1860s—the desire of the bereaved, particularly women, to contact their departed loved ones. Leading female mediums of this phase of Spiritualist history include the American Mina Crandon, who practiced in elite circles in Boston. Spiritualism as a practice and Spiritualist groups and churches influenced later developments such as channeling and continue to the present day. William E. Burns

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Further Reading Galvan, Jill Nicole. The Sympathetic Medium: Feminine Channeling, the Occult, and Communication Technologies, 1859–1919. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Knopf, 1998. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

SPIRITUALITY AND GENDER IN SOCIAL CONTEXT Scholars often associate spirituality with different views of the supernatural from the perspective of various religions. Other scholars associate spirituality with a search for meaning in our lives here on earth. Underlying both these views of spirituality are patterns that can be discerned using the analytical lens of the partnership-domination social scale, which shows how the cultural construction of spirituality is affected by, and in turn affects, norms for gender roles and relations. Early Spirituality and Religion

Anima is the Latin word for “soul” or “spirit.” It is the root of animism, which is believed to have been the first form of religion (Durkheim 1995). In this ancient belief system, all of nature is imbued with spirits. Confirming this view, much of European Paleolithic or Old Stone Age art, going back over 30,000 years, depicts plants and animals. This art also contains human forms, especially female ones. A dramatic illustration is the 25,000-year-old carving archaeologists called the Venus of Laussel. Discovered at the entrance of a French cave sanctuary, she is nude, wide-hipped, large-bellied, possibly pregnant, and covered with red ochre. In her right hand, she holds a crescent moon notched with 13 markings: the number of lunar cycles in a year. Her other hand, as if to instruct us about the correspondence between the cycles of the moon and women’s menstrual cycles, points to her vagina. The red ochre burials of our Paleolithic ancestors seem to associate woman’s life-giving menstrual blood with rebirth. This focus in prehistoric art on an immanent spirituality highlighting the power to give and nurture life continued into the Neolithic, when we find the first farming communities. Such images of life giving are not only absent from later religious art; in the Judeo-Christian Bible, a woman who gives birth is “unclean” and has to be “purified” by priests (Leviticus 12). Already during the end of the Neolithic, we find the virtual disappearance of the once ubiquitous Goddess figurines. Now, instead of images of giving and nurturing life, we find images of taking life, including art idealizing weapons or blades symbolic of this lethal power. Viewed through the analytical lens of the partnership-domination social scale, these changes in artistic themes are not random developments. They reflect a massive cultural shift from a partnership direction to a domination direction (Eisler 1988; Dexter and Jones-Bley 1997).



Spirituality and Gender in Social Context

Spirituality and Religion through a New Lens

The cultural categories of the partnership system and the domination system transcend familiar categories, such as ancient versus modern, Eastern versus Western, religious versus secular, rightist versus leftist, and industrial versus preor postindustrial. The domination system supports relations based on rigid rankings of domination ultimately backed up by fear and force: man over woman, man over man, religion over religion, race over race. Its core configuration consists of an authoritarian, top-down structure in both the family and the state or tribe and all institutions in between; a rigid ranking of the male half of humanity over the female half, and with this, the devaluation of traits and activities considered “feminine” in this system, such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence; and a high degree of fear, abuse, and force, which are needed to maintain rigid rankings of domination. The partnership system supports relations based on mutual respect, mutual accountability, and mutual benefit (linking rather than ranking). There are hierarchies of actualization that empower, rather than hierarchies of domination where power is defined as power over. Its core elements are egalitarian relations in both the family and state or tribe and all institutions in between; equal partnership between the female and male halves of humanity, and with this, high value given to traits and activities such as caring, caregiving, and nonviolence that are in domination systems considered unfit for “real men”; and a low degree of abuse and violence, as they are not needed to maintain rigid rankings of domination. No society orients completely to either system; it is always a matter of degree. However, art, archaeology, and myth point to a prehistoric shift from a partnership to a domination direction, ushering in destruction through warfare, social inequality in dwellings and graves, and rigid male dominance. For example, in the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, we learn that Marduk, a new deity, kills the supposedly evil Goddess Tiamat and dismembers her body to create land and sea. According to this story, not only the origin of the world but also our human origins stem from violence: after killing the Mother Goddess to create the world, Marduk kills her spouse, Kingu, and from his blood creates human beings to be the servants of the deities. That this myth, demonizing an earlier female deity and sacralizing violence, reflects brutal realities is verified by what we today know of the constant bloodshed in ancient Mesopotamia, as the lugul or “big man” took over control (Kramer and Maier 1989). As for the status of woman, we can read about her cruel subordination and virtual enslavement in the famous Mesopotamian law code of Hammurabi. By contrast, in earlier cultures, such as Çatalhöyük, women were not dominated by men. As archaeologist Ian Hodder (2004) noted, analyses of isotopes in bones give no indication of differences in status and power between women and men, and neither burials nor houses suggest gender inequality. As he also notes, these are signs of neither a patriarchy nor a matriarchy but of a society in which gender is not equated with superiority or inferiority. Moreover, dwellings and graves indicate a generally egalitarian society. While there is some evidence of violence, Çatalhöyük

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also seems to have been generally peaceful, with no signs of destruction by warfare for over 1,000 years (Mellaart 1967). There is also evidence from the Minoan civilization that lasted on the Mediterranean island of Crete until about 3,500 years ago of a more partnership-oriented cultural direction. Contradicting the claim that more centralized, complex, and technologically and artistically advanced cultures inevitably have massive inequalities, male dominance, and control through violence, there are no hovels (as in domination-oriented cultures of the time) and no signs of warfare between citystates, and there are signs that women wielded great influence and that a female deity and female priestesses held sway (Platon 1966). In other domination-oriented Bronze Age civilizations, there are remnants of the earlier focus on woman as the giver and nurturer of life and on sex as the source of pleasure and life. For instance, among Sumerian cuneiform tablets (the first deciphered Western writings) are the Hymns of Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven and Earth and Goddess of Love and Procreation—Sumer’s most beloved and revered deity (Kramer 1969). Every year, during prolonged New Year celebrations, Inanna’s sacred marriage to the reigning monarch of Sumer was enacted by a high priestess representing the Goddess. The Inanna Hymns were written down about 2000 BCE. However, they go back to much earlier oral traditions (Kramer 1969). Key elements of these traditions probably stem from the Neolithic and Paleolithic. This theme of male rather than female deities creating life is frequent in domination-oriented cultures, as in the Greek Zeus birthing Athena from his head and the biblical account of God creating the world and life all by himself. Another frequent artistic theme in domination-oriented cultures is the association of spirituality with fear, punishment, and pain in an afterlife. This should not be interpreted as saying that in more partnership-oriented cultures people were not concerned with (and afraid of) death. But to recognize the cyclic nature of life and death and to see the Goddess as giving life and taking it back so it may be reborn is not the same as instilling terror of the afterlife, as in medieval artworks (such as Hieronymus Bosch’s) depicting gruesome tortures awaiting sinners after death, often focused on torment to women’s breasts and vaginas. Still, traces of more partnership-oriented ideas remain in many spiritual traditions, not only in mystical writing where Sophia or the Shekinah are associated with divine wisdom but also in mainstream religious stories. An example from the Judeo-Christian Bible is the Song of Solomon or Song of Songs, where the beautiful Shulamite sings of the pleasures of holding her lover between her breasts. Other traces of the sacred marriage are more direct; for example, even in modern times in Japan, the emperor had to have intercourse (presumably symbolically) with a priestess representing the Japanese Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Hindu tradition has Tantric yoga, which describes sex as a path to spirituality. The Point-Counterpoint in Contemporary Religion and Spirituality

Domination-oriented systems, where the only perceived alternatives are domi­nating or being dominated, have been characterized by violence, inequality, and



Spirituality and Gender in Social Context

the ranking of men and “masculinity” over women and “femininity.” Still, there were periods of partnership resurgence. For example, the early followers of Jesus formed communities where equality (including gender partnership) and nonviolence were practiced. However, this was followed by a Christian church modeled on the domination system that hunted and persecuted “heretics” (including Jews and other Christian sects) and held that woman is so inferior to man that in its holy family only the Father and Son, but not the Mother of God, are divine. The massive dislocations of the shift from agrarian to industrial technologies that accelerated in the West in the 18th century opened the way for the Enlightenment. This led to progressive movements challenging traditions of domination— from challenges to the “divinely ordained” right of kings to rule their “subjects,” of men to rule the women and children in the “castles” of their homes, and of “superior” races or religions to rule (or kill) “inferior” ones, to challenges to man’s once hallowed “conquest of nature.” However, these movements were fiercely resisted, often on religious or moral grounds, and progress toward partnership was periodically pushed back by regressions to brutal domination. Today, some people make a distinction between organized religion and spirituality. Often, they associate the latter with a quest for justice, caring, and compassion. In some cases, this “new spirituality” focuses on reclaiming the Feminine Divine, as in the women’s spirituality movement, which recognizes how gender roles and relations are constructed in concepts of deity as well as life here on earth. Women’s spirituality is often inspired by findings of early Goddess worship and ancient traditions in which women were priestesses. It is not only transcendent but also embodied, and it connects gender partnership with a more equitable and peaceful world. Others cling to the repressive and violent elements in organized religions and seek to impose a theocracy based on domination-oriented scriptural passages they believe are the word of God or Allah. They, too, refer to spirituality, but, as in Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, it is associated with fear of an afterlife of eternal punishment and pain for those who fail to obey. This point counterpoint in how spirituality is viewed mirrors the modern movement toward partnership, and the resistance to it, as well as periodic regressions to an authoritarian, rigidly male-dominated, punitive social organization held together by fear and force. Still, challenges to traditions of domination and violence continue, often animated by a partnership spirituality focused on caring rather than coercion, geared to putting love into action. Riane Eisler See also: Ancient Religions: Mesopotamian Religion; Christianity: Fund­amentalism; Mother of God; Sex and Gender; Sophia; Indigenous Religions: Matriarchies; Judaism: Hebrew Bible; Goddesses; Prehistoric Religions: Crete, Religion and Culture; Neolithic Female Figures; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Shinto: Amaterasu Omikami; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Goddess Spirituality; Sex and Gender

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Further Reading Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Karlene Jones-Bley, eds. The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected Articles from 1952 to 1993 by Marija Gimbutas. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 18, 1997. Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press, 1995. Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988. Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. Hodder, Ian. “Women and Men at Catalhoyuk.” Scientific American 290, no. 1 (2004): 77–83. Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sacred Marriage Rite. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. Kramer, Samuel Noah, and John Maier. Myths of Enki, the Crafty God. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Mellaart, James. Catalhoyuk. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. Platon, Nicolas. Crete. Geneva: Nagel, 1966.

SYNCRETISM A term that came into more popular use with the rise of methodologically varied studies of religion in the 19th century, the word syncretism was first used to describe the mixing of cultures resulting from Hellenization, during and following the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century. However, the practice of religious syncretism—at its basis, the incorporation of two or more religious beliefs and actions into a unified practice—is an ancient one. There are instances of religious syncretism in Greco-Roman traditions, Judaism, Eastern traditions, early Christianity and Islam, and indigenous practices around the world that predate today’s practice of those traditions by millennia. Whether intentional or organic, syncretistic approaches to religion continue to shape the religious experiences of many through the present day. Contemporary women’s spirituality is particularly punctuated and informed by more than one religious world view. Instances of modern syncretistic female piety are the result of many conditions, including exponentially increased exposure to other religious cultures through modern technologies, leading to heightened instances of globalized religious understanding; a history of suppressed religious agency in traditions socially dominated by men, resulting in unique and personalized female expressions of faith; and centuries of immigration that have increased cross-cultural contact and exposure to traditions not previously encountered. While it has been argued that no modern religious tradition is insulated from the influence of other traditions, some movements tend toward more apparent syncretism than others (Leopold 2005). When considering the role of women in world religions, this is especially true for female practitioners adhering to traditional African religious practices while incorporating tenets of Western Christianity into their spirituality (as in Santeria and Vodou); Judeo-Christian Westerners adopting already syncretistic practices from East Asian traditions (chiefly Buddhism); and women from a spectrum of faith traditions who have brought metaphysical and New Age observances into their religious lives.



Syncretism

Views about women in traditions like Vodou include notions of divine female power, with spirits and Goddesses of fertility and creation, like Oya, who is believed to control forces of nature like tornadoes, fire, and lightning. With these forces as guides, earthly women find their own authority, in which they are able to act as shamans/mediums, healers, and mambo (priestesses), sometimes integrating Catholic saints, prayers, and rituals into their spiritual lives. Although Catholic tradition is historically male centered in its hierarchy, syncretistic approaches to the faith through its integration into some forms of Vodou and Santeria have afforded women greater participation in the rituals. Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Champagne Lovinski (b. 1936), better known as Mama Lola, is a Haitian-born Vodou mambo living in the United States today. Her syncretistic spirituality encompasses three faith traditions, as she claims seamless adherence to her Vodou roots, Cuban Santeria, and Roman Catholicism. In the Western context, female practitioners can likewise be found adding Buddhist meditation into their religious experiences while maintaining primary Judeo-Christian identities. The possibility for this syncretism may derive from the customary conditions into which Buddhist practices first established foundations in East Asia in places like China, Japan, and Korea. When Buddhism—a missionary faith—was transmitted to these countries in the centuries after the death of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama (ca. sixth century BCE), it was adapted to fit alongside long-standing folk practices like Shinto (Japan) and shamanism (Korea). The result is syncretistic religion that allows practitioners to embody more than one faith tradition. For women, who are culturally held to be responsible for the spiritual well-being of their families, this wider scope of religious expression offers the promise of greater spiritual reward. Through missionary efforts, West-to-East religious transmission has also occurred in places like Korea, where Christian traditions have combined with folk traditions and Buddhism to create a syncretistic religious experience. In the West, New Age and metaphysical traditions have become popular in recent decades, with practitioners embracing diverse practices, from Eastern religious meditation and chant to alternative medicine, earth care, and ecology to the sometimes contested adoption of indigenous ceremonies. For women especially, these alternative religious methods provide a platform for new religious expression. In a recent study of Roman Catholic women religious, it was found that some communities of Roman Catholic sisters have begun to frame ecological practices as being within the parameters of their spiritual life and work (Taylor 2009). In these communities, this has evolved into a form of syncretistic practice, in which customary Catholic communal life is blended with New Age practices (like presenting the Virgin Mary as Mother Goddess) to construct a new female religious identity. Whereas religious pluralism simply recognizes the variety of possibilities for spirituality present in a certain place and time, religious syncretism takes elements from different traditions and creates something new with them. The resulting practice is often one that is more egalitarian in its approach to gender, providing women with new avenues for religious expression. Emily Bailey

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See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Candomblé; Priestesses and Oracular Women; Buddhism: Buddhism in the United Staes; Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism; Christianity: Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women; Spirituality: Ecofeminism; Goddess Spirituality; Meditation; Women of Color Further Reading Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Leopold, Anita Maria, and Jeppe Sinding Jensen, eds. Syncretism in Religion: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2005. Stewart, Charles, and Rosalind Shaw. Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. New York: Routledge, 2005. Taylor, Sarah McFarland. Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

WOMEN OF COLOR Africa, original home of humanity, is the place of our first spiritual awakenings. People of color, an American term for indigenous inhabitants of Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and North, Central, and South America—and their multiethnic descendants—have been involved with women’s Spirituality since its inception in the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 40,000–50,000 BCE). The intentional use of the color ochre red, found in South African engraved red ochre (ca. 75,000–100,000 BCE), and depictions of the pubic v, symbol of life, birth, fecundity, woman, and the Goddess, suggest that women’s Spirituality is humanity’s oldest religion and that African immigrants carried these religious symbols into Europe between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. While much African rock art remains uncatalogued, current African Neolithic sites (ca. 8000–3500 BCE) depict female deities, Goddesses, sacred women, and ritual leaders. Although evidence of humanity’s matricentric beginnings abound, subsequent societies were significantly affected by patriarchy, colonialism, and institutionalized oppression. Many indigenous cultures/communities of color retained parts of their ancient woman-honoring traditions, including veneration of female deities, ancestors, and elemental powers; female priest(esses), seers, and healers; the honoring of women’s bodies, sexualities, and reproductive powers; matriarchal/ matrilineal social organization and respect for female elders; women’s leadership in social, spiritual, and political spheres; recognition of women’s intelligence, business acumen, creativity, physical strength, and valor; and social norms promoting balance, peace, and harmony. In precolonial Africa, women often held gender- or sex-specific roles of spiritual, economic, and political authority. Matricentric societies existed in one form or another in Ghana, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Malawi, Tanzania, Namibia, the Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, and ancient Egypt. African traditional religions celebrated female deities, elemental powers, lineage founders, priestesses, and queens. Birth and reproduction were important spiritual acts—and the term mother conveyed



Women of Color

social, moral, and spiritual authority. In Yoruba and Ibo societies today, women still hold roles of spiritual and economic authority. Osun Seegesi: The Elegant Deity of Wealth, Power and Femininity by Deidre Badejo (1996) explores the contemporary worship of Osun, Yoruba Goddess of Fresh Waters, Fertility, and Abundance, who is also a powerful warrior, healer, and businesswoman. Teresa Washington’s Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Aje in Africana Literature (2005) examines the awesome powers of Yoruba Goddess(es) and sacred Mother(s) who bless, kill, heal, protect, and arrange the destinies of their children—in precolonial sacred orature, contemporary Yoruba politics, and throughout the literature of the diaspora. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions by Paula Gunn Allen (1992) suggests that many precolonial Native Americans lived in societies that honored women and nature. Humans were part of a sacred web that included animals, spirit(s), the land, and the cosmos. Gender roles were based on principles of complementarity, embodying sociocultural values of balance and harmony. Traditional Keres, Hopi, and Iroquoian peoples saw the Creatrix as female; they honored the sacred Mothers, Grandmothers, and holy women who provided life, corn, tobacco, and weaving. White Buffalo Calf Woman brought the pipe ceremony and other sacred rituals to the Lakota Sioux. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (Mann 2000) explores the spiritual, political, social, and economic authority of precontact Iroquoian women who controlled the distribution of agricultural produce, declared war and negotiated peace, and enjoyed sovereignty over their own bodies. Even today, Iroquoian women have a say in choosing their chiefs. While Christianity, colonization, and U.S. laws have affected these beliefs, many American Indians still observe them today. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World by Nawal El Saadawi (1980) and Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society by Fatima Mernissi (1975) document matricentric and/or matrilineal roles held by pre-Islamic Arab women, who wrote their own marriage contracts, participated in war, and enjoyed sexual self-determination. Matrilineal descent may have characterized early Toltec and Aztec societies, and women held respected roles as priestesses and healers. Before establishment of the militaristic Aztec state, gender balance was reflected in Ometecuhtli, and Omecihuatl, Lord and Lady of Duality. Later deities included Coatlicue, Serpent Skirt, who represented fertility, earth, and death; Tonanzin, the Sacred Mother; and Chalchiuhtlicue, Goddess of Sweet Waters. When their worship was forbidden, their veneration was syncretized with worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The vast area of Asia and the Pacific Islands includes many religious and spiritual traditions celebrating goddesses, demigoddesses, nature spirits, primal female life-force energies, and female saints, teachers, shamans, priestesses, and grandmothers. Neolithic China’s Hongshan culture (ca. 4500–3000 BCE) includes sites of Goddess veneration and possible matriarchal organization. The Mago Way: Re-discovering Mago, the Great Goddess from East Asia by Helen Hye-Sook Hwang (2015) presents evidence of a prepatriarchal pan-Asian Goddess. Ancient China and Japan honored female shamans, while katalonan and babaylan were

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the Philippine Islands’ original healers. Although misogynistic elements in some Buddhist and Hindu traditions suppressed Goddess veneration, other traditions supported female-centered practices and liberation for all genders. Today, most Korean shamans are women, as is the Okinawan priesthood. Indigenous deities are still worshipped in Hawai‘i, and women serve as kahunas, or priests. Pele is the living Goddess of the Volcano; her veneration is linked with Hawai‘ian sovereignty struggles. The 1970s and 1980s produced groundbreaking work by women-of-color artists exploring women’s Spirituality. Gloria Anzaldua’s revolutionary text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) explored the clashing world views of Chicanas/ Xicanistas who claimed multiple bloodlines, diverse sexual orientations, shifting geographies, discordant languages, and conflicting religions. Anzaldua reviewed precolonial Mexican Goddess traditions, indigenous women’s herstories, and contemporary Chicana struggles. She affirmed the strength, power, and vulnerability of nepantleras, those who live within complex shifting identities and clashes of consciousness. Openly lesbian, she challenged homophobia, racism, classism, and sexism, affirming a mestiza consciousness that honored Spanish, indigenous, and African lineages. She inspired new generations of Chicanas, Xicanistas, and Latinas to embrace spiritual and political mestizaje, reclaiming indigenous deities, spiritualities, and dance traditions. Laura Perez’s Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Alterities (2007) documents the work of Chicanas who used murals, paintings, altars, and installations to transform chaste images of the Virgin and demonized images of mestiza womanhood into empowering figures of Chicana/Indigena grandmothers, workers, Goddesses, and superwomen. Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange affirmed women’s spirituality in works critiquing sexual abuse and violence experienced by black women. Walker’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Color Purple (1982) linked sexuality with Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The spirituality, and spirituality with Color Purple (1982), and In Search of Our Mother’s nature. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). Alice Walker created the term womanism to reflect the feminism, activism, Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice and spirituality of women of color. (Jemal Countess/ Walker (1983) defined womanism, which affirmed women’s right to WireImage)



Women of Color

love beings of all sexes, identified spirituality with women-of​-color feminism(s), and praised black women’s activism and leadership. Shange’s choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975) linked black women’s healing and empowerment to female African deities and to their ability to claim their inner Goddess and passionately love her. Frustrated by the lack of female Buddhist iconography, Japanese American Zen practitioner and feminist artist Mayumi Oda created large, seminude images of female Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and Goddesses. In Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women (1984), Japanese American psychiatrist Dr. Jean Bolen used Greek Goddesses to reframe Jungian archetypes, allowing women to view their psyches through a feminist/feminine lens. Visionary artist AfraShe Asungi created large seminude images of Black Goddesses and sheroes, rooted in matriarchal Kamaat (ancient Egypt). African dance trailblazers of the 1940s Pearl Primus, Katherine Dunham, Asadata Dafora, and Nana Dinizulu—and their dance students—introduced black women to West African dance traditions that included female deities, priestesses, and ecstatic worship, including trance, music, and dance. By the late 1960s, many African American women began exiting the black church, affiliating with orishabased traditions of Lucumi and Santeria, or Vodou. Luisah Teish’s Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals (1985) documents the syncretism of African ancestral veneration and Goddess worship with indigenous earth-based spiritualities and Euro-American mysticism characterizing some of these traditions. Others rejected syncretism, seeking more “authentically” African traditions found in Khemetic (Egyptian) practices or Harlem’s Yoruba Temple, which eliminated Christian/Eurocentric images from Yoruba-based practices. Under patriarchy, drumming—especially spiritual drumming—was limited to men. Radical trailblazers in African-diaspora drumming traditions challenged these restrictions in the 1960s and 1970s. Resisting violence and threats of violence, trailblazers like Edwina Lee Tyler, Carolyn Brandy, Nurudafina Abena, and Nydia Mata successfully persisted in their efforts to drum. Some played ceremonially for African deities (orisha). Taiko drumming, a Japanese spiritual practice, opened to women in the 1980s. Indigenous women formed drumming and singing circles, and in the late 1980s, a Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance began. Black lesbians challenged sexism and homophobia in African-derived traditions, and black women reclaimed the highest Yoruba female divination title, that of iyanifas, lost in passage to the Americas. For many communities of color, women’s Spirituality was linked to liberation struggles. In the 1970s, Native American women struggled to recover and preserve indigenous cultures, languages, land, and spiritualities. They led militant protests to regain treaty-granted fishing rights and occupied Alcatraz Island and Wounded Knee. They protested the forced sterilization of Native women and toxic pollution of the lands, the waters, the animals, and the people. These struggles were rooted in spiritual traditions connecting indigenous people to specific lands, animals, and plants—and to women’s spiritually designated roles and responsibilities.

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By the late 1990s, womanists, feminists, mujeristas, feministas, Xicanistas, nepantleras, tribalists, and other women-of-color scholars had elaborated black, Latino(a), Asian, and Native American liberation theologies. They documented the importance of spirituality in the lives of women of color and established post/decolonial studies as an academic field. They applied the concept of intersectionality to academic research, social struggles, and personal experience. In Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (1992), Leila Ahmed reviews discussions of women and gender from pre-Islamic, Arabic, Iraqi, and contemporary Egyptian sources. African American Amina Wadud’s Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1999) provides a woman-centered Muslim reading of the Qur’an that supports the rights of women. Wadud has led Muslim mixed-gender prayer services and supports the rights of LGBTQIQ Muslims. Hong Kong–born postcolonial feminist theologian Kwok Pui-Lan’s Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (2005) examines the impact of colonialism, empire, and Christianity on Asian women, documenting the resistance and resilience found in Asian women. Black choral singer/Ecofeminist Rachel Bagby’s Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women’s Voices (1999) critiqued the black church’s failure to celebrate female divinity; her CD Full (1993) praised Yoruba Goddess Yemaya. Some women’s spirituality communities accept LGBTQIQ practitioners. Others (e.g., Dianic Witchcraft traditions) only include women. San Francisco’s Reclaiming Community hosts rituals invoking the Goddess, the God, and the Third Gender Deity. Dianic rituals usually invoke the Goddess/Goddesses. Deities (orisha) in Yoruba-derived traditions may be male, female, neither, or both, depending on the tradition/region. Some indigenous cultures recognize gender diversity—and twospirit individuals, a contemporary Native American term reflecting various indigenous practices regarding sex/gender diversity—held culturally specific spiritual and political roles, which was also true in some African cultures. The Women’s Spirituality Program at California Institute of Integral Studies and New College’s Women’s Spirituality program (subsequently moved to Sophia University and closed in 2014) were two graduate-level academic programs that began in the 1990s. These programs explored womanist, feminist, indigenous, Abrahamic, and Goddess spiritualities; postcolonial religious studies; and artistic representations of the sacred. Writings highlighting students, faculty, and alumna of these programs and other women’s spirituality scholars is anthologized in She Is Everywhere! An Anthology of Writing on Womanist Feminist Spirituality, edited by Birnbaum (Vol. 1, 2005); Williams, Villanueva, and Birnbaum (Vol. 2, 2008); and Saracino and Moser (Vol. 3, 2012). Arisika Razak See also: African Religions: African Religions-in-Diaspora; Buddhism: Bodhisattvas; Christianity: African American Women; Indigenous Religions: Ceremonies (Native American); Matriarchies; Shamans in Korea; Islam: Feminism; Prehistoric Religion: Neolithic Female Figures; Upper Paleolithic Female Figures; Spirituality: Drumming; Goddess Spirituality; Radical Women’s Spirituality; Syncretism



Yoga

Further Reading Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987. Donaldson, Laura E., and Kwok Pui-lan, eds. Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge, 2002. Mann, Barbara Alice. Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Narayan, Anjana, and Bandana Purkayastha. Living Our Religions: Hindu and Muslim South Asian American Women Narrate Their Experiences. Sterling, VA: Kumarian, 2009. Phillips, Layli, ed. The Womanist Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.

YOGA Women have long been an integral part of the ancient and spiritual practice of yoga. Originating from the Sanskrit root yui, yoga means to yoke together the breath and the body. Rooted in the two sacred influences of the Vedic and the Tantric, the wellspring of what has become known as yoga derived from the ancient religious teachings of Hinduism and Brahmanism within India. Today, yoga is prevalent well beyond its origins. Used in spiritual and religious centers for guided meditation and spiritual awakening, it is also a popular and ever-expanding contemporary practice recommended by doctors for wellness and recovery. Typically, contemporary yoga practices combine physical postures with breathing exercises and guided relaxation techniques. However, yoga is also the spiritual practice of chanting, praying, ecstatic dance, trance, and the study of scripture. Most yoga classes in the Western world morph Eastern mysticism and Western methods and philosophies, with little similarity to the ancient Tantric postures and dances practiced primarily by women, or yoginis. The merging of female ecstasy and spirituality seems to be inherent to the ancient female yoga experience. Prehistoric shamans were often women (yoginis) who danced ecstatically to bring rain. Tantric yoga, which grew out of an oral shamanistic practice, was created and practiced by women as early as the seventh millennium BCE (Shaw 1995). Tantric practices began with women siddhis or yoginis who celebrated the powers of the menstrual cycle, sexuality, and birth. Sculptures, rock art, murals, and frescoes all demonstrate how women were involved in these communal practices that celebrated the female form and “blood rites.” In Tantric yoga, the “menstruating Shakti” was a female guru who could choose to initiate men (Marglin 1985). The “self-possession” of women in the Tantric practice, which can be found today among various indigenous and tribal women and has been adopted by some Western practitioners and teachers (i.e., Shiva Rae), originates from the ancient yoginis and woman as shaman or priestess. Tantra, which has the most profound influence on the growth of yoga as we know it today, is defined as “what extends knowledge” (Samuel 2008). The Tantric practice is an oral, physical, and spiritual tradition that began as a communal practice among women thousands of years ago and can be traced back to some of the earliest writings in India, such as the compilations of the Atharva Veda. Many

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Western scholars have argued that yoga has Vedic origins and was created and practiced exclusively by men; however, a growing body of scholarship and study demonstrates that a sacred female-centered Tantric influence supplied the esoteric and physical basis for yoga (Noble 1991). Tantric influences and practices were assimilated into Vedic and Brahmanic teachings and writings starting around 3000 BCE in the Atharva Veda (Kinsley 1986). References to breath work and what became known as yoga are linked to Tantra of Shiva, but it wasn’t until the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita (1000–500 BCE) that a blending of the Vedic thinking and Tantric practice came together. In the Hindu religion, every woman is said to be a divine manifestation of the Shakti, a feminine principle. Liberation of Shakti can occur through proper realization of the energy within, and one such path is the practice of Kundalini Yoga. According to this school of yoga, Shakti resides at the base of the spine, and it can move through the energy channels (chakras) or subtle body. When the energy channels are open, the yogini can achieve higher levels of spiritual realization. This process is the union of the Shakti and the Shiva, a Hindu deity representing destruction and regeneration. A core aspect of the ancient Hindu philosophy adopted into yoga is nondualism or the idea of transcendental Self, pure awareness of the Divine within. This belief system disperses the ideas of dualities, such as male/female, good/bad, mind/body. Any sensation can bring one closer to the Divine and one’s own spirituality. Contemporary yoga practices blend the physical and spiritual (which can be translated into a kind of mindfulness or awareness of the Divine within) and often brings together people from varied religious backgrounds. Many female practitioners articulate that the experience of spiritual awakening, a greater awareness of the Divine within, and bliss, namely the spiritual aspects of yoga, are the main intention of their practice. Geeta Iyengar, a contemporary Indian yogini and daughter of one of the foremost yoga teachers of the 20th century, B. K. Iyengar (1918–2014) writes that yoga is for her a means toward internal freedom from the stresses and struggles of life as a woman. A large body of research on yoga focuses on its psychophysiological and therapeutic benefits, with a small percentage of research studying the spiritual effects for female practitioners. Recent research shows that women who practice yoga for any length of time feel an increase in transcendence, compassion, and religious conviction (Büssing et al. 2012). Furthermore, mindfulness and mood are often elevated. Dozens of officially recognized schools of yoga disciplines are practiced widely across the world for health, fitness, and spiritual awakening (with women making up over 70 percent of over 17 million practitioners in the United States alone). All these disciplines originate with the same core principles that have varied and developed in various forms since the fifth century CE: inner peace, expansion of consciousness and compassion, and embodied liberation. Some schools of yoga include Karma Yoga, Hatha Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Janna Yoga. Iyengar and Bikram are just two of many new schools of yoga created within the last century.



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The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is the central text of the Yoga school of Hindu philosophy and makes reference to Ashtanga Yoga. Hatha Yoga is described in varying Hindu texts and is the most common practice in contemporary mainstream yoga teaching. Rachel York-Bridgers See also: Hinduism: Shakti; Tantra; Yoginis; Spirituality: Meditation; Syncretism Further Reading Büssing A., A. Hedtstück, S. B. Khalsa, T. Ostermann, and P. Heusser. “Development of Specific Aspects of Spirituality during a 6-Month Intensive Yoga Practice.” Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine. 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/165410. Iyengar, Geeta. Yoga: A Gem for Women. Kootenay, BC: Timeless Books, 2002. Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Marglin, Frederique. Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Noble, Vicki. Shakti Woman: Feeling Our Fire, Healing Our World: The New Female Shamanism. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991. Samuel, Geoffrey. Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Shaw, Miranda. Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Bernal, Martin. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola, ed. She Is Everywhere!: An Anthology of Writings in Womanist​ -Feminist Spirituality. Vol. 1. New York: iUniverse, 2005. Bitel, Lisa M., and Felice Lifshitz, eds. Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe: New Perspectives. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Blackstone, Kathryn R. Women in the Footsteps of the Buddha: Struggle for Liberation in the Therigatha. Richmond, UK: Curzon, 1998. Blum, Harrison, ed. Dancing with Dharma: Essays on Movement and Dance in Western Buddhism. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016. Braude, Ann. Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Brooton, Bernadette J. Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996. Broyde, Michael J., and Michael Ausubel, eds. Marriage, Sex, and Family in Judaism. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Bruhns, Karen Olsen, and Karen E. Stothert. Women in Ancient America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Castillo, Ana. Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997. Chandel, Bhuvan, ed. Women in Ancient and Medieval India. Vol 9. Part 2. History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization. Edited by D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2009. Chen, Fan Pen Li. Chinese Shadow Theatre: History, Popular Religion, and Women Warriors. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. Christ, Carol P. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. New York: Routledge, 1998. Chung, Hyun Kyung. The Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990. Clark, Elizabeth A. Women in the Early Church. Wilmington, NC: M. Glazier, 1983. Clarke, Peter B. A Bibliography of Japanese New Religious Movements with Annotations and an Introduction to Japanese New Religions at Home and Abroad. Richmond, UK: Japan Library, 1999. Collett, Alice. Lives of Early Buddhist Nuns: Biographies as History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Collier-Thomas, Bettye. Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons, 1850–1979. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998. Connelly, Joan Breton. Portrait of a Priestess. Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Cuffel, Alexandra, and Brian M. Britt. Religion, Gender, and Culture in the Pre-modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Dalmia, Vasudha. Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Dame, Enid, Rivlin Lilly, and Henry Wenkart, eds. Which Lilith? Feminist Writers Re-create the World’s First Woman. Oxford: Jason Aronson, 1998. Davies, Carole Boyce. Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture. 3 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008. De Groot, Joanna, and Sue Morgan. Sex, Gender, and the Sacred: Reconfiguring Religion in Gender History. Gender and History Special Issue Book Series. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2014.



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DeNapoli, Antoinette E. Real Sadhus Sing to God: Gender, Asceticism, and Vernacular Religion in Rajasthan. Religion, Culture, and History Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Vicki Noble, eds. Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries. Amherst, NY: Teneo, 2015. Dexter, Miriam Robbins, and Victor H. Mair. Sacred Display: Divine and Magical Female Figures of Eurasia. Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2010. Dexter, Miriam Robbins. “The Assimilation of Pre-Indo-European Goddesses into Indo-European Society.” Journal of Indo-European Studies 8, no. 1/2 (1980): 19–29. Dillon, Matthew. Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002. Donaldson, Laura E., and Kwok Pui-lan, eds. Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge, 2002. Douglass-Chin, Richard J. Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth​-​ Century African American Evangelists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Ehrman, Bart, and Zlatko Pleše. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988. Eisler, Riane. Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995. Elior, Rachel, ed. Men and Women: Gender, Judaism, and Democracy. Jerusalem: Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2004. Engelmajer, Pascale. Women in Pali Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Paths in Mutual Dependence. New York: Routledge, 2015. Faulkner, Mary. Women’s Spirituality: Power and Grace. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2011. Faure, Bernard. The Read Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Findly, Ellison Banks. Women’s Buddhism, Buddhism’s Women: Tradition, Revision, Renewal. Boston: Wisdom, 2000. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 2000. Frankel, Ellen. The Five Books of Miriam. New York: Putnam, 1996. Geary, Patrick. Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006. Gimbutas, Marija. The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe. San Francisco: Harper, 1991. Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Edited and supplemented by Miriam Robbins Dexter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Goettner-Abendroth, Heide. Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures across the Globe. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. Goode, Starr. Sheela na gig: The Dark Goddess of Sacred Power. n.p.: Inner Traditions, 2016. Greenspahn, Frederick E., ed. Women and Judaism: New Insights and Scholarship. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Griffith, R. Marie, and Barbara Dianne Savage. Lived Religions: Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

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Grossman, Susan, and Rivka Haut, eds. Daughters of the King: Women and the Synagogue: A Survey of History, Halakhah, and Contemporary Realities. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992. Haas, Michaela. Dakini Power: Twelve Extraordinary Women Shaping the Transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in the West. n.p.: Snow Lion, 2013. Haines-Eitzen, Kim. The Gendered Palimpsest: Women, Writing, and Representation in Early Christianity. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ilan, Tal. Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996. Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. En La Lucha/In the Struggle: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology: 10th Anniversary Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004. Jaffary, Nora E. Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Jaini, Padmanabh S. Gender and Salvation: Jaina Debates on the Spiritual Liberation of Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Jakobsh, Doris R. “The Construction of Women in Sikh History and Religion—Attitudes and Assumptions: An Overview of Secondary Sources.” In Relocating Gender in Sikh History, edited by Doris R. Jakobsh, ch. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. James, S., and S. Dillon, eds. A Companion to Women in the Ancient World. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Jones, Ian, Ian Wootton, Janet Thorpe, Janet Wootton, and Kirsty Thorpe. Women and Ordination in the Christian Churches: International Perspectives. New York: T and T Clark, 2008. Kassam, Zayn. Women and Islam. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Keinänen, Marja-Liisa. Perspectives on Women’s Everyday Religion. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2010. Keller, Rosemary Skinner, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Marie Cantlon. Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Khandelwal, Meena. Women in Ochre Robes: Gendering Hindu Renunciation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Kien, Jenny. Reinstating the Divine Woman in Judaism. Parkland, FL: Universal, 2000. Kinsley, David. Hindu Goddesses: Vision of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Traditions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Kirk-Duggan, Torjesen, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Karen Jo Torjesen. Women and Christianity. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2010. Klassen, Pamela, ed. Women and Religion. 4 vols. London: Routledge, 2009. Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan Piggott. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Kraemer, Ross Shepard. Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lincoln, Bruce. Emerging from the Chrysalis: Studies in Rituals of Women’s Initiation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Livingstone, Glenys. PaGaian Cosmology: Reinventing Earth-Based Goddess Religion. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005. Lou, Mary. Medieval Women on Sin and Salvation: Hadewijch of Antwerp, Beatrice of Nazareth, Margaret Ebner, and Julian of Norwich. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. MacHaffie, Barbara J. Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006.



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Malone, Mary T. Women and Christianity. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. Marcos, Sylvia. Women and Indigenous Religions. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010. Marler, Joan. “Fierce Goddesses, Great Mothers, and Yoginis: The Archaeomythology of Devotion.” ReVision 25, no. 1 (2002): 2. Marshall, Sherrin, ed. Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. McLaughlin, Eleanor, and Rosemary Ruether, eds. Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. McNamara, Jo Ann Kay. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Medine, Carolyn M. Jones, Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe, and Hans D. Seibel. Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Murcott, Susan. First Buddhist Women: Poems and Stories of Awakening. Berkeley, CA: Parallax, 2006. Murray, Jacqueline. “Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages.” In Handbook for Medieval Sexuality, edited by Vern Bullough and James A. Brundage, 191–222. New York: Garland, 1996. Nadell, Pamela. Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889–1995. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Nelson, Sarah Milledge. Shamanism and the Origin of States: Spirit, Power and Gender in East Asia. New York: Routledge, 2008. Nelson, Sarah Milledge. Shamans, Queens, and Figurines: The Development of Gender Archaeology. New York: Routledge, 2016 Novick, Rabbi Leah. On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism’s Divine Feminine. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2008. Okuda, Akiko, and Haruko Okano, eds. Women and Religion in Japan. Translated by Alison Watts. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998. Olajubu, Oyeronke. Women in the Yoruba Religious Sphere. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. Fierce Feminine Divinities of Eurasia and Latin America: Baba Yaga, Kali, Pombagira, and Santa Muerte. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Olupona, Jacob K., and Terry Rey, eds. Orisa Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Parca, M., and A. Tzanetou. Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007. Paul, Diana Y., and Frances Wilson. Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Maha-ya-na Tradition. Berkeley: Asian Humanities, 1979. Pechilis, Karen. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990. Pope-Levison, Priscilla, and John R. Levison. Sex, Gender, and Christianity. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Pope-Levison, Priscilla. Building the Old Time Religion: Women Evangelists in the Progressive Era. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

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Powers, Marla N. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Prell, Riv-Ellen. Women Remaking Judaism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007. Rabinovitch, Shelley T. S. The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2011. Rittner, Carol, and John K. Roth, eds. Rape: Weapon of War and Genocide. Saint Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2012. Rosenlee, Li-Siang Lisa. Confucianism and Women: A Philosophical Interpretation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Rouse, Carolyn Moxley. Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies. Berkeley: University of California, 2004. Rubin, Miri. Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon, 1983. Salomonsen, Jone. Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sawyer, Deborah F. Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries. London: Taylor and Francis, 2014. Schmitt, Miriam, and Linda Kulzer, eds. Medieval Women Monastics: Wisdom’s Wellsprings. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Schultz, C. Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Schumacher, Mark. “Kannon Notebook.” A to Z Photo Dictionary of Japanese Buddhist Statuary: Gods, Goddesses, Shinto Kami, Creatures and Demons. n.p.: Onmark Productions, 2016. http://www.onmarkproductions.com/html/kannon.shtml. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad, 1983 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Congress of Wo/men: Religion, Gender, and Kyriarchal Power. Cambridge, MA: Feminist Studies in Religion Books, 2016. Sharma, Arvind, ed. Today’s Woman in World Religions. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Sharma, Arvind, and Katherine K. Young, eds. Her Voice, Her Faith. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003. Sharma, S. K. Women and Islam. New Delhi: Vishavabharti, 2011. Shaw, Miranda, Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Sjöö, Monica, and Barbara Mor. The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987. Sours, Michael W. “The Maid of Heaven, the Image of Sophia, and the Logos: Personification of the Spirit of God in Scripture and Sacred Literature.” Journal of Bahá’í Studies 4, no. 1 (Mar.–June 1991). Spretnak, Charlene. The Politics of Women’s Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power within the Feminist Movement. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1982. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979.



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Stefaniw, Blosson. “Becoming Men, Staying Women: Gender Ambivalence in Christian Apocryphal Texts and Contexts.” Feminist Theology 18 (2010): 341–55. Stjerna, Kirsi. Women and the Reformation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009. Stol, Marten. Women in the Ancient Near East. Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. Taitz, Emily, Sondra Henry, and Cheryl Tallan. The JPS Guide to Jewish Women: 600 B.C.E. 1900 C.E. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. Umansky, Ellen M., and Ashton, Dianne, eds. Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1992. Wadud, Amina. Qur’an and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Wadud, Amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Warren, Karen. Ecological Feminist Philosophies. A Hypatia Book. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Weaver, Jace. Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. Edited by Jace Weaver. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998. Wegner, Judith Romney Wegner. Chattel or Person?: The Status of Women in the Mishnah. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wetzel, Sylvia. The Heart of the Lotus; A Buddhist Perspective on Women’s Inner and Outer Liberation. Translated by Jane Anhold. Berlin: BoD, 2015. Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993. York, Michael. Pagan Ethics: Paganism as a World Religion. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Springer International Publishing, 2016.

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Editor

Susan de-Gaia, PhD, is a lecturer in philosophy and religion at Central Michigan University. She earned a doctorate in religion and social ethics from the University of Southern California (USC) School of Religion, a graduate certificate in the study of women and men in society from USC, and a BA in women’s studies from University of California, Santa Barbara. Susan has published on women, religion, and popular culture, and contributes articles to the present work on women in Christianity, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism, and Spirituality. She has taught courses in World Religions, Religion and Society, Theories and Methods in Religious Studies, Death and Dying, and Religion and Literature, among others. Her other areas of interest are environmental ethics, women and religion/social ethics in America, and film studies. Contributors

Lady Jane Acquah is a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include Muslim leadership in Ghana and gender in the Muslim world. Penina Adelman, MA, MSW, is a writer and social worker. She is coauthor of The JGirl’s Guide for Bat Mitzvah Girls (Jewish Lights, 2005) and other books on Jewish women’s spirituality and biblical women. Presently, she is a scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. Komal Agarwal, PhD, teaches English literature at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, University of Delhi. She received her doctorate from the Center for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research areas include gender studies, classical Indian literature and aesthetics, the Mahabharata and its retellings, and folk and popular cultures in India. Tamara Agha-Jaffar has a PhD in English literature. She served as a professor of English, as a dean, and as the vice president for academic affairs before retiring in 2013. She has published four books on women and mythology. Her latest novel is Unsung Odysseys (Amazon Kindle 2017). Amanda Wrenn Allen, PhD, currently serves as an assistant professor of history at Brewton-Parker College in Mount Vernon, Georgia. In 2014, she earned her PhD

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in British history from Louisiana State University. She also holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Vanderbilt University and a BA from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. Laura Amazzone, MA, is the author of Goddess Durga and Sacred Female Power (Hamilton 2012). She has published numerous articles within the fields of Hinduism, Tantra, and women’s spirituality. Laura teaches in the Yoga Philosophy program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is also a columnist for the online Sutra Journal. Roy C. Amore, PhD, is a professor of political science at the University of Windsor in Windsor, Canada. He teaches and publishes in the area of religion and politics. His most recent books include coediting A Concise Introduction to World Religions, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press 2015) and authoring Religion and Politics in the World’s Hot Spots (Sloan 2016). Beata Anton is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her main interests include the native cultures of the Americas, with special focus on the Maya culture. She has published on ancestor veneration and the sacred book of the Quiché Maya, Popol Vuh. She is a graduate of Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. Kenneth Atkinson is a professor of history at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. His degrees are from the University of Chicago (MDiv) and Temple University (MA, PhD). He has written I Cried to the Lord (Brill 2003) and A History of the Hasmonean State (Bloomsbury T and T Clark 2016). Nicol Nixon Augusté, PhD, is a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her academic interests include women and theology, rhetoric and composition, and Native American studies. She has published in journals and has authored a book, Rome’s Female Saints: A Poetic Pilgrimage to the Eternal City (WestBowPress 2017). Emily Bailey, PhD, is an assistant professor of Christian traditions and religions in the Americas at Towson University. Her current research is focused on the contributions of 19th-century religious communities to American morality and dietary culture through food practices focused on sanctification. Amy L. Balogh, PhD, is a lecturer in religious and Judaic studies at the University of Denver and visiting lecturer in Judaism at Colorado College. A specialist in Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions, Amy is author of Moses among the Idols: Mediators of the Divine in the Ancient Near East (Fortress/Lexington, 2018). Ruth Barrett is an ordained Dianic high priestess and elder, ritualist, and author of Women’s Rites, Women’s Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation (3rd ed., Tidal Time Publishing, 2018). She is also an award-winning recording artist of original Goddess



About the Editor and Contributors

songs and contributor to the pioneering musical works in the Goddess Spirituality movement. She is a cofounder of Temple of Diana. Rebecca C. Bartel, PhD, is an assistant professor of religious studies at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on Christianity and political economy throughout the Americas. Bartel’s work is deeply ethnographic and has recently appeared in the Journal for the American Academy of Religion and the Journal for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. Brigitte H. Bechtold, PhD, is a professor of sociology at Central Michigan University. Her recent publications focus on such topics as the commons and infanticide. She directs the Center for Human and Environmental Rights at Central Michigan University and is the editor of the Michigan Sociological Review. Ruth Margolies Beitler, PhD, is a professor of comparative politics at the United States Military Academy, West Point. She is the author of several books, including, with Angelica Martinez, Women’s Roles in the Middle East and North Africa (Greenwood 2010). Susan Berrin is the editor of Sh’ma Now, a pluralistic monthly journal of contemporary Jewish ideas, and has edited two landmark Jewish anthologies: A Heart of Wisdom (Jewish Lights 1999) and Celebrating the New Moon (Jason Aronson 1977). She is a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of Hadassah International Research Institute for Jewish Women at Brandeis University. Monolina Bhattacharyya, PhD, is a Fulbright Fellow at University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She has been a junior fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies as well as the Indian Council of Historical Research, and she has taught at McMaster University in Canada. Her interests include the art and popular culture of South Asia. Karin J. Bohleke, PhD, is the director of the Fashion Archives and Museum at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Her research into women’s clothing of the 19th century has resulted in publications on dress in early photography, African American dress, American adaptations and translations of French fashion magazines, lady travelers in Egypt, and pre-Tutankhamun Egyptomania fashions. Chance Bonar is currently a PhD candidate in Religion (New Testament and Early Christianity) at Harvard University. His research interests include the Nag Hammadi corpus, heresiological rhetoric, and the construction of ethnic and gendered identity in the ancient world. Alexandra Méabh Brandon is a PhD candidate in American studies at the College of William and Mary and assistant director of the Boston Theological Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on Islam and gender in Euro-America and Islam and the American presidency.

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Susan Roth Breitzer holds a PhD in history from the University of Iowa, and is an independent scholar. She has also been serving her third term on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition of Independent Scholars. William E. Burns is a historian who lives in the Washington, D.C., area. His many books include An Age of Wonders: Prodigies, Politics and Providence in England, 1657–1727 (Manchester 2010) and The Scientific Revolution in Global Perspective (Oxford 2015). He is currently editing a reference book on the history of astrology. Jenny Butler, PhD, is a lecturer in the Study of Religions Department at University College Cork, Ireland, where she teaches on Western esotericism and new religious movements. She has published widely on Irish contemporary Paganism. She holds a PhD in folklore and ethnology and is a specialist in folk religion. Josianne Leah Campbell holds an MA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and is an instructor of English at York Technical College. She has enjoyed a long career as a professional educator, and her research and teaching expertise lies in the field of folklore and children’s literature. John Cappucci, PhD, is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Canada, where he has taught an array of courses. In addition, he teaches an online world religions course for Algonquin College in Ottawa, Canada. He has published several peer-reviewed articles, encyclopedia entries, and scholarly book reviews. Charles Carroll is a PhD candidate at Brown University. He researches topics related to the intersections of gender, sexuality, and religion in medieval Europe. His current project looks at understandings of masculinities and femininities in student culture at the University of Paris in the 12th and 13th centuries. Paola Cavaliere is an assistant professor of Japanese studies at Osaka University, School of Human Sciences. She specializes in religion, gender, and society in contemporary Japan with a focus on women’s volunteer activities and faith-based civil society movements. She is the author of Promising Practices: Women Volunteers in Japanese Religious Civil Society (Brill 2015). Carol P. Christ holds a PhD from Yale and is a founding voice in the study of women and religion and author of A Serpentine Path (FAR 2016), She Who Changes (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Rebirth of the Goddess (Routledge 1998), Laughter of Aphrodite (Harper & Row 1987), Diving Deep and Surfacing (Beacon 1995), and, with Judith Plaskow, Goddess and God in the World (Fortress 2016) and the path-breaking anthologies Womanspirit Rising (HarperOne 1992) and Weaving the Visions (HarperOne 1989). She leads Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete (www.goddessariadne.org). Patricia A. Clark, MA, MTS, is a part-time theology professor at Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts. Her interests are in the study of religion.



About the Editor and Contributors

Gregory M. Clines is a PhD candidate in the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University, and a visiting assistant professor of religion at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His research interests include Jainism during the late medieval and early modern periods and Sanskrit and vernacular literary production. Marzia Anna Coltri, PhD, is assistant professor in Humanities at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University, in the United Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She is the author of Beyond Rastafari: An Historical and Theological Introduction (Peter Lang 2015). Her Laurea Magistrale in Philosophy (in 2004) was received from Università Gabriele d’Annunzio, Chieti, Italy. Selena Crosson, PhD, has research interests including the socioreligious world view of Victorian settler women, interwar feminism and women’s peace movements, and the millenarian feminism of early 20th-century western Baha’i women. She has taught Canadian history and women’s history at the University of Saskatchewan and is currently part-time faculty at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Vivianne Crowley, PhD, is a lecturer in psychology at Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom. She specializes in the psychology of religion and has published extensively on contemporary Paganism and women’s spirituality. Her most recent publication is “Standing Up to Be Counted: Understanding Pagan Responses to the 2011 British Censuses,” Religion 44, no. 3 (2014): 483–501. N. K. Crown, PhD, is a recent graduate from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, specializing in the Reformation and early modern period. His thesis compared 16th-century Catholic, Anglican, and Puritan representations of martyrdom. His interests include death studies, church history, iconoclasm, early modern gender roles, and the study of 16th-century chronicles. Deepra Dandekar, PhD, is a researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Deepra has worked on gender and Hinduism, religious shrines, religious minorities and migrants in India. She has published on Sufi Islam and the problem of Muslim minorities in Maharashtra. Lukas K. Danner, PhD, is postdoctoral associate at Florida International University, Miami. His interests include Chinese foreign relations, international relations theories, and security studies. He earned an MA in sinology from the University of Munich, Germany, and an MA in international studies and a PhD in international relations from Florida International University. Adam W. Darlage, PhD, is an instructor in the Humanities and Philosophy Department at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. He teaches courses in

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world mythologies and world religions. His research interests include early modern Roman Catholic controversial literature, Anabaptist history and theology, and Christian communalism. Max Dashú is the director of the Suppressed Histories Archives, which she founded in 1970 to research global women’s history and cultural heritages. Its collection contains over 40,000 images and 130 visual talks. She is the author of numerous books, including Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion (Veleda 2017). Miriam Robbins Dexter holds a PhD in Indo-European Studies: comparative Indo-European linguistics, ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and comparative mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She has written scholarly journal and encyclopedia articles as well as books, including Whence the Goddesses (Teachers College Press 1990), Sacred Display (Cambria 2010; ASWM Sarasvati book award in 2012), and, with Vicki Noble, Foremothers of the Women’s Spirituality Movement (Teneo 2015; Susan Koppelman award for best edited feminist anthology, 2016). David Dry, MA, is a history instructor at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College and teaches courses in American and world history. He is a member of the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma and previously served as a Fulbright Scholar at the International University of Kyrgyzstan in Bishkek. Lynn Echevarria, PhD, is a professor emerita of Yukon College in Canada. Her research interests include the life history method, process and product; women’s and gender studies; sociology; and the Baha’i Faith. She has published numerous articles and chapters in books and journals on these subjects. Riane Eisler, JD, PhD (h), is president of the Center for Partnership Studies, editor in chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, a pioneer for women’s human rights, and author of influential books, including The Chalice and the Blade (1988), Sacred Pleasure (HarperOne 1996), and The Real Wealth of Nations (Berrett-Koehler 2008). See www.rianeeisler.com. Pascale Engelmajer, PhD, is an associate professor of religious studies at Carroll University in Wisconsin. She wrote Women in Pa-li Buddhism: Walking the Spiritual Path in Mutual Dependence (Routledge 2015), which examines women’s spiritual agency, and Buddhism (Hodder and Stoughton 2014), an introduction that provides an understanding of how doctrine informs practice in the contemporary Buddhist world. Kathryn LaFevers Evans (Three Eagles), MA, is a retired adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Engaged Humanities and the Creative Life program. A Chickasaw shaman, Evans’s native name is Three Eagles. Her recent publications



About the Editor and Contributors

include “Shamanic Vision Quest: Native American Ritual, Depth Psychology, and Renaissance Natural Magic,” NeuroQuantology (June 2016): 309-37. John W. Fadden, PhD, is an adjunct instructor of religious studies at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York. He teaches courses in biblical studies, Judaism, and world religions. Valentina Fedele, PhD, is an assistant professor of Islamic law at University of Calabria. Her main research interests are the sociology of Islam and contemporary history and culture of Magreb. Her latest articles explore contemporary Islamic masculinity, European Islam, and the relationship between art and riots in the Magreb. Mackenzie J. Finley, MA, is a PhD student studying African history at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include women and gender in Yoruba intellectual history, alternative epistemologies, and Africa in global history. Lailatul Fitriyah is a PhD student in the Department of Theology at University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Her research interests include Islamic feminism, Qur’anic hermeneutics, theological anthropology, Islamic peacebuilding theories, and normative theories of international relations. Kristan Ewin Foust, PhD, is a lecturer in history at the University of Texas at Arlington and Dallas. Her dissertation (2017) is titled “Exposing the Spectacular Body: The Wheel, Hanging, Impaling, Placarding, and Crucifixion in the Ancient World.” Maria Gabryszewska is an American politics PhD candidate (ABD) at Florida International University. Her primary research interest is American politics with a focus on gender and politics, Congress, and political communication. She also has an interest in interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches. Carole Ganim, PhD, has taught English literature and composition at Ursuline College in Cleveland, Ohio, as a member of the Ursuline Sisters and at several other colleges and universities. She has published in academic journals and authored two books: Shaping Catholic Parishes (Loyola, 2008) and Being Out of Order (Vandamere, 2013). Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon, PhD, is the rabbi educator at Congregation Beth Jacob in Redwood City, California. Her PhD is in biochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her rabbinic ordination is from the Academy of Jewish Religion, California. She is the author of numerous articles on Judaism and on science. Starr Goode, MA, teaches literature at Santa Monica College and is the producer and moderator for the cable TV series The Goddess in Art, now available on YouTube.

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Her book, Sheela na gig, The Dark Goddess of Europe (Inner Traditions 2016) won the 2018 Sarasvati Award for Best Non-Fiction Book. T. Nicole Goulet is an assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Religious Studies. Her expertise is in Hinduism in colonial India, with emphasis on race, class, and gender. Kohenet D’vorah J. Grenn, PhD, is the founder of the Lilith Institute and chair of the Women’s Spirituality MA program at Sofia University, Palo Alto, and was the founding priestess/kohenet at Mishkan Shekhinah. She teaches for Napa Valley College. Her book Talking to Goddess (Lilith Institute 2009) anthologized sacred writings of 72 women from 25 traditions. Daniel N. Gullotta is a doctoral student of religious studies (Christianity) at Stanford University. He holds a master’s degree in religion (with a concentration in the history of Christianity) from Yale University Divinity School and a master’s of theological studies (specializing in biblical studies) from Australian Catholic University. Harald Haarmann is the author of more than 50 books, some of which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. His preferred fields of study are cultural history, ancient civilizations, archaeomythology, history of religion, ethnic studies, and research on identity. For his work, he received the Prix Logos (France, 1999), the Premio Jean Monnet (Italy, 1999), and the Plato Award (United Kingdom, 2006). Rannveig Haga, PhD, holds a PhD in history of religions from Uppsala University and is a researcher affiliated with Södertörn University College. Her dissertation, “Tradition as Resource: Somali Women Traders Facing the Realities of Civil War,” is a qualitative study involving fieldwork in Hargeisa, Somaliland, and Dubai. Allison Hahn, PhD, is an assistant professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Her research centers on the argumentation strategies of pastoral-nomadic communities in Central Asia and East Africa. Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is the director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion and the cofounder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is the author of seven books, including The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (Ben Yehuda Press, 2015; with Taya Shere). Marsha Snulligan Haney, PhD, is the recently retired professor of missiology and religions of the world and director of the doctor of ministry program at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a Presbyterian minister and has published extensively on intercultural and religious studies, womanist values and methodologies, and urban missiology.



About the Editor and Contributors

Amanda Haste, PhD, teaches at Aix-Marseille University, France, and is an independent scholar (National Coalition of Independent Scholars) notably of 21st-century convent culture and identity construction. Her research is published in Journal for Religion, Media and Digital Culture, Culture and Religion, and Studies in Church History, among others. Barbara Lois Helms is serving as the first female Muslim chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces. She is also a registered psychotherapist (qualifying). Helms is a graduate of McGill University (MA, Islamic studies) and Athabasca University (MA, counselling psychology) and is currently pursuing a DMin at Toronto School of Theology. Elisabetta Iob, PhD, is a historian currently based at the University of Trieste and is the author of Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan: Resettlement in Punjab, 1947–62 (Routledge, 2017). Elisabetta’s research interests focus on Pakistan’s political and party history and the politics of gender and emotions in South Asia. Laurel Kendall, PhD, is the curator of Asian Ethnographic Collections at the American Museum of Natural History and chair of the Anthropology Division. She is the author of many books and articles about Korean shamans, modernity, consumption, and popular religion in East Asia. She was recently president of the Association for Asian Studies (2016–2017). Gary Kerley, PhD, a retired educator, has published numerous poems, book reviews, and articles. Most recently, he has articles in The Mississippi Encyclopedia, reviews in The Georgia Review and The South Carolina Review, and articles on the American Revolution and the Civil War in the Daily Life Series for ABC-CLIO. Yusri Khaizran, PhD, is a lecturer at Shalem Academic Center at Jerusalem. He specializes in the politico-cultural history of the Fertile Crescent. Khaizran has published articles on political and cultural aspects of the Fertile Crescent as well as a book, The Druze Community and the Lebanese State: Between Resistance and Reconciliation (Routledge, 2014). Pawan Kumar is a doctoral scholar at the Center for English Studies, School of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was a visiting research fellow at Trinity College at Dublin under the SPECTRESS project, 2016. He did his graduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Delhi. Kenneth Lee is the professor of Asian religions at California State University at Northridge. His degrees are from Occidental College (AB), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv), and Columbia University (MPhil, PhD). His book, The Prince

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and the Monk: Shotoku Worship in Shinran’s Buddhism (State University of New York Press 2007) traces the evolution of Shotoku worship in Japanese Buddhism. Tyler A. Lehrer is a doctoral student in Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research engages gender and modern Buddhist monastic history in and between Thailand and Sri Lanka. Liang Zhu, MA, is a PhD candidate in the Department of China and Inner Asia, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is interested in the intellectual and cultural history of China, pre-Tang literatures and cultures, and history of religious thought in East Asia. Judit Erika Magyar has been lecturing in modern Japanese history, Western civilization, and global history at universities in Europe and Japan for the past decade. Educated in Hungary, Italy, and Japan, her research interests include the history of the Japanese navy, Russo-Japanese relations, interwar and wartime Japanese magazines, Kirishitan, and Christian history. Susan Stiles Maneck, PhD, is an associate professor at Jackson State University, teaching courses in history and comparative religion. Her degrees are from the University of Arizona (MA, PhD). She has authored numerous articles and a book, The Death of Ahriman (K.R. Cama Oriental Institute 1997), on the history of the Parsis. Barbara Alice Mann, PhD, is a professor of humanities in the Jesup Scott Honors College at the University of Toledo and the author of hundreds of chapters and articles as well as 13 books, including Spirits of Blood, Spirits of Breath (Oxford, 2016) and Iroquoian Women (Lang, 2000), and was the lead coauthor of Matriarchal Studies: A Bibliography (Oxford, 2015). Joan Marler, PhD, is the founder and executive director of the Institute of Archaeomythology. She is the editor of The Civilization of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas (HarperCollins 1991), From the Realm of the Ancestors (Knowledge Ideas & Trends 1997), The Danube Script (Institute of Archaeomythology 2008), The Journal of Archaeomythology (2005–present), and other publications. Hannah Mayne is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto and in the collaborative program in Jewish studies. Her research focuses on the performance and politics of contemporary Jewish women’s prayer practices in Jerusalem, especially in feminist and ultra-Orthodox communities. Julia McClenon studies Chinese religiosities at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has lived, worked, and studied in China, most recently as a diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service. She welcomes cross-disciplinary exchange and is interested in issues of time and temporality.



About the Editor and Contributors

Beverley McGuire, PhD, is an associate professor of East Asian religions at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her research interests include Buddhist perspectives on karma, suffering, and repentance, and her most recent book is Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu (Columbia University Press, 2014). Bernadette McNary-Zak, PhD, is an associate professor of religious studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Adele Valeria Messina, PhD, is a member of the Association for Jewish Studies and of the Research Laboratory in History, Philosophy, and Politics at the Department of Political and Social Sciences of the University of Calabria. She has published articles, including “L’idéologie raciale aux États-Unis,” Diasporas, Circulations, Migrations, Histoire (2018): 115–129. Semontee Mitra is a PhD candidate of American studies and a lecturer in the School of Humanities at Penn State University, Harrisburg. She specializes in the study of South Asian Indian Americans with a focus on religion, immigration, folk culture, and gender. Her work has appeared in various journals and encyclopedias in the United States and India. Race MoChridhe, MA, is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His research spans Pagan, women’s, and textual studies to examine issues in the history of feminist thought, mid-20th century British lesbian spirituality, and archival representations of the same. More about his work can be found at his website: www.racemochridhe.com. James Harry Morris is a specially appointed research associate at the National Institute of Technology, Fukushima College. He is completing his doctoral research on the history of Christianity in Japan at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He has published on various aspects of Japanese and East Asian religious history. Phyllis Moses is a level three Tara Dhatu teacher and leads a circle of dance in the Puget Sound area of Washington. She also leads the Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara whenever and wherever she is called to share it. Asha Mukherjee, PhD, is a professor in philosophy and director of the Women Studies Centre at Visva Bharati University in Bolpur, West Bengal. Vicki Noble is an artist, healer, writer, teacher, and foremother of the Goddess movement. She cocreated the round Motherpeace Tarot deck (1981). Her books include Motherpeace (HarperSanFrancisco 1983), Shakti Woman (HarperSanFrancisco 1991), and The Double Goddess (Bear & Company 2003). She teaches internationally with books published in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and French.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, PhD, is a professor of Latin American literary and cultural studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her recent books include The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation (U New Mexico 2011), and Fierce Feminine Divinities of Eurasia and Latin America: Baba Yaga, Kali, Pombagira, and Santa Muerte (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Ali A. Olomi is a writer, historian, and PhD candidate at the University of California, Irvine where he studies the history of the Middle East with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, religion, and colonialism. Cassandra Painter is a PhD candidate in modern European history at Vanderbilt University. Her research focuses on lived religion in the modern world, the uses of culture to express identity, and the ways in which faith traditions evolve and adapt over time and space. Rasheda Parveen, PhD, is an assistant professor of English at Vellore Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh, India. Her doctoral work was on religion and sexuality with a focus on minoritarian Indian poets. Julia Pascal, PhD, is a playwright, theater director, and scholar. A graduate of the University of London and the University of York, she is now a research fellow at King’s College in London. Her dramas are published by Oberon Books, and her plays have been performed in Europe and the United States. Stephanie Peek is a PhD candidate and instructor in the Religion Department at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Her areas of expertise include New Testament studies, specifically the study of the Christian gospels, Greco-Roman culture, noncanonical Christian gospels, and women in early Christianity. Todd LeRoy Perreira is completing his PhD in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He graduated from Harvard University’s Divinity School with an MTS and earned his BA in religious studies at San José State University, where he currently teaches. Rupa Pillai is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation research examines the adaptations of Caribbean Hindu practices in New York City. Farhana Rahman is a Cambridge international scholar and PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Studies, University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in gender, religion, and lived experiences in Muslim societies. She has extensive experience in the gender and development sector, working internationally for various organizations in the Global South.



About the Editor and Contributors

Lauren Raine, MFA, studied sacred mask traditions in Bali. Her Masks of the Goddess creation traveled throughout the United States for over 20 years to communities of dancers, storytellers, and ritualists. She was awarded an Alden Dow Fellowship and was resident artist at Henry Luce Center for the Arts. Her work can be seen at www.masksofthegoddess.com. Akshaya K. Rath, PhD, is an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, India. He has published extensively on religion and sexuality. He recently published Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant, as editor (Oxford University Press, 2016). Arisika Razak, RN, MPH, is a professor emerita and former chair of the Women’s Spirituality program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a former president of the American Academy of Religion–Western Region and served as cochair of the Womanist–Pan African Section for five years. Julie Remoiville, PhD, is postdoctoral researcher at Groupe Sociétés Religions Laïcités GSRL (EPHE/CNRS) in Paris and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taiwan. Her research interests include contemporary Chinese religion and gender issues and concern more particularly the traditional practices and cultural beliefs around pregnancy in urban China. Therese Rodin, PhD, is currently a senior lecturer in religious studies at Dalarna University. Her thesis (2014) was titled “The World of the Sumerian Mother Goddess: An Interpretation of Her Myths.” Rodin specializes in ancient Mesopotamian religion and culture and mainly female divinities and women’s history. Lena Roos, DTheol, is an associate professor of history of religions and codirector for the Forum for Jewish Studies at Uppsala University. Her fields of expertise include medieval Judaism, Jewish-Christian-Muslim relations, religion and sexuality, religion and food, and teaching religion. Patricia Rose, PhD, is an independent writer, researcher, and facilitator whose work includes studies of women’s spirituality, earth-centered spirituality, contemporary women’s writings, and spiritual feminist myth and ritual. Her most recent books are Gaia Emerging: Goddess Beliefs and Practices in Australia (Patricia Rose 2011) and Knowing Places: Reflections on the Sacred Book of Nature (Gaia’s Ink 2012). Hannah Sachs is a professional theater director focusing on applied theater work with marginalized communities. She spent 2017 in the Czech Republic teaching and directing on a Fulbright scholarship and is now pursuing graduate work on religion and the arts at Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music.

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About the Editor and Contributors

Rochelle G. Saidel, PhD, is the founder and executive director of Remember the Women Institute. She is the author or editor of six books on various aspects of the Holocaust and is the curator of several related museum exhibits. She has written, presented, and lectured internationally on the Holocaust for nearly 40 years. Mary Ruth Sanders, PhD, is a lecturer in history at Armstrong State University in Savannah, Georgia. Her research focuses on the history of American Christianity and the history of terrorism. She received her PhD from Oklahoma State University in 2015. Sandy Eisenberg Sasso is the director of the Religion, Spirituality and the Arts Initiative at Butler University and Christian Theological Seminary and cofounder of Women4Change Indiana. She was the first woman to be ordained from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1972. She is the author of award-winning books for children and adults. Clara Schoonmaker is a PhD student in the Religion Department at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on the complexities of American religious pluralism and the position of contemporary Pagans in the American religious landscape. Shahida, PhD, is an assistant professor at NIT Kurukshetra, India. She specializes in Sufi studies, comparative religion, and culture. She is the author of The Color Purple: A Study (Prakash 2005), and has many articles and research papers to her credit. Currently, she is working on the 13th-century Sufi Rishi movement of Kashmir and its sociopolitical impact. Miranda Shaw, PhD, is an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Her publications on women, gender, and female deities in South Asian and Himalayan Buddhism include Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton University Press, 1994), which has been translated into seven languages. Morgan Shipley, PhD, is an academic specialist in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University. His publications include Psychedelic Mysticism: Transforming Consciousness, Religious Experiences, and Voluntary Peasants in Postwar America (Lexington 2015), as well as articles in academic journals, including Utopian Studies, Preternature, and The Journal for the Study of Radicalism. Emily B. Simpson is a PhD candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published scholarly articles, including “Sacred Mother Bodhisattva, Buddha and Cakravartin: Recasting Empress Jingu- as a Buddhist Figure in the Hachiman gudo-kun,” Journal of Religion in Japan (December 2017): 107–27. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies and the Crawford Family Professor at Colby College. She has published



About the Editor and Contributors

extensively in Sikh studies and serves on the editorial board of several journals. Her views have been aired on television and radio across the United States, Europe, and South Asia. Dale Stover, PhD, is a professor emeritus of religious studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He has published on postcolonial interpretations of Native American traditions, including “Postcolonial Sun Dancing at Wakpamni Lake,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (December 2001): 817–36. Sana Tayyen is currently a lecturer of religion at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University with an emphasis on Islam, Muslims, and comparative theology. Her present work involves women in Islam, comparative research and writing on Ghazali and Aquinas, and interreligious studies. Victoria Team, MD, MPH, DrPH, is a medical anthropologist and a public health researcher with broad interests in women’s health. She currently works in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a managing editor for Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. Adriana Teodorescu, PhD, is interested in death studies, comparative literature, and gender studies. Her article “The Women-Nature Connection as a Key Element in the Social Construction of Western Contemporary Motherhood” was published in Women and Nature? Beyond Dualism in Gender, Body, and Environment (Routledge 2017), ed. Vakoch and Mickey. Aubrey Thamann, PhD, is an independent scholar in the fields of American studies and anthropology whose broad research interests include culture change, death and dying, and fat studies. Her most recent research project was an ethnographic study of funeral directors in Indiana. She received her doctorate from Purdue University in 2016. Amy B. Voorhees earned her PhD in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an independent scholar focusing on Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science tradition. She has received many awards and fellowships, most recently from the New England Regional Fellowship Colloquium. Katherine Clark Walter, PhD, is an associate professor of history at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. She has published on medieval widows, liturgy, and hagiography. Her most recent publication is “Animals on the Edge: Humans and Hybrids in the Pontificals of Later Medieval France,” in Human/Animal, edited by Fabry-Tehranchi and Russakoff (Rodopi 2014, 95–113). Lewis Webb, MPhil, is a PhD candidate in ancient history and classical archaeology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, where he is investigating elite

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female status competition in mid-Republican Rome. He has published on religion, social status, and gender in the Roman Republic and Empire. Michelle Claire White is a writer, poet, and facilitator who has a deep passion for the revival of Goddess spirituality. Drawing from her undergraduate studies in comparative religion, her focus is on how myth, symbols, and stories can help empower us and reenchant our connections with the natural world. Annette Lyn Williams, PhD, is the chair of the Women’s Spirituality program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her research interests include healing from sexual trauma at the level of the soul and women’s spiritual power and agency within the Yoruba Ifa tradition with specific reference to the primordial feminine authority of àjé. Rachel York-Bridgers, PhD, is a lecturer of English at Western Carolina University in North Carolina and a graduate of University of Toronto’s School of Environment and Education. Her interests include ecological world views, environmental and peace education, and the arts. Yue Du, PhD, is an assistant professor of modern Chinese history at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She has published articles on gender and law in early modern China and on the connection between the imperial cult of filiality and political religion in 20th-century China. She is writing a book on state-sponsored filiality and China’s empire-to-nation transformation.

Comprehensive Index

The volume in which each entry appears is indicated in bold. Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abbesses, 1:160–161, 221–222, 231–232, 256, 261, 274 hagiographies of, 1:257 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 1:204–206, 251, 278 Abdi, Hawa, 2:83 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, 1:90 Abena, Nurudafina, 2:361 Abi Bakr, Ayesha bint, 2:68 Abigail (biblical), 2:186 Abortion, 2:155, 162, 174 Buddhism, 1:100–101 Christianity, 1:161–163, 179, 202 Judaism, 2:204 ritual for, 2:229 Sikhism, 2:296 Abortion, legalization of, 1:202 Abrahamic traditions, 1:22, 2:188, 228, 297, 312, 362. See also Christianity; Islam; Judaism Abreu, Rosalia (Efunche Wandondo), 1:4 Abu-Lughod, Lia, 2:55 Abzug, Bella, 2:136 Ackerman, Paula, 2:118 Activism and Buddhism, 1:111–13, 135 Christianity, 1:165, 210, 234 ecofeminism, 2:321–325 environmental, 2:176–177, 193, 218–219, 321–322 feminist, 2:360–361 Islam, 2:55, 60–61, 83–84, 94–95 Judaism, 2:120, 132–136, 159, 193 peacemaking, 2:41, 117, 185–88 Activism (Native American), 2:3–6 Acupuncture, 2:332

Adam (biblical), 1:197–198, 229, 2:169 and Lilith, 2:171–174 in the Qur’an, 2:63–64 See also Eve; Lilith Adams, Carol J., 2:323 Adams, Evangeline, 2:312 Adefunmi, Oba (King) Oseijeman Adelabu I, 1:6 Aditi, 1:315–316, 364, 373, 379 Adler, Celia, 2:190 Adler, Margot, 2:340 Adler, Rachel, 2:146 Adler, Stella, 2:190 Adulthood ceremonies, 1:16–17, 49 Aforodita, 1:55 Africa Christianity in, 1:176–178 Islam in, 2:68–71 matricentric societies in, 2:358–359 monasticism in, 1:254 See also African religions African American Episcopal church, 1:187 African American Methodist movement, 1:164 African American Ecofeminism. See Ecowomanism African American feminism. See Womanism African American women, 1:163–166, 174, 186, 194, 2:360–362 African diaspora, drumming traditions in, 2:361 African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, 1:164, 165, 185 African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) church, 1:164, 165

392

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

African religions, 1:1–24 and art in Africa, 1:7–9 and body art, 1:10–11 Candomblé, 1:11–14 and Christianity, 2:355 in diaspora, 1:3–6 and female genital mutilation, 1:14–16 indigenous, 1:3, 8, 171 introduction, 1:1–2 and life-cycle ceremonies, 1:16–17 and Orisha veneration, 1:3, 4, 11, 2:361 precolonial, 2:343 priestesses and oracular women, 1:17–22 Rastafari, 1:22–23 Vodou (Vodoun, Vodun, Voodoo), 1:3, 5 women’s spirituality in 2:358–359 Yoruba, 1:23–25 See also Africa African religions-in-diaspora, 1:3–6 Africana women, 1:3–6, 2:359 Afsaruddin, Asma, 2:55 Afterlife, 2:354 Agatha (saint), 1:256 Ahimsa, 2:105 Ahl al-Kitab community, 2:68 Ahmadiyya Muslim movement, 2:69 Ahmed, Leila, 2:60, 362 Ahmose-Nefertari, 1:19 Aiken, Robert, 1:105 Aimée, Anouk, 2:191 Aisha (Ayesha) bint Abu Bakr, 2:52, 88, 68, 70, 97, 344 Aisha bint Al Shati, 2:55, 70 Aisha of Damascus, 2:100 Aje, 1:24 Akan religious tradition, 1:3 Akka Mahadevi, 1:325–326 Alakshmi, 1:349 Al Batayahiyyah, Fatima, 2:53 Albear, Timotea (Ayaji La Tuan), 1:4 Alcatraz Island, occupation of, 2:361 Al-Din, Nazira Zin, 2:51 Al Fihri, Fatima, 2:53 Al-Ghazali, Zainab, 2:70 Al-Habash, Huda, 2:84 Al-Hibri, Azizah, 2:103 Al-Huda International, 2:103 Ali, Kecia, 2:55

Allen, Paula Gunn, 2:341, 359 Allen, Richard, 1:164 Allen, Terry, 1:196 Alliance of Baptists, 1:224 Allione, Tsultrim, 1:104, 2:341 Al Qarawiyyin university, 2:53, 70 Al-Qubaysi, Munira, 2:75 Al-Qubaysiyat, 2:75 Al-Qushayri, wife of, 2:99 Al Rahaman, Aisha Abd, 2:55 Alseikiene, Marija Birute. See Gimbutas, Marija Al-Sitt Nayfa, 2:51 Al-Sitt Sarah, 2:51 Al-Zahra, Fatima, 2:56 Amadiume, Ifi, 2:342 Amar Das (Guru), 2:303 Amaterasu, 1:75, 80, 2:284, 354 Amaterasu Omikami, 2:269, 270–272, 271, 278 Amazigh of Morocco, 2:84 Ambedkar, B. R., 1:324 Ambika. See Shakti Ambrose (saint), 1:162, 260, 271 Ambuvaci festival, 1:357 Amenirdis I (princess), 1:19 Amen meals, 2:142 Ame-no-Uzume, 1:73, 75 American Baptist Churches USA, 1:224 American denominations American Baptist Churches USA, 1:224 Amish, 1:192, 273 denominationalism and beyond, 2:121–122 Halachah, 2:120 Judaism: 1850 to present, 2:117–122 modern Orthodoxy and the Woman Question, 2:118–120 Reconstruction and gender distinction, 2:121 reform and the limits of equality, 2:118 shifting emphases of the Conservative movement, 2:120–121 American Individual Religious Freedom Act (1978), 2:29 American Jewish Congress, 2:135 American Muslim Women Political Action Committee, 2:78 American Red Cross, 1:174



American Shaking Quakers, 1:186, 199 American Sisters of Charity, 1:174 American Women’s Zionist Organization (Hadassah), 2:135–136 Am Ha Aretz, 2:226 Amin, Qasim, 2:54 Amish, 1:192, 273 Amrita initiation, 2:299–300 An, 1:62 Anabaptists, 1:224, 246, 273, 274, 275, 276. See also Amish; Mennonites Anandamayi Ma, 1:342 Anat, 2:144 Ancestors (Native American), 2:6–8, 22, 30–31. See also Kinship Ancestor veneration, 1:3–4, 23, 2:24, 236, 258, 277, 361. See also Filial Piety Anchoresses, 1:211–212, 277 Ancient Druid Order (ADO), 2:217 Ancient Judaism, 2:122–124 education for women in, 2:130 Ancient religions, 1:27–83 Athena, 1:29–32, 44, 65–66, 237, 2:254, 255 Daily Lives of Greek and Roman Women, 1:48–52 Delphic Oracle, 1:32–33, 67 Diana, 1:33–35, 70, 2:329 Egyptian religion, 1:35–39 Eleusinian Mysteries, 1:39–42 Gaia, 1:31, 42–43, 65–66, 2:222 Gorgon Medusa, 1:43–48 homosexuality, 1:52–53 Hypatia, 1:28, 53–54 Inanna, 1:55–56, 63, 82 introduction, 1:27–29 Judaism, 2:122–124 marriage, ancient Greek and Roman religions, 1:56–58 Mesopotamian religion, 1:58–61 Ninhursagˆa Mother Goddess, 1:62–63 ˘ 1:63–65 Ninlil, pre-Greek goddesses in the Greek Pantheon, 1:65–67 priestesses and their staff in ancient Greece, 1:67–68 religious leadership, ancient Roman religions, 1:68–71 Sappho, 1:28, 52, 71–73, 72

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Shamans in East Asia, 1:73–77 Sibyls, 1:77–78 sun goddess, 1:78–80 writers and poets, ancient Mesopotamia, 1:81–83 Anderson, Judith, 2:309 Andinna (ancestral priestesses), 1:21 Androcentrism, 2:169, 193, 296, 315 An Druidh Uileach Braithreachas, 2:217 Angela Merici, 1:174 Angela of Foligno, 1:265 Angelica (Mother), 1:187 Angel therapy, 2:333 Angelus Temple, 1:199 Angha, Sayedeh Nahid, 2:101 Angkor Wat, 1:107–108 Anglican church, 1:180, 246, 248, 273 in Africa, 1:177 and divorce, 1:215 women religious, 1:166–167 See also Episcopalian church Anglican/Episcopalian women religious, 1:166–167 Anglicanism. See Anglican church Anglican religious communities (ARC), 1:167 Anglo-Papists, 1:166 Animal liberation, 2:325 Animal sacrifice, 1:4, 16, 69, 151–152, 322 Animism, 1:80, 2:251–252, 257 and female genital mutilation, 1:15 Ankhesenpepi II, 1:35, 36 Anna (gospel of Luke), 1:269, 271 Anne (mother of Mary), 1:223 Anthropocentrism, 2:20, 313, 314, 315 Anthropology movement, 1:264 Antinomian controversy, 1:185 Antiochian Department of Marriage and Parish Family Ministries of the Antiochian Christian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, 1:187 Anti-Semitism, 2:133, 134, 135. 165, 186, 221 Antonia (Princess of Württemberg), 1:264 Anzaldua, Gloria, 2:360 Aodun Miaoshan, 1:301 Aphrodite, 1:55, 72–73

393

394

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Apocrypha, 1:168–169, 2:122, 173 Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 1:168, 219, 251 Gospel of Philip, 1:168, 219 Gospel of Thomas, 1:168–169, 219 Apollo, 1:77 Archaeomythology, 2:240, 249 Arician sacred grove, 1:33 Arjan (Guru), 2:303 Armstrong, Annie, 1:248 Ár nDraiocht Féin, 2:218 Arquette, Patricia, 2:190 Arquette, Rosanna, 2:190 Art (Judaism), 2:124–128 Art in Africa 1:7–9, 2:358 of ancient Judaism, 2:124–125 depictions of Mary Magdalene, 1:217, 218 depictions of Mary of Nazareth, 1:238 Indian, 2:293–294 Indigenous, 1:74, 2:8, 9–11 Jewish feminist, 2:159 Medieval, 2:348 and women’s spirituality, 2:341, 360–361 prehistoric, 1:74, 2:239, 247–248, 250, 253–255, 257, 260–264, 324, 352, 363 Renaissance, 2:125 sacred, 1:7, 2:239 spirituality in, 2:308–311 See also Sculpture Art, Modern and Contemporary (Christianity), 1:170–173 Art and performance Sikhism, 2:292–295 spirituality, 2:308–311, 310 Artemis, 1:33, 44–45, 65–66 Art in Africa, 1:7–9 Arts (Native American), 2:9–11 Asanti, Iyanifa Ifalola TaShia, 1:6 Ásatrú, 2:227 Ásatrúarfélagið, 2:221 Ásatrú Lore Vanatrú Assembly, 2:221 Asceticism, 1:131, 151, 189, 260–261, 265–266, 347, 361–363, 379–380, 382, 2:99, 285 Jain, 2:105, 107, 108, 109–111, 112 See also Monasticism; Renunciation Ashbridge, Elizabeth, 1:185

Ashcroft, Peggy, 2:191 Asherah, 1:55, 263, 2:142–146, 143, 152–153, 192, 327 Ashrawi, Hanan Mikhail, 2:83 Ashtaprakari Puja, 2:112 Ashtoret (Ashtart; Astarte), 1:55, 2:142, 144 Asiyah, 2:92 Askew, Anne, 1:194, 276 Asma’u, Nana, 2:70 Assad, Audrey, 1:171 Assemblies of God, 1:183, 249 Association of Shinto Shrines, 2:273, 279 Astarabadi, Bibi Khanoom, 2:54 Astarte (Ashtoret; Ashtart), 1:55, 2:144, 320, 329 Asteroids, 2:312 Astral body, 1:377 Astrology, 1:384, 2:312–313, 316 feminist, 2:312 Asuncion “Sunita Serrano,” 1:6 Asungi, AfraShe, 2:361 Athena, 1:29–32, 30, 44, 65–66, 237, 2:254, 255 priestesses of, 1:30–31 Athena of Victory, 1:31 Atum, 1:35 Augustine of Hippo, 1:197–198, 207, 221, 231, 245, 260, 268 Aura readings, 2:316 Aurobindo, Sri, 1:355 Austen, Hallie Iglehart, 2:341 Autumn equinox (Mabon), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Avalokites´vara. See Guan Yin Avvaiyaˉr, 1:316 Awashima Religion, 2:282 Awen, 2:218 Àwon Ìyá Wa (ancestral Mothers), 1:13 Ayaji La Tuan (Timotea Albear), 1:4 Ayambil Oli, 2:109 Ayesha bint Abu Bakr. See Aisha bint Abu Bakr Aztec Cihuateteo, 2:35 Aztec culture and religion, 1:333, 2:12, 15, 21, 22, 26, 34, 223 Azusa Street Revival, 1:185–186 Baalat-Gebal, 1:55 Ba’a lot Teshuva, 2:167



Ba’al Shem Tov (Besht), 2:147 Ba’al Teshuva movement, 2:185 Bab, Siyyid Ali Muhammad al-, 1:93–94 Babalowa, 1:6 Bacall, Lauren, 2:189 Bacchus, 1:69 Bach, Alice, 2:179 Bagby, Rachel, 2:362 Baha’i, 1:85–96 and the divine feminine, 1:87–88 gender roles in, 1:91–93 introduction, 1:85–87 places of worship, 1:85, 86 Tahirih, 1:93–94 and universal education, 1:88–91 Universal House of Justice, 1:85–86, 95, 96 women in Baha’i scriptures, 1:95–96 Baha’i House of Worship, Delhi, 86, 86 Baha’i Institute of Higher Education (BIHE), 1:90 Baha’i International Community (BIC), 1:90 Bahá’ú’lláh, 1:85, 86, 88, 94, 95–96 Bahia, 1:13 Bahir, 2:167 Bahiyyih Khanum, 1:94 Baker, Ella, 1:186 Baker, Julien, 1:172 Baker, Richard, 1:124 Balas, Maria, 1:186 Baldwin, Shauna Singh, 2:293 Bale, John, 1:194 Ballet Rambert, 2:191 Ballets Russes, 2:191 Banna tribe, 1:10 Ban Zhao, 1:283, 289 Baptism, 2:12 Baptist Church, 1:163, 178, 183, 224, 246 and divorce, 1:215 German, 1:180 missionary activity, 1:226, 248 Swiss, 1:180 Barbara (saint), 1:256 Barbour, Jeannie, 2:30 Bari Gongju (Pali Kongju), 1:73, 76 Barkin, Ellen, 2:190 Barlas, Asma, 2:59, 60 Bar mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 183, 188 Barnardo, Thomas, 1:195

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Barney, Alice Pike, 1:89 Barton, Clara, 1:174 Basil the Great, 1:162, 245 Basket Dance, 2:10 Basketry, 1:7, 30, 41, 68, 285, 380, 2:9–10, 9, 26, 28, 251 Bat mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 121, 128–129, 183 Beadwork, 1:9, 2:230 Beaivvi nieida, 1:79 Bear cults, 2:252 Béart, Emanuelle, 2:191 Beatification, 1:266 Beatrice of Nazareth, 1:241 Beauty products, 1:191–192 Beckett, “Sister Wendy,” 1:175 Beecher, Catharine, 1:186 Beeching, Vicky, 1:172 Beginning of knowledge rituals, 1:374 Beguines, 1:222, 241, 269 Beltane, 2:232, 232, 233, 236, 329 Benedict of Nursia, 1:232 Benkovic, Johnnette, 1:187 Berber people (Africa), 2:24, 26 Berechiah, Rabbi Aaron, 2:169 Berenice (mother of Herod), 1:271 Berezan, Jennifer, 2:338 Berg, Jónína Kristín, 2:221 Bergner, Elisabeth, 2:191 Berk, Lotte, 2:191 Bernhard, Sandra, 2:190 Bernhardt, Sarah, 2:191 Bernstein, Theresa, 2:126 Berry, Amanda Smith, 1:164 Bes, 1:38 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 1:165 Bhadrakali. See Shakti Bhagavad Gita, 1:317, 358, 2:364 Bhakti movement, 1:314, 316–320 Bhakti Yoga, 2:364 Bhangra, 2:302 Bhikkhunis, 1:129–130, 132–133, 134, 135, 151–152, 153 Bibi Bhani, 2:297–298 Bikkhuni movement, 1:123 Bikram yoga, 2:364 Biospheric equality, 2:315–316 Birth, 1:33 life-cycle ceremonies, 1:16 Hindu ceremonies (jaˉtkarman), 1:374

395

396

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Birth control, 1:22, 2:204 prohibitions on, 2:148 Birth control movement, 2:135 Black Artemis of Ephesus, 1:49 Black Doves, 1:18 Black nationalists/nationalism, 1:6, 2:77 Black women, 1:181 Blaney, Ta’Kaiya, 2:5 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 1:103, 2:350 Blessing of a child, 2:12 Blessing way/Blessingway (Navajo), 2:13, 231 Bloom, Claire, 2:190 Blyde, Ludy, 1:160 Boas, Franz, 2:35 Bodhisattvas, 1:97, 101–102, 129, 138, 139, 142, 2:344–345, 361 Jizo, 1:100, 101 Mañjus´ rıˉ, 1:139 Marıˉcıˉ, 1:304 See also Dance of Tara; Deities, Buddhist; Engaged Buddhism; Guan Yin; Mizuko Body art, 1:10–11, 10 Body-modification practices, 1:10 Boegue, Rosine, 1:186 Boehme, Jacob, 1:264, 2:222 Bolen, Jean, 2:361 Boleyn, Anne, 1:194 Bolz-Weber, Nadia, 1:248 Bone, Eleanor, 2:224 Bonewits, Phaedra, 2:218 Book of Mormon, 1:233 Books for women, 1:282–284 Boorstein, Sylvia, 1:104 Bori religion, 1:20 Boucher, Sandy, 1:105 Boxer, Amanda, 2:191 Boyle, Louise Dixon, 1:89 Brach, Tara, 1:104 Bradstreet, Anne, 1:170 Brahma, 1:332, 369 Brahmanas, 1:364 Brahmanism, 1:321–323, 373 and yoga, 2:363 Brahmcharinis, 1:362–363 Brandy, Carolyn, 2:361 Brazil, 1:11, 24 Candomblé in, 1:24 enslaved Africans in, 1:11

Breslov Hasidism, 2:147, 148 Brice, Fanny, 2:189 Bridget (Bridgit) of Sweden, 1:257, 277, 269, 278 Brin Fanny, 2:186 Bristol Women’s Liberation, 2:327 British Circle of the Universal Bond, 2:217 British Druid Order, 2:217 British Society for Psychical Research, 2:351 British Traditional Wicca (BTW), 2:226 Bron, Eleanor, 2:191 Bronze Age burials, 2:244 Bronze casting, 1:9 Brooten, Bernadette, 2:192 Brown, Olympia, 1:186 B’Shevat, 2:139 Budapest, Zsuzsanna, 2:215–216, 225, 229, 235, 327–328, 340 Buddhahood, 1:116, 129, 130, 131, 139, 140, 142, 143, 154 Buddha-nature, 1:154 Buddha(s) Amitabha, 1:102, 126 female, 1:107, 115–116, 140, 143, 2:361 Mahavairocana, 2:278 mothers of, 1:117, 119, 132, 135–136, 137, 152 Nairatmya, 1:116 Sakyamuni, 1:102 Shakyamuni, 1:106, 114, 136 Simhamukha, 1:140 Tara, 1:140, 143 Vajrayogini, 1:116, 140, 143 Buddhism, 1:97–156, 2:276, 355, 357 and abortion, 1:100–101 in China, 1:281, 284 connection to Shinto, 2:278 dance, 1:106–108 Dance of Tara, 1:108–111, 2:336 engaged, 1:111–114 female divinities, 1:114–118 feminine virtues, 1:118–120 funeral practices, 1:120–122 gender roles in, 1:122–125 Himalayan, 1:146 introduction, 1:97–100 in Japan, 1:117–118, 134, 2:284–285, 357



and kirtan, 2:334 laywomen in Theravada Buddhism, 1:127–129 Mahayana, 1:97, 101–102, 103, 106, 114–115, 125, 129–131, 134, 136–137, 138, 2:335, 344 meditation in, 2:335, 336 Newar, 1:116–117, 147 Nichiren, 1:126, 140–142 Nuns, Theravada, 1:132–133 ordination, 1:133–135 Pajapati, 1:135–136 Prajnaparamita, 1:136–138 Pure Land, 1:126 sacred texts on women, 1:138–140 sex scandals associated with, 1:105, 124, 141 Soˉka Gakkai, 1:140–142 soteriological androgyny, 1:131 Soˉto Zen, 1:104, 123, 133, 155–156 Tantric, 1:110, 114, 115–117, 142–144, 304, 2:335, 336, 346 Tara, 1:144–147 tea ceremony, 1:148–149 Tendai, 1:126 Theravada, 1:97, 104, 112, 118–120, 124, 127–128, 130, 134, 138, 139–140, 153, 2:335 Therigatha, 1:149–150 Tibetan, 1:104, 109–110, 117, 138, 153, 2:344 Tientai, 1:126 in the United States, 1:103–105, 108 Vajrayana (Himalayan), 1:97, 107, 129, 130, 140, 142, 2:335 Western, 1:124 women in early Buddhism, 1:150–152 women’s Buddhist networks, 1:152–154 Women’s Division, 1:141 Youth Division, 1:141 Zen, 1:103, 104–105, 148–149, 154–156, 2:335, 361 See also Bodhisattvas; Deities, Buddhist; Lotus Sutra Buddhism in the United States, 1:103–105 Buddhist Churches of America, 1:103 Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, 1:112 Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 1:113

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Buddhists as followers of Sufism, 2:101 Buehler, Bernice, 1:196 Bulkeley, Catherine, 1:160 Burials, 2:243–244 Bronze Age, 2:244 and the funeral industry, 2:330 green funerals, 2:330–331 in Japan, 2:280 Mesolithic, 2:243–244 mounds, 1:16 prehistoric, 2:243–244 Uan Afuda cave, 2:243–244 Upper Paleolithic, 2:243 See also Funeral practices Burka, 2:47, 69, 76, 90 Burma Buddhism in, 1:113, 127, 128, 130, 134, 153 missionaries in, 1:226 Cabrini, Frances Xavier (Maria Francesca Cabrini), 1:186 Caesar, Julius, 1:37, 48 Caesarion, 1:37 Caine, Margaret N., 1:234 Caitanya Mahaprabhu, 1:360 Calvin, John, 1:179, 246, 275 Calvinist churches, 1:178 Cama, Bhikaji Rustomji, 1:339 Cambodia, 1:107–108, 127 Cambridge Buddhist Association, 1:104 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 1:171 Camp, Sokari Douglas, 1:9 Campbell, Billy, 2:331 Campbell, Kimberly, 2:331 Canavarro, Marie deSouza, 1:103 Candidas, 1:360 Candle lighting, 2:207, 207 Candomblé, 1:1, 3, 4, 11–14, 24 Cannon, Katie Geneva, 1:187 Canonization, 1:54, 184, 205, 222, 241, 255–259, 266, 269, 305, 341. See also Saints Canyon de Chelly, 2:33 Cao Wenyi, 1:301 Carlini, Benedetta, 1:207 Carlson, Lisa, 2:331 Carol, Sister, 1:22 Carr, Anne, 1:187

397

398

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Carrington, Leonora, 2:308–309 Carter, Helena Bonham, 2:191 Carvajel, Luisa de, 1:160 Caste, 1:112, 131, 151, 313, 318, 321– 324, 326, 327, 330, 346, 348, 364, 370, 377, 2:297, 298, 299, 345 and Tantric Hinduism, 1:377–378 Castillo, Francisca Josefa de, 1:160 Çatalhöyük culture (Turkey), 1:251. 2:254, 353–354 Catherine of Alexandria, 1:256 Catherine of Siena, 1:241, 257, 257, 277, 278 Catholic Charismatic Revival, 1:186 Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church Catholicism. See Roman Catholic Church Catholic Worker movement, 1:174, 186 Caur, Arpana, 2:293–294 Cave art, 1:16–17, 66, 334, 2:251, 260, 261, 262, 266, 324, 348, 349. See also Petroglyphs Celebrations. See Festivals and holy days; Life-cycle ceremonies Celestial Masters, 1:308 Celibacy, 1:60, 96, 138, 155, 157, 175– 176, 199, 245, 249, 258, 261, 262, 269, 274, 275, 308, 316, 340, 361, 371, 2:73, 105, 108, 345 Celtic Reconstructionism, 2:227 Ceremonies (Native American), 2:11–14 Ceres, 1:69 Chabad-Lubavich Hasidism, 2:119, 147, 149–150 Chadha, Gurinder, 2:294–295 Chador, 2:47, 54, 76, 90 Chagatai (son of Genghis Khan), 2:38 Chaim, Yosef, 2:128 Chakras, 1:377, 384 Challah, 2:129, 137–138, 141, 206–207 Chamunda, 1:374 Changing Woman, 2:12, 13 Chan Khong, 1:112–113 Chanukah, 2:139, 212 Chaos, 1:42 Chapman, Vera, 2:217 Charismatic Catholicism, 1:182 Charismatic Christianity, 1:182 Charismatic preaching, 1:164, 165

Charity, 1:173–175 Charya Nritya, 1:107, 108 Chast, Roz, 2:127 Chastity, 1:175–176, 346, 2:105, 109, 345 Chastity belt, 1:175 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 1:355 Chayat, Sherry, 1:105 Cheng Yen, 1:112 Chen Jinggu, 1:75 Chicago, Judy, 2:127, 309 Chicanas, 2:360 Child abuse, 1:15 Childbirth. See Birth China abortion in, 1:100 Buddhism in, 1:117, 130, 134, 153, 2:357 Confucianism in, 1:281–282, 294 Hongshan culture, 2:359 missionaries in, 1:226 shamans in, 1:74–75 Chinese medicine, traditional, 1:306–307 Chinese of Indonesia, 2:84 Chochmah (Wisdom), 2:144–145 Chödrön, Pema, 1:104, 123 Chodron, Thubten, 1:104, 112 Christ, Carol P., 2:240, 248, 323, 337, 339 Christensen, Else, 2:221, 225 Christian Coalition, 1:202 Christian egalitarianism, 1:248 Christian Feminism Today, 1:187 Christianity, 1:53–54, 157–279, 2:276 abbesses, 1:160–161 abortion and, 1:161–163 in Africa, 1:176–178 African American, 1:163–166 Anglican/Episcopalian women religious, 1:166–167 Apocrypha, 1:168–169 and charity, 1:173–175 and chastity, 1:175–176 Christine de Pizan, 1:188–189, 278–279 and clothing, 1:189–193 Eastern Orthodox, 1:176 and education, 1:193–197 Ethiopian, 1:22 Ethiopian Orthodox, 1:177 in Europe, 1:178–180 evangelical, 1:182



and “The Fall,” 1:197–199 and female genital mutilation, 1:15 founders of Christian denominations, 1:199–201 fundamentalism, 1:201–204 and homosexuality, 1:206–208 interfaith dialogue post 9/11, 1:208–211 introduction, 1:157–159 in Latin America, 1:180–184 marriage, divorce, and widowhood, 1:213–216 in the Middle Ages, 1:221–223 ministers, 1:223–225 missionaries, 1:225–227 modern and contemporary art, 1:170–173 monasticism and contemporary women, 1:230–231 monasticism and medieval women, 1:231–233 monastic life, 1:227–230 orthodox, 1:242–243 pilgrimage, 1:243–245 and polygamy, 1:245–247 prohibition of, 1:126, 242 Protestant denominations, 1:247–250 relationship and social models in scripture, archeology, and history, 1:250–253 revivalist movements, 1:163 Roman Catholic women religious, 1:253–255 sex and gender, 1:260–262 Sophia, 1:263–265 stigmatics, 1:265–266 in the United States, 1:184–188 and widowhood, 1:215–216, 267–271 women in early Christianity, 1:271–273 women in the Reformation, 1:273–276 women writers in early and medieval Christianity, 1:276–279 See also Anabaptists; Christians; Christian saints; Christian scripture; Hildegard of Bingen; Julian of Norwich; Mary Magdalene; Mary of Nazareth; Mormonism; Mother of God; Mystics; Protestantism; Roman Catholic Church Christianity in Africa, 1:176–178

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Christianity in Europe, 1:178–180 Christianity in Latin America, 1:180–184 colonial Christianity, 1:180–182 Pentecostal and Protestant Christianity, 1:183 Pluralization and Contemporary Latin America, 1:182–183 Christianity in the United States, 1:184–188 Christian Kabbalah, 1:263, 264 Christians Hindu violence against, 1:340 Indian, 1:323 See also Christianity Christian saints, 1:4–5, 222, 241, 255–259, 2:332, 345, 357 Agatha, 1:256 Ambrose, 1:162, 260, 271 Anne, 1:223 Augustine of Hippo, 1:197–198, 207, 221, 231, 245, 260, 268 Barbara, 1:256 Basil the Great, 1:162, 245 Benedict of Nursia, 1:232 Bridget of Sweden, 1:257 Brigit (Brigid) of Ireland, 2:332 Catherine of Alexandria, 1:256 Catherine of Siena, 1:241, 257, 257, 277, 278 Clare of Assis, 1:257 Clement of Alexandria, 1:162 Cyprian of Carthage, 1:271 Cyril of Alexandria, 1:54 Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton, 1:186 Elizabeth of Thüringia, 1:257 Elizabeth of the Trinity, 1:241 Euphemia, 1:272–273 Felicitas, 1:271, 272 Frances of Rome, 1:257 Frances Xavier Cabrini, 1:186 Francis of Assisi, 1:265 Francis of Rome, 1:265 Gertrude, 1:265 Jerome, 1:221, 231, 260, 268 John Chrysostom, 2:162 John Paul II, 1:224 Kateri Tekakwitha, 1:184, 258, 259 Katharine Drexel, 1:186 Margaret of Antioch, 1:223

399

400

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Christian saints (Continued) Pauli Murray, 1:187 Perpetua of Carthage, 1:271, 272, 276 Scholastica, 1:160, 232 Teresa of Avila, 1:239, 240, 241, 258 Teresa of Calcutta, 1:259 Thérèse of Lisieux, 1:241 Thomas Aquinas, 1:162 See also Mary Magdalene; Mary of Nazareth Christian Science Publishing Society, 1:200 Christian scripture Apocrypha, 1:168–169 Book of Mormon, 1:233 charity in, 1:173 and the Garden of Eden, 1:197–198 and Jewish law, 1:184 on marriage, 1:212, 213, 245–246 on Mary of Nazareth, 1:235–237 Pastoral Epistles, 1:245 relationship and social models in, 1:250–253 on sexuality, 1:206–207 Song of Solomon, 1:251 two versions of Creation, 1:203, 251 on widows and widowhood, 1:267–268, 270 women in, 1:178 Christians for Biblical Equality, 1:187 Christian theosophy, 1:263 Christian Wisdom Traditions, 1:263 Christine de Pizan (ca. 1364–ca. 1430), 1:188–189, 278–279 Chukchee people, 2:265 Church of Christ, Scientist, 1:186, 199, 200 Church of England, 1:194, 196. See also Anglican church Church of God, 1:249 Church of God in Christ, 1:165 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. See Mormonism Church of the Nazarene, 1:249 Cicero, 1:67 Circle of life, 1:331 Circle Sanctuary, 2:331 Circulo Odinista Español, 2:221 Circumcision, 2:136

Civil rights era, 1:165 Clare of Assisi, 1:257 Classical Confucianism, 1:284–285 Cleisthenes, 1:67 Clement of Alexandria, 1:162 Cleopatra VII, 1:35, 37, 38, 51 Clothing, 1:189–193, 2:85, 138, 244 aesthetic aspect of, 2:14–15 and Athena, 1:30, 31 biblical references to, 1:189–190, 191, 192 ceremonial, 1:13, 18, 285, 370, 2:15, 39, 250, 262, 267, 282 embellishment of, 2:14 of Hasidim, 2:149 and head covering, 1:210, 243, 260, 2:45, 69 hemline length, 1:190–191 of Jain aescetics, 2:107, 109–111, 112 Japanese wedding garments, 2:287 monastics, 1:230 mourning, 1:215 Native American, 2:9, 21, 22, 41 from pelts, 2:14 from plant fibers, 2:14 private school uniforms, 1:17 in the Renewal Judaism movement, 2:166 restrictions of, 1:22, 122, 135, 362, 2:76 of Sikh women, 2:291 wedding, 2:21 widows, 1:347, 353, 371 women in trousers, 1:191 See also Coverings; Veiling Clothing (Native American), 2:14–15 Cohen, Katherine M., 2:126 Collins, Joan, 2:190 Coming of age ceremonies, 2:12, 13, 17, 24–25, 27 bar mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 183, 188 bat mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 121, 128–129, 183 See also Life-cycle ceremonies; Rites of passage (Sikh) Committee on Jewish Law (CJL), 2:120–121 Community of Our Lady of Walsingham, 1:230–231



Community of Saint Mary the Virgin, 1:167 Compassion, 1:210, 2:56, 60, 105, 316, 355, 364. See also Bodhisattvas; Dance of Tara; Engaged Buddhism; Guan Yin; Motherhood: Link to compassion; Shekinah; Tara Complementarianism, 1:202, 247–248 Conception rituals, 1:374, 2:229 Concerned Women’s Movement (Indonesia), 2:84 Conference of Liberal Rabbis, 2:194 Confirmation in Judaism, 2:118, 121 Confucianism, 1:281–298, 2:345 books for women, 1:282–284 classical, 1:284–286 Confucian revivalism, 1:286–288 cult of female chastity, 1:289 feminine virtues, 1:290–291 filial piety, 1:291–294 hierarchy in, 1:284–285 introduction, 1:281–282 motherhood, 1:294–296 social context of, 1:281 traditional, 1:287 women’s changing roles, 1:296–298 Confucian revivalism, 1:286–288 Connelly, Jennifer, 2:190 Consecrated Women of East and Central Africa, 1:177 Conservative Judaism, 2:128, 183, 195 Constellations, 2:312 Contraception. See Birth control Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (UN), 2:159 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 2:186 Cook, Florence, 2:351 Cook, Jill, 2:260 Cope, Marianne, 1:258 Coptic church, 1:176 Corda, Murshida Vera, 2:101 Corn Mother, 2:2, 18–19, 34 Cosmic egg, 1:42 Cosmetics, 1:10 Council of Chalcedon, 1:176 Council of Hertford, 1:246

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Counter-Reformation, 1:179–180, 258 Covenant of the Goddess, 2:238 Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans, 2:218 Covens, 2:235 feminist, 2:216 women-only, 2:225, 235 Coverings, 2:45–47, 69, 73–74, 89–90 banning of, 2:73–74, 76 and Druzism, 2:50 Coy, Genevieve, 1:89 Crandall, Prudence, 1:185 Crandon, Mina, 2:351 Creation stories, 1:4 Inuit, 2:35 Native American, 2:15–17 Ob-Ugrian, 2:252 Yoruba, 1:23 See also Origin myths Creation stories (Native American), 2:15–17 Creatrix (Creator Goddess), 1:3, 42, 79, 263, 328, 336, 355, 359, 363, 373, 377, 379, 380, 2:2, 222, 230, 265, 309, 359. See also Mother Goddess Crete Bronze Age (Minoan), 2:245–248, 354 prehistoric, 2:240–241 Crete, religion and culture, 2:245–249 “Croning” ritual, 2:229 Cross-dressing, ritual, 1:13 Crouch, Janice, 1:187 Crouch, Paul, 1:187 Crowley, Vivianne, 2:225 Crowther, Patricia, 2:224 Crypto-Jews, 2:201 Cuba, 1:14, 24 Cult of Female Chastity, 1:289 Cult of True Womanhood, 2:119 Cuneiform writing, 1:81 Curanderas, 2:8 Cutts, Linda Ruth, 1:105 Cyclic time, 2:312 Cyprian (saint), 1:271 Cyril of Alexandria, 1:54 Dafora, Asadata, 2:361 Dahia al-Kahena, 1:20

401

402

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Dakota Access Pipeline, 2:6 Dalai Lamas, 1:117, 125 Dalida, 2:191 Dalits, 1:323–324 Daly, Mary, 1:249, 2:305, 337, 339 Dance, 1:21, 22, 106–108, 324–326 Basket Dance, 2:10 and Buddhism, 1:106–108 ecstatic, 1:77, 199, 2:336, 363 Hindu, 1:324–326 music for 1:5–6 Punjabi, 2:301, 301 ritual, 1:1, 2:258, 266, 267, 289 round dances, 2:30 at Shinto shrines, 2:275 spiral dances, 2:311 Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance, 2:361 See also Dance of Tara; Dancers; Ghost Dance Dance of Tara, 1:108–111, 109, 2:336 Dancers, 1:3, 8, 20, 21, 38, 2:191, 361 Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance, 2:361 snake, 1:18 See also Dance Danger Cave, 2:9 Daoism, 1:299–312 in China, 1:281, 284, 288, 299–302 goddesses, 1:303–305 healers, 1:305–307 introduction, 1:299–300 meditation in, 2:335, 336 priestesses, nuns, and ordination, 1:307–310 Quanzhen school, 1:302, 310 revival of, 1:309–310 Wu Wei and the feminine, 1:310–312 Zhengyi school, 1:302, 310 Daoism in China, 1:300–302 Daolu yuan, 1:301 Dark Moon astrology, 2:313 Dasara, Prema, 1:108, 109, 110 Dashain festival (Navaratri/Durga Puja), 1:335, 336, 350 Dashú, Max, 1:1, 2:146, 193, 339 Daughter of the Celestial Emperor (Tiandi), 1:304 Daughters, filial, 1:292–293 Daughters of Charity, 1:173, 232 Daughters of the Moon Tarot, 2:340

Davidman, Lynn, 2:149–150 Davies, Nike, 1:8–9 Davis, Elizabeth Gould, 2:339 Day, Dorothy, 1:174, 186 Daystar Television Network, 1:187 Deacon/deaconess, 1:157, 176, 179, 224, 243, 247, 253, 261, 271, 272 Dead Sea Scrolls, 2:123, 199 Deaf, 2:195 Death life-cycle ceremonies for, 1:17 and Sikhism, 2:300–301 See also Burials; Funeral practices Death Goddess, 1:46. See also Hecate Death-lamps, 2:24 D’Eaubonne, Françoise, 2:321 Deborah (biblical), 2:152, 212 Decolonial studies, 2:362 Dedmon, Theresa, 1:171 Deep ecology, 2:313–316, 322 feminist criticism of, 2:315–316 principles of, 2:314–315 Deguchi Nao, 2:276, 285 Deguchi Onisaburoˉ, 2:276 Deities direct communication with, 1:4 third gender, 2:362 See also Goddesses Deities, African, 1:4, 2:26, 361 Agwe, 1:5 Atete, 1:20 Babaluaye, 1:5 Bahia, 1:13 Candomblé, 1:13 Damballah, 1:5 Elegba (Eshu, Eleggua, Exu), 1:4 Erzulie Danto, 1:5 Erzulie Freda, 1:5 Ewa, 1:13 Idemili, 2:25, 26 Iemanjá, 1:13 Lasyrenn (Labalenn), 1:5 Lwa, 1:5 Nanã, 1:13 Obatala (Ochala, Oxala, Obbatala), 1:5 Ochosi (Ochossi, Oxossi), 1:5 Oduduwa, 1:23 Ogun (Oggun, Ogou, Ogum), 1:5 Orishas, 1:4–5, 24, 2:362



Orunmila (Orunla, Ifa), 1:5 Osun (River Goddess) (Oshun, Ochún), 1:4, 23, 24, 2:359 Oxum, 1:13 Oyá (Yansa, Yansan), 1:5, 13, 2:357 Papa Legba, 1:5 Sango (Shango, Xango), 1:5 Serpent Goddess Uadjet, 1:18 Yemoja (River Goddess) (Yemaya, Iemanja), 1:4, 23, 24, 2:362 Vodou, 1:3 Deities, Buddhist Avalokites´vara, 1:117, 130, 144 Celestial Goddesses, 1:106 female Buddhas, 1:107, 115–116, 130 Guan Yin, 1:97, 102, 103, 116–117, 120, 125–126, 129–130, 305, 309, 2:345 Guhyeshvari, 1:116 Hariti, 1:97, 114–115, 116, 2:278 Kannon Bosatsu, 1:116–117 Lakshmi (Sri Lakshmi), 1:114, 332, 333, 337, 348– 350, 351, 366, 367, 368, 373 Marici, 1:115 Nature and Tree Goddesses (yakshinis), 1:114 Palden Lhamo, 1:116 Prajnaparamita, 1:97, 115, 136–138 Prithivi, 1:97, 114 Sitatapatra, 1:115 Tara, 1:97, 102, 108–111, 115, 120, 129, 130, 143, 144–147, 145, 2:344–345 Tashi Tseringma, 1:116 Vajrayogini, 1:116, 143 Vasudhara, 1:115 Deities, Chinese/Confucian Eternal Mother, 1:288 Seul Sha, 2:25 Deities, Daoist Ancestral Goddesses, 1:304–305 Daughter of the Celestial Emperor (Tiandi), 1:304 Goddess of the Morning Clouds (Bixia yuanjun), 1:304 Lady Near the Water’s Edge (Linshui furen), 1:75, 304–305 Mazu, Holy Mother in Heaven (Tianshang shengmu), 1:304–305

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mother of the Dao, 1:303 Mother of the Dipper (Doumu), 1:304 Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannü), 1:304, 308, 2:332 Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), 1:74, 303–304 Xuannü, 2:332 Deities, Egyptian, 2:361 Atum, 1:35 Bes, 1:38 Hathor, 1:39 Isis, 1:37, 237, 2:329, 332 Ma’at, 1:38 Nunet, 1:37–38 Osiris, 1:37 Sekhmet, 2:332 Taweret, 1:38 Wadjet, 2:332 Deities, Gaulish, Sirona, 2:332 Deities, Germanic, Freyja, 2:255 Deities, Greek and Roman Angitia, 2:332 Aphrodite, 1:55, 72–73, 2:320 Apollo, 1:77 Artemis, 1:33, 44–45, 65–66 Athena (Minerva), 1:29–32, 30, 44, 65–66, 237, 2:254, 255 Black Artemis of Ephesus, 1:49 Bona Dea, 1:70 Ceres, 1:69 Chaos, 1:42 Demeter, 1:39–40, 41, 65–66, 2:255, 329 Diana, 1:33–35, 70, 2:329 Dike, 1:66 Epione, 2:332 Eros, 1:42 Feronia, 1:70 Gaia (Earth Goddess), 1:32, 42–43, 65–66 Hades, 1:39–40 Hecate, 1:33, 46, 47, 2:329 Hera, 1:65–66, 237 Hermes, 1:40 Hestia, 1:65–66, 237 Juno, 1:33, 69, 70–71, 2:345 Jupiter, 1:69 Latonia, 1:33 Lucina, 1:33

403

404

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Deities, Greek and Roman (Continued) Luna, 1:33 Magna Mater, 2:345 Mars, 1:69 Minerva, 2:332 Persephone, 1:39–40, 41 pre-Greek goddesses, 1:65–66 Quirinus, 1:69 Sea Gods, 1:42 Themis, 1:65–66 Trivia, 1:33 Uranus, 1:42 Virbius, 1:33 Deities, Hindu, 1:360–361 Aditi, 1:315–316, 373, 379 Ambika, 1:373 Brahma, 1:332, 369 Chamunda, 1:374 Devi (Mahadevi; Great Goddess), 1:326–329, 331–332, 332, 333, 355, 377, 2:255 Divine Mother, 1:357 Draupadi, 1:329–331, 366, 367 Durga (Mahamaya), 1:328, 331–335, 336, 355, 359, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 377, 378, 2:255 Ganesha, 1:316, 349, 355 Gauri, 1:332, 373 household/clan deities, 1:343–344 Irrti, 1:365 Kali, 1:325, 328, 330, 331–335, 337, 339, 341–342, 355, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 2:255 Krishna, 1:325, 341, 342, 359, 360–361 Lakshmi (Sri Lakshmi), 1:114, 332, 333, 337, 348–350, 351, 366, 367, 368, 373 Mahadevi, 1:374 Mahamaya, 1:374, 377 Mahavidyas, 1:374 Matrikas, 1:374 Maya, 1:359 Mother Goddesses, 1:347, 354, 355 native Tibetan, 1:334 Parashakti, 1:374 Parvati, 1:325, 333, 334, 337, 355, 359, 365, 373 Prakriti, 1:379 Prithvi, 1:364, 373, 379

Purusha, 1:359 Radha, 1:325, 359, 360–361 Rama, 1:346 Ramayana, 1:366 Rani Sati, 1:347 Ratri, 1:373 Saraswati, 1:332, 337, 359, 364, 367, 368, 369–370, 373, 374, 2:278 Sati, 1:355, 365 sati-matas, 1:313 Shakti, 1:331, 335, 342, 372–374, 377, 2:364 Shiva, 1:317, 325, 332, 332, 334, 337, 342, 355, 359, 367, 371, 377, 2:364 Sita, 1:346, 366–367 Sitatapatra, 1:366 Surya, 1:355 Tara, 1:334 Uma, 1:334, 373 Usas, 1:364, 373 Ushas, 1:379 Vac, 1:364, 370, 373, 379 Vighneˉs´wara, 1:316 Vishnu, 1:318, 328, 332, 332, 342, 349, 351, 355, 360, 367 Yoginis, 1:374 See also Yoginis Deities, indigenous religions Creator Gods, 2:8 Hawai’ian, 2:360 Sedna (Sea Goddess), 2:7 Deities, Iranian, Anahita, 2:255 Deities, Jain, 2:106–107 Ambika, 2:107 Cakresvari, 2:107 Padmavati, 2:107 Saraswati, 2:106 16 Tantric Goddesses, 2:107 Sri Lakshmi, 2:106 vidyadevis, 2:107 yaksis, 2:107 Deities, Korean, Eopsin (black-snake Goddess), 2:25 Deities, Lithuanian, Laima, 2:255 Deities, Mesopotamian, 1:58 Aforodita, 1:55 An, 1:62 Aphrodite, 1:55 Asherah, 1:55, 2:327



Assur, 1:55 Astarte (Ashtart), 1:55, 2:320, 329 Baalat-Gebal, 1:55 Enki, 1:62, 63, 2:254 Enlil, 1:55, 62, 64 Ereshkigal, 2:254 Eshtar, 1:55 Inanna, 1:55–56, 63, 82 Ishtar, 1:55, 63 Marduk, 1:55, 2:353 Nanna (moon god), 1:81–82 Ninhursagˇa Mother Goddess, 1:62–63, ˘ 263 82, Ninimma, 1:82 Ninlil, 1:63–64 Nisaba, 1:82 Tanit, 1:55 Tiamat, 2:353 Turan, 1:55 Deities, Norse, Eir, 2:332 Deities, of ancient Israel Anat, 2:144 Asherah, 2:143–144, 143, 145, 152–153, 192, 327 Astarte (Ashtoret; Ashtart), 2:144, 329 Baal, 2:144 Binah, 2:145 Chochmah (Wisdom), 2:144–145 Elat, 2:143 Kabbalah, 2:142–143 Lady Wisdom (biblical), 2:153 modern Jewish Goddess references, 2:146 Queen of Heaven, 1:55, 237, 238, 2:144, 152, 153 Shekinah, 2:142–143, 145 Yahweh (YHWH), 2:144, 152, 153 Deities, Pagan Aphrodite, 2:234 Brigid, 2:218, 233 Cernunnos, 2:236 Cerridwen, 2:218 Eostre, 2:233 Flora, 2:233 Frigga, 2:228 Gabija, 2:228 Gaia, 2:222 Great Mother Goddess, 2:229, 230, 233, 234 Hearth Goddesses, 2:228

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Hestia, 2:228 Moon Goddess, 2:223 Persephone, 2:233 Sun God, 2:223 Sun King, 2:233 Vesta, 2:228 Deities, prehistoric Anat, 2:254 Bee Goddess, 2:252 Bird Goddess, 2:252, 267 Divine Ancestral Mother, 2:265 Goddess of Regeneration, 2:252 Great Goddess, 2:252, 254, 255 Hathor, 2:254 Inanna, 2:254, 354 Ishtar, 2:254 Mother Sun, 2:252 Sky God, 2:252 Snake Goddess, 2:267 Deities, Sami, Beiwe, 2:332 Deities, Shinto Amaterasu Omikami (Sun Goddess), 2:270–272, 278, 284 Ame-no-Uzume, 2:271, 278 Benzaiten (Goddess of Language and Arts), 2:278 Izanagi, 2:270, 277, 78–79 Izanami, 2:270, 277, 778–779 Kami, 2:277–278 Kishimojin, 2:278 Koˉtai Jin, 2:276 Tsukihi (Sun and Moon), 2:289 Tsukiyomi (Moon God), 2:270 Uke-mochi (Goddess of Food), 2:270 Deities, Slavic, Z˙ ywie, 2:332 Deities, Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec Aztec Cihuateteo, 2:35 Chalchiuhtlicue, 2:359 Coatlicue, 2:359 Flower Quetzal Goddess, 2:8 Ilamatecuhtli (Goddess of Earth, Milky Way, and Death), 2:15 Ixchel, 2:35, 332 Omecihuatl, 2:359 Ometecuhtli, 2:359 Sacred Mother, 2:359 Serpent Skirt, 2:359 Tonanzin, 2:359 Xochiquetzal, 2:35

405

406

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

De la Cruz, Juana Ines, 1:160 Delphic Oracle, 1:32–33, 67 Demeter, 1:39–40, 41, 65–66 Denison, Ruth, 1:104 Dennings, Kat, 2:190 Deta, Iya, 1:4 Devadasis, 1:106, 326–328 Devi (Mahadevi; Great Goddess), 1:326– 329, 331–332, 332, 333, 355, 377, 2:255 Devi Mahatma. See Durga Devis, 1:355 Devotional song (kirtan), 2:334 Dhamma Dena Desert Vipassana Center, 1:104 Dhammadinna, 1:151 Dhammananda, 1:123, 135 Dharmapala, Anagarika, 103 Dharmashastras, 1:362 Diamond Sangha, 1:105 Diana, 1:33–35, 34, 70 Dianic Wicca (Dianic Witchcraft), 1:27, 34, 2:225, 229, 317, 338, 362 Diaspora (Islam), 2:48–49 Diaspora African, 1:3–6, 2:361 Haitian, 1:3 Jewish, 2:147, 189 Muslim, 2:48–249 Sihk, 2:296 Yoruba, 1:23 Dickinson, Clare Joseph, 1:254 Dickinson, Frances, 1:161 Digambaras, 2:105, 106, 107–108, 109–111, 112, 113 Dike, 1:66 Dinah (biblical), 2:179 Dinizulu, Nana, 2:361 Diodore of Tarsus, 1:271 Dionysian mysteries, 1:39 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 1:48 Disability, 2:296 Displaced persons (DP) camps, 2:162 Divination, 1:1, 12, 13, 24, 68, 2:38, 275, 316–318, 340 in Heathenry, 2:221 16 cowry, 1:12 Yoruba, 2:361 Divine ancestral mother, 2:265

Divine feminine, 1:43, 87–88, 373, 2:338, 343 in the Classical Age, 1:365–366 and divination, 2:318 as Goddess, 2:232 as healing force, 2:331–332 as immanent, 1:43, 319, 373, 2:168, 232, 236, 323, 328 in Judaism, 2:143, 146 in the Modern Age, 1:367–1:368 and Paganism, 2:215, 218, 219, 224, 229 in performing arts, 2:309–310 in prehistoric figures, 2:262 and Reconstructionist Paganism, 2:228 in the Vedic Age, 1:364 Divine Masculine, 2:234, 338 Divine Mother, 1:144, 336, 357, 2:324 Divorce, 1:50, 95, 245, 2:51 and Christianity, 1:214–215 in the Druze religion, 2:51 in Iran, 2:94 and Islam, 2:66, 71, 73, 79–81, 94, 98 in Israel, 2:157, 159 in Japan, 2:280 and Judaism, 2:120, 123, 161, 175–177 See also Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood Diwali, 1:335, 337, 349, 2:106, 113 Dixon, Jeanne, 2:312 Docwra, Anne, 1:194 Doˉgen (Master), 1:123, 154 Doherty, Austin, 1:187 D’Oignies, Marie, 1:241 Dolmen stones, 2:24 Dolni Vestonice, 2:243 Domestic violence, 1:185, 381, 2:62, 161 Dominion theology, 1:162 Downey, Roma, 1:187 Dowry, 1:351, 2:296 Dragon Environmental Network, 2:219 Draupadi, 1:329–331, 366, 367 Draupadi festivals, 1:330 Dreams, 2:28, 29, 101 Dress codes, 1:22. See also Clothing Drexel, Katharine, 1:174, 186, 258 Drisha, 2:184 Druid Order, The, 2:217 Druidry, 2:217–218, 219, 224, 225, 232, 333



Drumming, 1:1, 3, 18, 2:318–320, 319, 361 in Nyabinghi Assemblies, 1:22–23 Taiko, 2:361 Druze religion, 2:49–52 Druze Religious Council, 2:51 Dubas, Marie, 2:191 Duchemin, Almaide, 1:186 Duchesne, Rose Philippine, 1:258 Duggar family, 1:203 Dunham, Katherine, 1:5–6, 2:361 Dupatta, 2:47, 90 Durga, 1:328, 331–335, 336, 355, 359, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 377, 378 Durga and Kali, 1:331–335 Durga Navratri, 1:334 Durga Puja (Navaratri/Dashain), 1:335, 336, 350 Dyer, Mary, 1:185 E., Sheila, 2:318 Earth First! 2:314, 324 Earth Goddess, 1:333, 334. See also Gaia Eastern Orthodox Church, 1:176, 263–264 Eaton, Elizabeth, 1:224, 248 Ecofeminism, 2:306, 315, 321–326 Eco-Paganism, 2:218–220 Ecowomanism, 2:321 Ecstatic worship, 2:361, 363 Eddy, Mary Baker, 1:186, 199, 200 Edelson, Mary Beth, 2:309 Education, in Africa, 1:177, 195 in Asia, 1:195 Baha’i, 1:88–91 Catholic, 1:186 in Christianity, 1:185, 193–197 in convents and nunneries, 1:195, 222, 254–255, 277 divinity schools, 1:196 for girls and women, 1:96, 160, 179, 193–194, 195, 346, 2:50, 51, 296 for girls and women (Confucian), 1:282–284, 285, 290–291, 298 in Islam, 2:52–55 in Judaism, 2:118, 130–132, 147– 148, 161, 162

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

of Muslim women and girls, 2:52–55, 70–71, 75, 102–103 in the Muslim world, 2:131–132 of Native American children, 2:4 university students, 2:131, 133 Eerindinlogun, 1:24 Effendi, Shoghi, 1:95 Efunche Wandondo (Rosalia Abreu), 1:4 Egalitarianism, 1:163, 247–249, 2:93, 120–121, 165, 315–316 Egeria, 1:33 Egypt, priestesses in, 1:18–19 Egyptian religion, 1:35–39 Eight Sabbats, 2:232, 236–237 Eilberg, Amy, 2:121, 195 Eisenstein, Judith Kaplan, 2:128 Ekaku, Hakuin, 1:154–155 Elaw, Zilpha, 1:164 Elders, pagan, 2:226–227 Elder status, 1:17 Eleusinian Mysteries, 1:39–42 Eliezer, Israel ben, 2:147 Elizabeth of the Trinity, 1:241 Elizabeth of Thüringia, 1:257, 269 Embroidery, 1:9 Emesal language, 2:256–257 Emmerick, Anna Katherina, 1:265 Endogamy, 1:321, 322, 323 Engaged Buddhism, 1:111–114 Enheduana, 1:55, 60, 81–82 ˘ 1:62, 63, 2:254 Enki, Enlil, 1:155, 62, 64 Ennoˉkyoˉ, 2:275, 276 Enuma Elish, 2:353 Environmental movement, 2:321–322 Eostre (spring equinox), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Episcopalian church, 1:165, 187, 224, 246, 248 in Latin America, 1:183 women religious, 1:166–167 See also Anglican church Erebus, 1:42 Eristi-Aya, 1:60 Eros, 1:42 Erzyan Mastor, 2:226 Esbats, 2:237 Eshtar, 1:55 Eskenazi, Tamara, 2:179

407

408

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Esperanto, 1:89 Essential oils, 2:333 Esther (biblical), 2:122, 139, 186, 188 Eteoboutadai family, 1:67 Eternal Word Television Network, 1:187 Ethical teachings, 1:4 Ethiopia Christianity in, 1:176 as Zion, 1:22 Ethiopian Orthodox church, 1:177 Ethnocentrism, 2:4–5 Eucharistic ministers, 1:179 Eugenius III (pope), 1:204 Euphemia (martyr and saint), 1:272–273 Eurasia, guardian spirits in prehistoric cultures, 2:251–252 Europe Christianity in, 1:178–180 conflict of cultures in, 2:247–251 Islam in, 2:71–74 Judaism in, 2:160–163 Euryale, 1:44 Eusebius of Caesarea, 1:245 Evangelical and Ecumenical Women’s Caucus, 1:187 Evangelical Christianity, 1:182 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), 1:224, 248 Evans, Arthur, 2:246–247 Eve and “The Fall,” 1:186, 197–198, 229, 2:169, 344 and Lilith, 2:172 in the Qur’an, 2:63–64 See also Adam; Lilith Evenk communities, 2:259 Ewe peoples, 1:3 Exorcism, 2:285 Exum, J. Cheryl, 2:179 Ezrat Nashim, 2:136 Fabiola, 1:173 Fabrics. See Textiles Face painting, 1:11 Facial piercing, 1:10 Falade, Chief Oloye Fayomi, 1:6 Falah, Hadiya Nasib, 2:51 Falah, Um Nasib Fatima, 2:51 Falashas, 1:15

Fama, Chief, 1:6 Family International, 1:246 Family planning, 1:22. See also Birth control Family purity (taharat mishpachah), 2:204–205 Family Research Council, 1:202 Farkas, Mary, 1:104 Farrar, Janet, 2:225 Fasting, 1:41, 95, 147, 309, 337, 352, 2:12, 19, 42, 48, 69, 73, 105, 107– 108, 109, 113, 138, 140, 336 Fatima, 2:56–57, 68, 344 Fatima al-Fihriyya, 2:70 Fatima bint al-Muthanna, 2:96 Fatimah bint ‘Ali al-Daqaq al-Naysaburiyyah, 2:98 Fatimah of Balkh (Omm Ali), 2:96 Fatimah of Cordova, 2:99 Fatiman, Cécile, 1:5 Fatima of Nishapur, 2:99 Fé, Pura, 2:5 Fedele, Anna, 2:338 Federation of Muslim Women’s Association of Nigeria, 2:70 Feldman, Deborah, 2:149 Feldshuh, Tova, 2:190 Felicitas (martyr), 1:271, 272 Felix, Rachel (Mademoiselle Rachel), 2:191 Female deities, 2:106–107. See also Deities; Goddesses Female divinities, 1:114–118. See also Feminine Divine; Goddesses Female evangelical societies, 1:196 Female feticide, 1:48, 2:296–297 Female figures, 2:341–342 with felines, 2:251, 254–255, 262, 263–264 fish sculptures, 2:264 neolithic, 2:240, 253–256 Sheela na gigs, 2:347–349 Upper Paleolithic, 2:260–264 Female genital mutilation (FGM) (also female genital circumcision; female genital cutting), 1:2, 14–16, 17, 2:57–58, 69–70, 339 Feminine Divine, 1:157, 2:355 in ancient Crete, 2:245 in art, 2:306



festivals devoted to, 1:335 in Hinduism, 1:313 in Neolithic female figures, 2:255 Feminine Energy, 1:377 Feminine Virtues Buddhist, 1:118–120 Confucian, 1:290–291 Shinto, 2:272–273 Feminism, 1:202, 340, 2:58–62, 362 Christian, 1:196, 249–250 eco-, 2:315 in Egypt, 2:54 environmental, 2:315 first wave, 1:185 and gender equality, 1:252–253 Goddess, 2:325, 337 Islamic, 2:51, 59–62 in Israel, 2:159 Jewish, 2:117, 120, 126, 128–129, 132–137, 138, 146, 166, 178, 193, 202 and the Lilith story, 2:173–174 in monastic orders, 1:229 Mormon, 1:235 Muslim, 2:63, 70 Orthodox Jewish, 2:183 second wave, 1:185, 2:305 and Sikhism, 2:293, 295–297 and spirituality, 2:218 See also Ecofeminism Feminist and women’s movements, 2:132–137 Feministas, 2:362 Feminist Holocaust studies, 2:154 Feminist issues in Sikhism, 2:295–297 Feminist studies, 2:321 Feminist theological movement, 1:182–183, 219 Feronia, 1:70 Fertility, 1:8, 23, 30, 38, 47, 51, 56, 2:17, 232, 253 and infertility, 1:50 Festival of the Sacred Tooth, 1:107 Festivals (Hinduism), 1:335–338 Ambuvaci, 1:357 Diwali, 1:335, 337, 349, 2:106, 113 Kali Puja, 1:337 Karva Chauth, 1:352 Kaumudi-Purnima festival, 1:349

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Lakshmi Puja, 1:352 Mahashivaratri, 1:337 Makar Sanranti, 1:338 Navaratri/Durga Puja/Dashain, 1:334, 335, 336, 356 Pongal, 1:336–337 Saraswati Puja (Vasant Panchami), 1:337, 370 Shivratri, 1:352 Teej, 1:352 Vat-Savitri Amavasya, 1:335 See also Festivals and holy days Festivals and holy days, 1:335–338, 2:137–141 Draupadi, 1:330 Durga Navratri, 1:334 Festival of the Sacred Tooth, 1:107 Jain, 2:113 Jewish, 2:137–140, 212 Mae d’agua, 1:24 Native American, 2:11–14 Rosh Hodesh, 2:197–198 Sacred Marriage festival, 1:55 seasonal, 2:231–234 sex-specific celebrations, 2:229–230 Sikh, 2:301–302 Filial piety Confucianism, 1:291–294, 295 Daoism, 1:308–309 Shinto, 2:272, 273–275 Filmmaking, 2:294–295 Final rites. See Funeral practices Finnic peoples, 2:37 Finno-Ugrians, 2:265 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, 1:187 Fioretta of Modena, 2:169 Firestone, Shulamith, 2:340 First Great Awakening, 1:163, 170, 194 First Man, 2:13 First Peoples, 2:6–7. See also Native American religion First solid food rituals, 1:374, 375 First Woman, 2:13 First Zen Institute (NY), 1:104 Fitzpatrick, Elyse, 1:187 Five Point Mission, 1:174 Florida Holocaust Museum, 2:156 Flower Quetzal Goddess, 2:8 Flower remedies, 2:333

409

410

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Focus on the Family, 1:202 Fon peoples, 1:3, 20 Food (Judaism), 2:141–142 for Passover, 2:139–140 and the role of kinship, 2:18 Food preparation, 2:123, 141, 212, 245 amen meals, 2:142 for religious feasts, 2:141 for Sabbath, 2:141 Sikh, 2:302 Foot binding, 1:290, 2:339 Foote, Julia, 1:164, 194 Fortune-telling, 2:340 Foster, Mary Elizabeth Mikahala, 1:103 Founders of Christian denominations, 1:199–201 Founders of new religious movements, 2:275–277 Foursquare church, 1:183, 201, 203, 224, 249 Fox, Kate, 2:350 Fox, Margaret, 2:350, 351 Fox, Selena, 2:331 Frances of Assisi, 1:265 Frances of Rome, 1:257 Francis (pope), 1:162, 224, 253 Frank, Anne, 2:190 Frank, Eva, 2:201 Frank, Jacob, 2:201 Frankel, Ellen, 2:179 Frankist movement, 2:201 Freud, Sigmund, 1:47 Friedan, Betty, 2:136, 340 Frost, Yvonne, 2:225 Frymer-Kensky, Tikvah, 2:146 Fukada Chiyoko, 2:276 Full moon ceremonies, 2:237 Fundamentalism as domination, 1:252, 2:355 Christian, 1:201–204 Hindu, 1:338–340 Islamic, 2:72 Funeral industry, 2:330 Funeral practices, 1:18, 120–122, 376 Buddhist, 1:120–122 Senufo, 1:7 See also Burials Gage, Matilda Joslyn, 2:224 Gaia (collage by Cristina Biaggi), 2:324

Gaia (Earth goddess), 1:31, 42–43, 65–66, 2:222 Gaia hypothesis/theory, 2:218, 309–310 Gainsbourg, Charlotte, 2:191 Galindo, Lauryn, 1:109 Gampo Abbey, 1:104 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (“Mahatma”), 1:318, 355 Ganesha, 1:316, 349, 355 Gardner, Gerald Brosseau, 2:215, 224, 234–235 Gargi, 1:341 Gauri, 1:332, 373 Gaza War, 2:187 Gelede masquerade, 1:7, 13 Geller, Laura, 2:195 Gender equality, 1:90–91, 95, 248–249, 2:136, 185, 273, 315, 334, 346 in Buddhism, 1:112, 141 in China, 1:298 and the hajj, 2:85 and Islam, 2:59, 93–94 in Japan, 1:297–298 in Korea, 1:298 scriptural and historic models of, 1:250–253 and Sikhism, 2:296–297 in Zen Buddhism, 1:156 Gender fluidity, 1:13, 23, 262, 2:25, 26, 26, 221, 275–276. See also Transgender persons Gender ideology, 2:134 Gender jihad, 2:94–95 Gender norms, 1:339 Hasidic, 2:149 Gender prejudices, 2:296 Gender relations, in Islam, 2:69 Gender roles in the Baha’i faith, 1:91–93 in Buddhism, 1:122–125 in Confucianism, 1:284–285 in Hasidism, 2:147 in Kabbalah, 2:169 Native American, 2:359 Gender studies, 2:185 Gender transitions, 2:259 Generativity, 1:8 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 1:170 German Baptist churches, 1:180 Gert, Valeska, 2:191



Gertrude (saint), 1:265 Ghosha, 1:341 Ghost Dance, 2:8, 20 Giants, 1:42 Gidda, 2:301–2:302 Giehse, Therese, 2:191 Gifting, 2:25 Gikow, Ruth, 2:127 Gimbutas, Marija, 2:240, 247, 250, 253, 265, 323, 327, 340, 341–342, 343 and the religions of Old Europe, 2:249–251 Glossolalia, 1:186 Gluck, Gemma LaGuardia, 2:156 Gluckl of Hameln, 2:212 Gnosticism, 1:263, 2:49–50 Goba people, 1:20 God feminine aspect of, 1:252–253, 263, 2:344 See also Deities; Goddesses; Yahweh Goddard, Paulette, 2:190 Goddesses (Daoism), 1:303–305 Goddesses (Judaism), 2:142–146 Goddesses in African neolithic sites, 2:358 agrarian, 2:252 Amaterasu Omikami (Sun Goddess), 2:270–272 Ame-no-Uzume, 2:271 ancestral, 1:304–305 of ancient Israel, 2:142–146 Aphrodite, 1:55, 72–73, 2:320 Asian and Pacific Islander, 2:359 Asherah, 1:55, 2:327 Astarte, 1:55, 2:320, 329 Atete, 1:20 Bee Goddess, 2:252 Bird Goddess, 2:252, 254, 267 Black, 2:361 Celestial, 1:106 Crone/Birth Giver, 2:234 Cybele, 2:320 cycladic, 2:254 as dancing partners/consorts of gods, 1:325 Daoist, 1:301, 303–305 Demeter, 1:39–40, 41, 65–66, 2:255, 329 depicted with drums, 2:320

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Diana, 1:33–35, 70, 2:329 Divine Feminine as, 2:232 Divine Mother, 1:357 Earth Goddesses (Gaia), 1:31, 42–43, 65–66, 333, 334, 2:222, 324 Earth Mother Goddess, 2:245 Gaia, 2:324 Flower Quetzal Goddess, 2:8 Goddesses of Crete, 2:240–241 Goddess of Mountains, 2:274 Goddess of Regeneration, 2:252 Goddess of the Morning Clouds, 1:304 Grain Goddess, 2:255 Great Goddess (Uralian), 2:252 Great Mother Goddess, 2:234, 308, 311, 348 Greek, 2:361 Hathor, 2:320 Heathen, 2:222 in the Hebrew Bible, 2:150 Hecate, 2:329 Hindu, 1:313, 363–368 Isis, 1:37, 2:324, 329 Jain, 2:106–107 in Judaism, 2:142–146 and leopards, 2:254–255 Maiden, 2:233, 234 Minerva, 2:332 Minoan Snake Goddess, 2:245, 247 Mother Goddesses, 1:347, 354, 355, 2:331 Mother/Reaper, 2:233 Native American, 2:15–16 Nature and Tree Goddesses, 1:114 Neolithic, 2:253–255 Neolithic European, 2:255 Osun (River Goddess), 1:4, 23, 24, 2:359 Oya, 2:357 pagan, 2:218, 227, 227–228, 230, 232 Pele (Goddess of the Volcano), 2:360 Ping, 2:332 precolonial Mexican, 2:360 pregnant, 2:267 prehistoric, 2:266 rituals honoring, 2:230 Sekhmet, 2:320, 332 Shekinah, 2:354 Snake Goddess, 2:254, 267, 332 Sophia, 2:354

411

412

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Goddesses (Continued) Spider Woman, 2:329 Sun Goddesses, 1:78–79, 2:70–72 Vedic, 1:379 Yemaya, 2:362 Yoruba, 2:359 Z˙ ywie, 2:332 See also Deities; Yoginis Goddess Icon Spirit Banners (Ruyle), 2:310– 311, 310, 328 Goddess movements, 2:146, 340, 346 Neo-pagan, 2:317 Goddess of the Morning Clouds (Bixia yuanjun), 1:304 Goddess pilgrimage, 2:337–338 Goddess spirituality, 2:225, 229, 316, 326–330 and healing, 2:333 Goddess symbols, 2:317 Goddess worship, 2:361 God’s Wife of Amun, 1:19 Goettner-Abendroth, Heide, 2:248, 342 Gold, Miri, 2:196 Goldenberg Judith Plaskow, 2:172 Goldstein, Elyse, 2:179 Gonzalez, Fermina (Ocha Bi), 1:4 Gonzalez, Mama Monserrate (Oba Tero), 1:4 Gopıˉ girls, 1:314, 318, 360–361 Gorgon Medusa, 1:28, 43–48, 2:349 in Western history, 1:46–47 Gormley, Joan Frances, 1:175 Gospel music, 1:172–173 Gospel of Mary Magdalene, 1:168, 219, 251 Gospel of Philip, 1:168, 219 Gospel of Thomas, 1:168–169, 219 Gottlieb, Lynn, 2:146, 193, 195, 196 Göttner-Abendroth, Heide, 2:327 Graham, Isabella, 1:174 Grahn, Judy, 2:339, 341 Grail, The, 1:227 Grant, Jacquelyn, 1:187 Granth Sahib (Guru), 2:298–299, 303, 304 Grave goods, 2:243–244, 251, 258 female figures, 2:253 Great Disappointment, 1:200 Great Goddess (Hindu). See Devi Great Goddess (Uralian), 2:252

Great Mother Goddess, 1:39, 42, 55, 299, 315, 2:311, 324, 345, 348 Native American, 2:15–16, 17 pagan, 2:218, 229, 230, 233, 234, 308, 311, 324, 348 Great Schism, 1:263 Great Wailing ceremony, 1:56 Greece, missionaries in, 1:226 Greek and Roman women, daily lives of, 1:48–52 Green, Eva, 2:191 Green, Paula, 1:113 Greenberg, Blu, 2:120 Green Burial Council, 2:331 Green Corn Ceremony, 2:19 Green funerals, 2:330–331 Green Man, 2:233 Greenpeace, 2:314 Green Sisters, 1:255 Greer, Germaine, 2:340 Grenn, Kohenet D’vorah J., 2:193 Griffin, Susan, 2:339 Griffiths, Marcia, 1:22 Grimké, Sarah, 1:174, 185 Gross, Rita, 1:105 Groves, Sara, 1:171 Guan-eum. See Guan Yin Guan Yin, 1:102, 103, 116–117, 125–126, 129–130, 305, 309, 2:345 Guardian spirits in Eurasian cultures, 2:251–252 Gudea (king), 1:60 Gugenheim, Shoshana, 2:127 Guhyeshvari, 1:116 Gumelnitza peoples, 2:253 Gurpurabs, 2:301 Guru period, 2:297–298 Gurus, 1:340–343, 360, 361 Gurus and saints, 1:340–343 Habdalah, 2:138 Hadassah, 2:135–136 Hades, 1:39–40 Hadewijch, 1:241 Hadith, 2:45, 53, 59, 60, 62–63, 65, 68. 69–70, 88–89, 91–92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 344, 345. See also Qur’an Hadlakat, 2:137



Hafsah bint ‘Umar, 2:52, 88 Hagar, 2:62–63 Hagen, Nina, 2:191 Hagiographies, 1:97, 255–258 Hair designs, 1:7, 8, 9, 10, 16–17 Hair dye, 1:191 Haitian diaspora, 1:3 Haitian Revolution, 1:5 Hajj pilgrimage, 2:63, 69, 84–86 Hakafoth, 2:139 Halachah, 2:115, 120, 121, 149 Halifax, Joan, 1:112 Hallucinogenic plants, 2:258, 259 Hamantaschen, 2:139 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 1:165 Hammer, Jill, 2:146, 179, 193 Handfasting, 2:237 Hannah (biblical), 2:151 Hanon, Geraldine Hatch, 2:312 Hariti, 1:114–115, 116 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins, 1:185 Harrison, Jane, 2:229 Harrist churches, 1:246 Hartman, Zenkei Blanche, 1:105 Hashmi, Farhat, 2:103 Hasidism, 2:147–150, 161, 162, 190 Chabad-Lubavich, 2:119, 147, 149–150 Haskalah, 2:161, 188–189 Hatha Yoga, 2:364, 365 Hathor, 1:39 Hatshepsut, 1:35, 37 Hausa, 1:21 Haut, Rivka, 2:120 Haviland, Laura, 1:185 Havurah, 2:136 Hawn, Goldie, 2:190 Hawwa, 2:63–65 Hayden, Maria B., 2:350 Headscarves, 2:73–74 Head shaving, 1:16–17 Healers, 1:77, 305–307, 2:331–334 Philippine Island, 2:359–360 Healing, 1:12, 21, 2:8, 28, 275, 276 faith, 2:277 folk healing, 2:332 meditative, 2:336 mind body spirit approach, 2:333 self-, 2:230–231

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

spiritual, 2:37 Tenriky, 2:289 using traditional plants and herbs, 1:4 Healing ceremonies, 1:18 Heathenry, 2:220–222, 224, 227, 232 universalist vs. folkish, 2:220–221 Heathens, 2:219 Heavenly Mother, 1:233 Hebrew Bible, 2:120, 150–153, 173, 188, 192, 193 Hebrew Goddess Prayerbook, 2:146 Hecate, 1:33, 1:46, 47, 2:329 Heck, Barbara, 1:186 Helen of Troy, 1:73 Hellenic Reconstructionism, 2:228 Hellenism, 2:227 Henes, Donna, 2:341 Henge of Keltria, 2:217 Hera, 1:65–66, 237 Heraklion Museum, 2:247 Herbal remedies, 2:28 Hermes, 1:40 Herrad of Hohenberg, 1:232 Herrad of Landsberg, 1:277 Hervör, Angie, 2:221 Hesse, Eva, 2:127 Hestia, 1:65–66 Hetepheres I, 1:35–36 Hickey, Marilyn, 1:187 Hieroglyphs, 2:11 Hijab, 1:210, 2:69, 73, 76, 77, 90 banning of, 2:54 in Islam, 2:45–47 restrictions on, 2:46–47 Hilda (Whitby Abbey), 1:160 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 1:204–206, 205, 222, 232, 240, 241, 251, 277, 278 Hill, Julia Butterfly, 2:314 Himiko (shaman-queen), 1:75, 2:281, 283–284 Hinduism, 1:313–385, 2:49–50 Bhakti, 1:316–320 Brahmanic, 1:150–151 caste, 1:321–324 dance, 1:324–326 devadasis, 1:326–328 female gurus, 2:336

413

414

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Hinduism (Continued) festivals, 1:335–338 fundamentalism, 1:338–340 Golden Age of, 1:377–378 gurus and saints, 1:340–343 household shrines, 1:343–345, 346 ideals of womanhood, 1:345–348 introduction, 1:313–315 and kirtan, 2:334 marriage, 1:350–353 matriliny, 1:353–356 meditation, 2:335, 336 pilgrimage, 1:356–358 prakriti, 1:358–360 Radha and Gopi girls, 1:360–361 religious conversion from, 1:324 renunciation, 1:361–363 sacred texts on women, 1:363–369 Samkhya school, 1:357–358 sati (suttee), 1:313, 347, 353, 370–372, 376, 2:339 Shaivism, 1:367 Shaktism, 1:367 stage-of-life rituals (samskaras), 1:331, 374–376, 375 Tantric, 1:377–378, 2:336, 363 Vaishnava, 1:360, 367 Vedic, 1:378–383, 2:363, 364 and yoga, 2:363 yoginis, 1:383–385 See also Deities, Hindu; Karma Hindus, as followers of Sufism, 2:101 Hindu sacred texts, 1:336, 337, 338, 345, 346, 347, 355, 358, 362, 363–368, 370, 372, 373, 375, 377, 378, 382–384 Bhagavad Gita, 1:317, 358, 2:364 Classical Age and the Divine Feminine, 1:365–366 Mahabharata, 1:317, 324, 329–331, 334, 345–347, 366–368, 373 Vedic Age and the Divine Feminine, 1:364 Vedic Age and the Earthly Feminine, 1:364 Hindu saints (sadhu/sadhvi), 1:340–343 Akka Mahadevi, 1:319, 325–326, 342 Anandamayi Ma, 1:342 Andal (Antal), 1:318, 342, 367

Avvaiyaˉr, 1:316 Bhaktha Meera, 1:342 Caitanya, 1:319 Candi Das, 1:319 Gargi, 1:341 Gaurıˉbaˉi, 1:318 Ghosha, 1:341 Gonaˉˉı, 1:318 Is´ai Jñaˉniyaˉr, 1:317 Janaˉbaıˉ, 1:318, 342 Kabıˉr, 1:319 Kaˉraikkaˉl Ammaiyaˉr, 1:316, 317 Kuruˉr Amma, 1:318 Lalles´wari (Lalla Yogıˉswarıˉ; Laˉl Ded), 1:317, 319 Lopamudra, 1:341 Maitreyee, 1:341 Mangaiyarkaras´iyaˉr, 1:317 Mıˉraˉ Baˉi, 1:317, 318, 319, 320, 341, 360 Naˉnak, 1:319 Raˉjaıˉ, 1:318 Sadhvi Auvaiyar Ma, 1:342 Sree Ma (Holy Mother; Ma Sarada; Saradevi), 1:341–342 Tulsidaˉs, 1:319 Vaishnava bhakti, 1:318 Vidyaˉpati, 1:319 Hindutva (Hinduness), 1:338–339 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 2:118 Hock, Khouriya Maggie, 1:187 Hodder, Ian, 2:353 Hoffmann, Melchior, 1:275 Hogan (dwelling, center of the world), 1:13, 31–33 Hogan, Linda, 2:31 Holger, Hilde, 2:191 Holiday celebrations, sex-specific, 2:229–230 Holiness churches, 1:164, 165, 246, 248–249 Holistic health, 2:333 Holmes, Sandra Jishu, 1:113 Holocaust, 2:126–127, 135, 153–157, 162, 189 Holocaust studies, 2:153 Holy Days. See Festivals and holy days Holy Spirit, feminine, 2:218 Homoeroticism, 1:28, 52



Homosexuality, 1:13, 50, 52–53, 95, 172, 2:205, 237, 360, 361. See also Lesbians; LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals; Transgender persons Homosexuality in Early to Early Modern Christianity, 1:206–208 Hongshan culture, 2:359 Honjoˉ Chiyoko, 2:277 Honor, 2:65–67, 296 Honor killings, 2:66, 296 Honor the Earth, 2:5–6 Hoodoo, 1:3 hooks, bell, 1:105 Hopkinson, Deborah, 1:105 Hopman, Ellen Evert, 2:217 House for All Sinners and Saints, 1:248 Household/clan deities (Hindu), 1:343–344 Household shrines, 1:343–346 Howe, Julia Ward, 1:174 Howkens/Hoskins, Jane Fenn, 1:185 Hrotsvit (Hroswitha) of Gandersheim, 1:222, 232, 277, 278 Huachocana Cave, 2:9 Hughes, Marion, 1:166 Huldah (biblical), 2:152 Humanism, 1:275 Human rights, 1:15, 2:103 Hume, Sophia, 1:185 Huppert, Isabelle, 2:191 Huris, 1:96 Hurwitz, Sara, 2:195–196 Hussaini, Safiya, 2:71 Hutchins, Julia, 1:185 Hutchinson, Anne Marbury, 1:185 Hutterites, 1:273 Hypatia, 1:28, 53–54 Hyrde, Richard, 1:193–194 Ibo (Igboo) society, 2:23, 25, 359 I Ching, 2:316 Ideal woman, 1:345–348, 2:67–68 Identity gender, 2:203, 259 Jewish, 2:116, 125, 134, 186, 190 Jewish ethnic, 2:141–142 religious, 2:203 Ifa divination, 1:12, 24 Ifa traditions, 1:3, 6

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Igboo (Ibo) society, 2:23, 25, 359 Ikeda, Daisaku, 1:141 Ilamatecuhtli (Goddess of Earth, Milky Way, and Death), 2:15 Iliad (Homer), 1:44 Imbas, 2:218 Imbolc (Oimlec), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Immanence, 2:27, 352 Immigration Jewish, 2:119, 126, 127, 134, 213 Muslim, 2:48–49, 72–73, 76, 77 from Southeast Asia, 1:104 Inanna, 1:55–56, 63, 82 Inca culture, 2:11, 12, 34 Independent Minyan movement, 2:183 India Buddhism in, 1:114–116, 151–152 missionaries in, 1:226 See also Hinduism; Jainism Indigenous cultures, 2:1 Indigenous medicine, 2:28–29 Indigenous religions, 2:1–42 activism (Native American), 2:3–6 African, 1:3, 8, 177 ancestors (Native American), 2:6–8 arts (Native American), 2:9–11 British law outlawing, 1:21 ceremonies (Native American), 2:11–14 clothing (Native American), 2:14–15 creation stories (Native American), 2:15–17 introduction, 2:1–3 kinship (Native American), 2:18–21 marriage and social status (Native American), 2:21–23 matriarchies, 2:23–27 medicine women (Native American), 2:27–29 nature (Native American), 2:30–31 sacred place (Native American), 2:31–33 sacred spirits (Native American), 2:34–36 shamanism in Eurasian cultures, 2:36–39 shamans in Korea, 2:39–41 women warriors (Native American), 2:41–42 See also African Religion Indigenous wisdom, 1:4

415

416

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Infanticide, 1:48, 296–297 Infertility, 1:50. See also Fertility Infibulation, 2:57 Initiation ceremonies, 1:4, 376, 2:12–13 Insight meditation, 1:104 Insight Meditation Community, 1:104 Insight Meditation Society (IMS), 1:104, 2:336 Institute of Consecrated Life, 1:253 Instrumentalists, 1:3, 38, 39. See also Drumming Integrated Energy Therapy, 2:333 InterAmerican church, 1:183 Interfaith dialogue confessional, 1:210 experiential, 1:210 practical, 1:209, 210 relational, 1:210 Interfaith Dialogue Post 9/11, Christian and Muslim Women, 1:208–211 International Association of Sufism, 2:101 International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, 1:186, 199, 201, 203, 224, 249 International Conference on Buddhist Women, 1:153 International Congress on Matriarchal Studies, 2:342 International Jewish Peace Union, 2:186 Inuit tribes, 2:7, 35 Irenaeus of Lyons, 1:245, 271 Irrti, 1:365 Ise Shrine, 2:271, 282, 284 Ishtar, 1:55, 63 Isis, 1:37, 2:324, 329 Islam, 2:43–104 in Africa, 2:68–71 Alawi, 2:75 and Baha’i, 1:85 coverings, 2:45–47 Druze religion, 2:49–52 and education, 2:52–55 in Europe, 2:71–74 Fatima, 2:56–57 and female genital mutilation, 1:15, 2:57–58 female leadership in, 2:344 feminism, 2:58–62 fundamentalist, 2:101

Hagar, 2:62–63 Hawwa, 2:63–65 honor, 2:65–67 Ideal woman, 2:67–68 interfaith dialogue post 9/11, Christian and Muslim women, 1:208–210 introduction, 2:43–45 Ismailism, 2:75 Jewish women living under, 2:200–203 legal schools, 2:80 Maliki, 2:69 marriage and divorce, 2:79–81, 94 Maryam, 2:81–82 in the Middle East, 2:74–75 peacemaking, 2:82–84 pilgrimage, 2:84–86 polygamy, 2:86–88 Prophet’s wives, 2:88–89 purdah, 2:89–91 Qur’an and Hadith, 2:91–92 reform, 2:92–95 saints, Sufi, 2:95–97 Salafi/Wahabis, 2:69 Shafi, 2:69 Shari’a, 2:97–2:99 Shi’a (Shi’ite), 1:85, 2:49–51, 53, 56, 69, 75, 80, 98 Sufi, 2:75, 99–102, 336 Sunni, 2:45, 50, 51, 69, 75, 77, 80, 98, 103 Tijaniyya, 2:69 Twelver, 2:75 in the United States, 2:76–79 Wahhabi-Deobandi, 2:54, 55, 101 Women’s organizations, 2:102–104 women’s role in, 1:210–211 Zaidi, 2:75 See also Festivals and holy days; Muslim diaspora; Muslims Islamic Revolution, 2:54 Islam in Africa, 2:68–71 Islam in Europe, 2:71–74 Islam in the Middle East, 2:74–75 Islam in the United States, 2:76–79 Islamization, 2:72 Ismailism, 2:49–50 Israel, 2:157–160 women and work in, 2:213–214 Iyengar, B. K., 2:364



Iyengar, Geeta, 2:364 Iyengar yoga, 2:364 Jackson, Mahalia, 1:172 Jackson, Nakia, 2:77 Jahanara (daughter of Shah Jahan), 2:100 Jainism, 2:105–114 female deities, 2:106–107 introduction, 2:105–106 Jina, 2:107–108 laywomen, 2:108–109 monastics and nuns, 2:109–112 ritual, 2:112–114 Jamaica, 1:22 James, William, 2:351 Janna Yoga, 2:364 Japan abortion in, 1:101 Buddhism in, 1:117–118, 134, 2:284–285, 357 Confucianism in, 1:281, 284, 294 missionaries in, 1:226 shamans in, 1:75–76 See also Buddhism, Mahayana; Shinto Jaˉti, 1:321, 322, 323 Jayadeva, 1:360 Jephthah’s daughter, 2:151 Jerome (saint), 1:221, 231, 260, 268 Jerusalem Center for Women, 2:83 Jewelry, 1:10 Jewish-Arab relations, 2:135 Jewish diaspora, 2:147, 189 Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, 2:120, 183 Jewish Renewal and Chavurah movement, 2:122 Jewish Renewal movement, 2:166, 183, 195 Jewish scriptures. See Hebrew Bible Jewish Women Peacemaking (JWP), 2:185–186, 187 Jezebel (biblical), 2:151, 152 Jilbab, 2:47 Jina, 2:107–108, 112 Jinguˉ (empress), 2:281, 284 Jixian yuan, 1:301 Jizo Bodhisattvad, 1:100, 1:101 Joanna (New Testament), 1:271 Joan of Arc, 1:241 Johansson, Scarlett, 2:190

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

John Chrysostom, 1:162 John III (pope), 2:320 John of Leiden, 1:246 John Paul II (pope saint), 1:224 Johnsen, Linda, 2:336 Johnson, Sonia, 1:235 Joˉkin, Keizan, 1:123 Jonas, Regina, 2:194 Jones, Kathy, 2:329 Jordan, 2:66 Josei, Toda, 1:140 Josephus, 2:123 Jost, Ursula, 1:275, 276 Joya, Malalai, 2:54 Judaism, 2:115–214 American denominations: 1850 to present, 2:117–122 ancient, 2:122–124, 208 art, 2:124–128 Ashkenazi, 2:130, 139, 160, 161, 200, 212 bar mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 183, 188 bat mitzvah, 2:115, 118, 121, 128–129, 183 Conservative, 2:120–121, 128, 181, 183, 195, 209–210 Chabad–Lubavich Hasidism, 2:119, 147, 149–150 education, 2:130–132 in Ethiopia, 1:15 in Europe, 2:160–163 and female genital mutilation, 1:15 and feminine aspect of God, 2:344 feminist and women’s movements, 2:132–137 festivals and holy days, 2:137–141 food, 2:141–142 goddesses, 2:142–146 Haredi (ultra-Orthodox), 2:115, 130, 147, 157, 203–204, 205, 214 Hasidism, 2:147–150, 161, 162, 190 Holocaust, 2:126–127, 135, 153–157, 162, 189 introduction, 2:115–117 Israel, 2:157–160 Liberal, 2:161 Lilith, 2:171–175 marriage and divorce, 2:120, 123–124, 161, 175–177, 183–184

417

418

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Judaism (Continued) medieval, 2:209 Midrash, 2:177–180 mitzvah, 2:180–182 Mizrahi, 2:200–203 modern and contemporary, 2:182–185 Modern Orthodox, 2:118–120, 128–129, 195 mysticism in, 2:161 Open Orthodox, 2:119–120 Orthodox, 2:128, 131, 137, 139, 140, 158–159, 166, 181, 183, 184, 188, 205, 210 peacemaking, 2:185–188 performance, 2:188–192 priestesses, 2:192–194 Provençal, 2:160 rabbis, 2:194–197 Reconstructionist, 2:121, 195 Reform, 2:118, 128, 161, 162, 188, 209 Rosh Hodesh, 2:197–199 Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE), 2:124, 199–200 Sephardic, 2:139, 160, 161, 200–203, 212, 213 sex and gender, 2:203–206 Shabbat (Sabbath), 2:206–208 synagogue, 2:208–211 women and work, 2:211–214 See also Hebrew Bible; Judaism in the United States; Kabbalah Judaism in Europe, 2:160–163 Judaism in the United States, 2:163–167, 209–210 denominationalism and the Woman Question, 2:164–165 gender and early change, 2:163–164 Gender and Jewish Expansion, 2:164–165 Modern Jewish Feminism and Religious Change, 2:164–165 Jüdischer Frauenbund (League of Jewish Women, JFB), 2:132–134, 161 Judith (biblical), 1:269, 2:122 Juhal, 2:50 Juju, 1:24 Julia (early Christian), 1:271 Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416), 1:211–213, 240–241, 277–278

Jungian psychology, 2:229, 338, 361 Juno, 1:33, 69, 70–71 Jupiter, 1:69 Justin Martyr, 1:245 Juwayriyyah bint al-Harith, 2:88 K’abal Xook, 2:10 Kabbalah, 2:142–143, 147, 167–170, 190, 336 Christian, 1:263, 264 Lurianic, 2:147 Kabbalism, 2:161 Kabilsing, Chatsumarn, 1:112 Kabyle people (Africa), 2:23 Kadake queens, 1:19 Kadison, Luba, 2:189 Kaddish, 2:184, 188 Kala, Iya, 1:4 Ka lawbei Tynrai, 2:24 Kali (Bhadra-Kali, Mahakali, Durga-Kali), 1:313, 325, 328, 330, 331–335, 332, 336, 337, 339, 341–342, 355, 365, 366, 367, 368, 373, 374, 2:255 Kalika. See Shakti Kali Puja, 1:337 Kamal, Zahira, 2:83 Kamala. See Lakshmi Kama Sutra, 1:144 Kami, 2:269, 277–278, 283 Kaminska, Esther, 2:189 Kaminska, Ida, 2:189 Kamo Shrine, 2:282 Kane, Carol, 2:190 Kannon Bosatsu, 1:116–117, 125. See also Guan Yin Kanwar, Roop, 1:347, 372 Kaplan, Mordecai, 2:121, 128, 209 Kappes, Lillian, 1:89 KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights, 2:103 Karlin, Miriam, 2:191 Karma, 1:101, 122, 127, 136, 139, 337, 357, 2:105, 108–109, 110 Karman, Tawakkol, 2:84 Karma Yoga, 2:364 Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, 1:113 Karva Chauth, 1:352 Kasamba, 1:20 Kasi-Pnar people (India), 2:24



Kaumudi-Purnima festival, 1:349 Kaur, Arpita, 2:294 Kaur, Rupi, 2:293 Kaur, Snatam, 2:334 Kayati Kermani, 2:100 Kaza, Stephanie, 1:113 Kelly, Kate, 1:234 Kelman, Naamah, 2:195 Kemaikina, Raisa, 2:226, 228 Kemetic Orthodoxy, 2:226 Kemetism, 2:227 Kempe, Margery, 1:212, 241, 277–278 Kennett, Peggy Jiyu, 1:104 Kennewick man, 2:7 Khadija bin Khuwaylid, 2:67, 70, 88, 99, 344 Khadija bin Khuwaylid, 2:67 Khan, Noor-un-Nisalnayat, 2:101 Khankan, Sherin, 1:211 Khanty peoples, 2:252 Khema, Ayya, 1:104 Khifad, 2:57–58 Khimar, 2:47 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 2:54 Khun Mae Siri Krinchai, 1:128 Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti, 2:100 Kiddush, 2:138 Kien, Jenny, 2:146, 192 Kinaaldá (Navajo initiation rite), 2:13 Ki Nanayon, 1:128 Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, 2:217 King, Bernice, 1:187 King, Katie (spirit), 2:351 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1:165 Kinship (Native American), 2:18–21 Kinship and marriage, Shinto, 2:278–281 Kirtan, 2:334–335 Kitamura Sayo, 2:276 Klapper, Melissa R., 2:186 K’lilah, Kohenet D’vora, 2:193 Knapp, Jennifer, 1:172 Kodo Sawaki, 1:133–134 Kohenet, 2:192–193 Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Training Institute, 2:193 Kohl, 1:10 Kola nut divination, 1:24 Kol Nidre prayer, 2:138 Koˉmyoˉ (empress), 1:123 Kongo-based traditions, 1:4

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Korea abortion in, 1:101 Buddhism in, 1:118, 130, 153, 2:357 Confucianism in, 1:281, 284, 294 shamans in, 1:76, 2:38–41, 40 Koyama Mihoko, 2:277 Krasner, Lee, 2:127 Krishna, 1:325, 341, 342, 359, 360–361 Kroeger, Catherine Clark, 1:187 Kuan Yin. See Guan Yin Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth, 2:331 Kudrow, Lisa, 2:190 Kujou Sadako, 2:286 Kundalini, 1:377, 384, 2:305, 336 Kundalini Yoga, 1:377, 2:364 Kunis, Mila, 2:190 Kurgan theory, 2:342 Kusang (“crying during funeral”), 1:121 Kut, 2:40–41 Kwok Pui-Lan, 2:362 Kykeon, 1:41 Ladies’ Benevolent Societies, 1:174 Ladies Christian Association, 1:187 Ladies of Charity, 1:173 Ladies of the Dao, 1:308 LaDuke, Winona, 2:5–6 Lady Folly (biblical), 2:122–123 Lady Near the Water’s Edge (Linshui furen), 1:305 Lady of Suyapa, 1:182 Lady Skollie (Laura Windvogel), 1:9 Lady Wisdom (biblical), 2:122, 344 Lagaš dynasty, 1:59–60 Lahu people (China), 2:23, 25 Lakshmi (Sri Lakshmi), 1:114, 332, 333, 337, 348–350, 351, 366, 367, 368, 373 Lakshmi Puja, 1:352 Lamb, Joni, 1:187 Lamb, Marcus, 1:187 Lammas (Lughnasadh), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Lange, Elizabeth, 1:186 Laos, 1:27, 77 La Regla de Ocha, 1:3 Lateau, Louise, 1:265 Latin America Christianity in, 1:180–184 enslaved Africans in, 1:3

419

420

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Latinas, 1:181, 2:360 Latonia, 1:33 Laughter therapy, 2:333 Laura, Judith, 2:146, 192 Laurent, Mélanie, 2:191 La Virgen de Chinquinquirá, 1:181 La Virgen de Guadalupe, 1:181–182, 238, 2:26, 359 Lawal, Amina, 2:71 Laywomen, 2:105, 108–109 celibate, 1:179 fasting by, 2:113 Laywomen in Theravada Buddhism, 1:127–129 LDS church. See Mormonism Leadership roles (women) founders, 1:199–201, 2:275–277 ministers, 1:223–225 missionaries, 1:225–227 priestesses, 1:1, 17–22, 27, 49, 2:146, 192–194, 341, 343, 345, 358, 359, 360, 363 rabbis, 2:136, 194–197 shamans and ritualists, 2:282–286 League of Jewish Women (Juˉdischer Fraauenbund, JFB), 2:132–134, 161 Leah (biblical), 2:150, 176 Lebanese Druze community, 2:51 Lebanon War, 2:186 Lee, Christine, 1:187 Lee, Jacinta, 1:194 Lee, Jarena, 1:164, 185 Lee, Mother Ann, 1:171, 186, 199, 249 Legalism, 1:284 Leibowitz, Nechama, 2:166 Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 2:190 Leland, Charles G., 2:236 Leoba, 1:160 Leo XIII (pope), 1:162 Lesbians, 1:52 black, 2:361 See also Homosexuality; LGBTQ/ LGBTQIQ individuals Lessing, Doris, 2:102 Levantine Pagans, 2:226 Leviticus Ceremonial Law, 1:22 LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals, 1:6 activist, 1:202 and Heathenry, 2:221

Muslim, 2:62, 362 See also Homosexuality; Lesbians; Transgender persons; Transsexuals Liana, Lili, 2:189 Liberation theologies, 1:182–183, 2:362 Life-cycle ceremonies, 1:16–17, 374–376, 2:12, 23, 24–25, 27, 193 adulthood, 1:17 African, 1:16–17 birth, 1:16, 374 blessing of a child, 2:12 Hindu, 1:331, 374–376 initiation, 1:4, 376, 2:12–13 menarche, 1:331, 376, 2:13 pagan, 2:229–230 womanhood initiation, 1:18 See also Bar mitzvah; Bat mitzvah; Coming of age ceremonies Lilith, 2:169–170, 171–175, 171, 178, 179, 313 artistic portrayals of, 2:171, 173 feminist perspectives, 2:173–174 identity of, 2:171–173 literary and artistic development of the archetype, 2:173 Lilith astrology, 2:313 Lingam, 1:337 Lingguang Shengmu, 1:301 Lipman, Maureen, 2:191 Literacy, 2:131 and Islam, 2:70 Jewish, 2:128 Old European, 2:257 among women, 1:81–82, 89 Litha (summer solstice), 2:225, 232, 233, 236, 239 Little Sisters of the Poor, 1:232 Liturgical languages, 1:4 Liu (Lady, of Qing), 1:283, 289 Livermore, Mary, 1:196 Llyon, Jo Anne, 1:187 London Matriarchy Study Group, 2:327 Long, Asphodel, 2:146, 192, 327 Lopamudra, 1:341 Lotus Sutra, 1:117, 123, 125, 126, 138, 139, 140, 141, 2:278 Lotus Temple, 1:86 Lotz, Anne Graham, 1:187 Lovelock, James, 2:218, 309



Lovinski, Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Champagne, 2:357 Luapula (Bantu group; Africa), 2:24 Lucina, 1:33 Lucomi, 1:3 Lucumi, 2:361 Lughnasadh (Lammas), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Luna, 1:33 Lunar rituals, 2:229 Luria, Isaac, 2:169–170 Lurianic Kabbalah, 2:147 Luther, Martin, 1:178, 179, 246, 273 Lutheran church, 1:178, 180, 186, 246, 273 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1:224, 248 in Latin America, 1:183 Lutheran church of Liberia, 1:246 Lwa deities, 1:5 Lya mi (Society of Powerful Women or the Mothers), 1:23 Lydia (early Christian), 1:271, 272 Maafa (Great Disaster), 1:3, 4 Ma’at, 1:38 Maban (Australian), 2:25 Mabon (autumn equinox), 2:232, 233, 236, 329 Machig Labdron, 1:138 Mackey, Mary, 2:340 MacKillop, Mary, 1:259 Macy, Joanne, 1:113 Mae d’agua festivals, 1:24 Magic, 2:15, 19, 222–223, 237, 340 ceremonial (“high”), 2:333 Magneh, 2:47 Mahaˉbala, 2:107–108 Mahabharata, 1:317, 324, 329–331, 334, 345–347, 366–368, 373 Mahadevi, 1:319, 328, 373–374. See also Shakti Mahamaya. See Durga Mahashivaratri, 1:337 Mahavidyas, 1:374 Mahavir Jayanti, 2:113 Mahayana, 1:129–1:131 Maheswari, 1:355 Mahmudnizhad, Mona, 1:89–90

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mai Bhago, 2:297–298 Maid of Heaven (Baha’i), 1:87–88 Maitreyee, 1:341 Makar Sanranti, 1:338 Makeup, 1:10 Makewana (Mother of Children), 1:20 Makki, Hind, 2:61 Malala. See Yousafzai, Malala Malawi, 1:20 Mali, 1:20 Malli, 2:107–108 Mallika (Queen), 1:151–152 Mama Acxo, 2:34 Mama Allpa, 2:34 Mama Coca, 2:34 Mama Cocha, 2:34 Mama Keke, 1:6 Mama Lola, 2:357 Mama Quilla, 2:34, 35 Mama Quinoa, 2:34 Mama Sara, 2:34 Manchuria, 1:76 Mandala Dance of the 21 Praises of Tara, 1:108–111, 109, 2:336 Mandell, Jacqueline Schwartz, 1:104 Manifest Destiny, 2:6 Mann, Erika, 2:191 Mann, Franciszka, 2:191 Mann, Horace, 1:195 Mansfield, Patti Gallagher, 1:186 Mansi peoples, 2:252 Manteau, 2:47 Mantras, 2:334 Manusmriti, 1:322, 324, 345, 366–367 Manyano, 1:177 Marc Antony, 1:37, 51 March of Hope, 2:187–188, 187 March to the Knesset, 2:187 Margaret of Antioch, 1:223 Margery Kempe, 1:212, 241, 277–278 Margoyles, Miriam, 2:191 Marguerite of Navarre, 1:275, 276 Margulies, Juliana, 2:190 Margulis, Lynn, 2:309 Maria Kannon, 1:126 Marici, 1:115 Marillac, Louise de, 1:173 Marinatos, Nanno, 2:248 Markova, Alicia (Alice Marks), 2:191

421

422

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Marler, Joan, 2:338 Marley, Rita, 1:22 Maroons, 1:3, 5 Marriage, 1:350–353 in ancient Greece and Rome, 1:50–51 anuloma, 1:322 arranged, 1:347–348, 350–351, 2:21–22, 73, 148 Baha’i, 1:95 child, 1:346. 2:62 and Christianity, 1:212–214, 213–215 civil vs. religious, 2:176 and the dowry system, 1:351, 2:296 in the Druze religion, 2:51 and filial duty, 1:293 forced, 2:66 handfasting, 2:237 in the Hebrew Bible, 2:151 heterosexual, 1:339, 2:147, 205 Hindu, 1:350–353 interfaith, 1:209 intermarriage, 2:116, 183 intervarna, 1:322 and Islam, 2:79–81, 94 in Israel, 2:157, 159 Japanese, 2:272–273 and Judaism, 2:120, 123–124, 175–177, 183–184 love (gandharva), 1:350–351 monogamous, 1:213, 245, 2:205 Native American, 2:21–22 open, 1:246 polyandrous, 1:55, 330, 331 polygamous, 1:193, 213, 233–234, 245–247, 275, 367, 2:59, 62, 86–88, 98 polygynous, 2:79–80, 161, 175 pratiloma, 1:322 ritual, 1:326–327 sacred, 2:168 same-sex, 1:213, 2:79, 205, 237 as samskara, 1:376 in Sephardic Judaism, 2:202 and Shari’a, 2:98 Shinto, 2:278–281 of siblings, 1:35 spirit weddings, 1:289 temporary, 2:80, 98 traditional, 1:202

in Vedic society, 1:381 Wiccan, 2:237 and the “Woman’s Question,” 1:339 for Zen priests, 1:155 See also Weddings Marriage, ancient Greek and Roman religions, 1:56–58 Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood, 1:213–216 Marriage and divorce, 2:79–81, 175–177 Marriage and social status (Native American), 2:21–23 Marriage ceremonies, 1:17 Mars, 1:69 Martha (New Testament), 1:178 Martha (sister of Lazarus), 1:221, 258, 260 Martyrs, 1:222, 264, 271, 275–276 virgin, 1:256 Maryam, 2:81–82, 92. See also Mary of Nazareth Maryam of Bastra, 2:100 Mary Guan Yin, 1:126 Mary Magdalene (Mary of Magdala), 1:168, 186, 216–220, 221, 257, 260, 271 after Christ’s death, 1:216–217 in the Apocrypha, 1:168 confusion with repentant sinner, 1:219–220 in history, 1:219–220 as new Eve, 1:218 in the New Testament, 1:216 in popular imagination, 1:217–218 relics of, 1:244 Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha), 1:178, 218, 221, 258, 260 Mary of Nazareth, 1:186, 235–239, 2:218, 344 appearances of, 1:238 in Christine de Pizan’s writings, 1:188 in Church tradition, 1:235–236 contemporary devotion and apparitions, 1:238 depicted in art, 1:238 devotion to, 1:237–238 Latin American manifestations of, 1:181–182, 238 link to Sophia, 1:263–264 as Mother Goddess, 2:357 as Mother of God, 1:235–236



relics of, 1:243–244 as role model, 1:205, 223, 238 role of, 1:250 transformations of pre-Christian goddesses, 1:237 veneration of, 1:160, 166, 178 See also Mother of God Ma Sarada (Saradadevi), 1:341–342 Masks, 1:8, 21, 44, 46, 2:267, 311 Mata, Nydia, 2:361 Mata Gujari, 2:297–298 Mata Jitoji, 2:299–300 Mata Khivi, 2:297 Maternal Gift Economy, 2:342 Matriarchies, 1:252, 354 2:3, 6, 23–27, 342, 343, 358, 361 egalitarian, 2:246, 247, 248 in Candomblé religion, 1:11–12 in Hongshan culture, 2:359 Hwang, Helen Hye-Sook, 2:359 in Wicca, 1:34 Matriarchs, in Jewish liturgy, 2:184, 209 Matriarchy Research and Reclaim Network, 2:327 Matrikas, 1:374 Matrilinieal societies, 2:359 Matriliny, 1:353–356, 2:22, 183 Matthews, Caitlin, 2:226 Mattson, Ingrid, 2:55 Mat weaving, 1:9 Maurin, Peter, 1:174 Maxwell, Mary, 1:89 Maxwell, May, 1:89 Mayaafi, 2:69 Maya culture, 1:359, 2:12, 22 Mayahuel (Central Mexico), 2:34 Mayanasundari, 2:109 Maymunah bint al-Harith, 2:88 Maznavi, M. Hasna, 1:211 Mazu, Holy Mother in Heaven (Tianshang shengmu), 1:305 McCracken, Sandra, 1:171 McFague, Sallie, 2:323 McFarland, Morgan, 2:225 McKay, Mabel, 2:28 McKenzie, Vashti Murphy, 1:165 McNeil, Brenda Salter, 1:187 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 1:186, 199, 201, 202–203, 224, 249

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mechthild of Magdeburg, 1:278 Medical mission, 1:188 Medicine bag, 2:30 Medicine bundle, 2:28 Medicine dreams, 2:29. See also Dreams Medicine Eagle, Brooke, 2:341 Medicine wheel, 2:30, 31, 32, 33 Medicine women (Native American), 2:27–29, 333 Meditation, 2:333, 335–337 benefits of, 2:335 Buddhist, 2:357 by lay members, 1:128 samatha, 2:335 similarities with other contemplative practices, 2:336 Transcendental Meditation, 2:336 vipassana, 2:335 Medusa, 1:28, 43–48, 45, 2:349 Mellaart, James, 2:247 Memorial Ecosystems, 2:331 Men, functions of in Candomblé, 1:12 MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, 2:200–203 Mencius, 1:284 Mendelsohn, Moses, 2:189 Mendes, Dona Gracia, 2:212 Menelik I, 1:22 Menhirs, 2:24 Mennonites, 1:224, 273 in Latin America, 1:183 Menstrual blood, 2:352 Menstruation rituals, 2:229. See also Women, menstruating Merchant, Carolyn, 2:314, 322 Merman, Ethel, 2:189 Mernissi, Fatima, 2:359 Mesolithic burials, 2:243–244 Mesopotamia, writers and poets in, 1:81–82 Metaformic theory, 2:341 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 1:44 Methodist church, 1:163, 186, 194–195, 199–200, 246 in America, 1:186 in Latin America, 1:183 missionary activity, 1:226 Methodist Church of Southern Africa, 1:177

423

424

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Meyer, Joyce, 1:187 Middle Ages, 1:221–223 Middle East, Islam in, 2:74–75 Midler, Bette, 2:190 Midrash, 2:116, 177–180 Midrash, 2:116 Miko, 2:274, 282, 283, 284, 287 Mikogami, 1:73, 75–76 Milady of Tartara, 2:256–257 Milani, Farzaneh, 2:101 Mili Jide (shaman), 1:73 Millenarianism, 2:276 Miller, William, 1:200 Millerites, 1:200, 2:350 Millet, Kate, 2:340 Mills, Stephanie, 2:314 Minangkabau people (Sumatra), 2:23 Mind body spirit healing, 2:333 Mindfulness, 2:364 Ministers, 1:223–225 Minoan civilization, 1:65, 251–252 Minoan religion, 2:247 Mıˉraˉ Baˉi, 1:341, 360 Mıˉraˉbaˉis, 1:320 Mir-Hosseini, Ziba, 2:60 Miriam (biblical prophet), 2:139, 140, 152, 178–179 Mishnah, 2:123, 181 Missionaries, 1:225–227 Missionary activity, 1:164 in Africa, 1:177, 254 Baptist Church, 1:248 in the Global South, 1:226 Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa, 1:254 Mitchell, Elsie, 1:104 Mitford, Jessica, 2:331 Mitzvah, 2:180–182. See also Bar mitzvah; Bat mitzvah Mixtecx, 2:34 Mizrahi, 2:200–203 Mizuko, 1:100, 100, 101. See also Abortion: Buddhism Moab, women of, 2:151 Modern and contemporary Judaism, 2:182–185 change, response, and the Jewish future, 2:184–185

change and Resistance within the Jewish Movements, 2:182–183 marriage, family, and the life cycle, 2:183–184 matriarchs in Jewish liturgy, 2:184 Modern Orthodox Judaism, 2:118–120, 2:195 Modesty, 1:94, 192, 193, 203, 260, 278, 282, 283, 362, 2:43, 45, 50, 66, 68, 76, 89, 90, 98, 119, 147, 148, 149, 156, 164, 183 Modi, Narendra, 1:340 Moksha, 2:105, 112 Monasticism Anglican, 1:166–167, 229 Augustinian, 1:228 Benedictine, 1:222, 228, 232 Carmelite, 1:228, 230, 254 Cistercian, 1:222 Divine Office (Daily Office), 1:228–229, 230, 231 Dominican, 1:222, 228, 232 female Hindu, 1:362 Franciscan, 1:222, 228, 232 golden age of, 1:232 Green Sisters, 1:255 and missionary work, 1:254 Poor Clares, 1:232 Rule of Life, 1:230 Second Order of Franciscans, 1:232 Monasticism, contemporary women, 1:230–231 Monasticism, medieval women, 1:221–222, 231–233 Monastic life, 1:227–230 Monastics Buddhist, 2:345 Christian, 2:345 Jain, 2:105, 109–111 Monastics and nuns, 2:109–112 Monks Buddhist, 1:122–123, 124, 129, 146, 151, 2:345 Christian, 2:345 Jain, 2:105, 108–111, 113 ordination of, 1:134–136 Mono Craters, 2:17 Monotheism, 2:291, 314, 317



Monroe, Marilyn, 2:189 Montessori, Maria, 1:89 Moody, Susan I., 1:89 Moon, Lottie, 1:248 Moon, Susan, 1:113 Moon Lodge (Native American), 2:341 Moonwheel, 2:341 Moon Woman, 2:35 Moore, Beth, 1:187 Moore, Queen Mother, 1:6 Mor, Barbara, 2:341 Moral Majority, 1:202 Mordvin Pagans, 2:226 More, Margaret, 1:194 Morgan, Fiona, 2:340 Morgan, Robin, 2:340 Mormonism, 1:165, 233–235, 246, 2:350 fundamentalist, 1:246 temple garments, 1:192–193 Morning Star Ceremony, 2:12 Mosheim, Grete, 2:191 Mosques praying spaces for women in, 2:62 women-only, 2:102 Mosuos of Tibet, 2:27 Mother Earth, 1:43, 2:2–5, 7, 8, 15–16, 25, 31, 32–33, 319. See also Gaia (Earth Goddess); Great Mother Mother Goddess, 1:62 as healing force, 2:331 Hindu, 1:315–316, 347, 354, 355 See also Aditi; Creatrix; Deities; Demeter; Devi; Gaia; Great Goddess; Great Mother; Inanna; Ninhursagˆa; Tara Motherhood, 1:23, 24, 92,˘ 98, 119–120, 141, 147, 291–294, 321, 341, 375–376, 2:123 Confucian ideal of, 1:294–296 in the Hebrew Bible, 2:150 Hindu clan, 1:354 and Islam, 2:73 in Israel, 2:157–158 in Japan, 1:295 in Korea, 1:295–296 link to compassion, 1:63, 118, 120, 127–128, 2:82 See also Womb

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mother Nature, 1:43, 2:240. See also Gaia (Earth Goddess) Mother of God, 1:235–239 in Church tradition, 1:236 contemporary devotion and apparitions, 1:238 depicted in art, 1:238, 243 divinity of, 1:252 and Marian devotion, 1:237–238 Mary of Nazareth as, 1:235–236 as Queen of Heaven, 1:237, 238 as role model, 1:238 transformations of pre-Christian goddesses, 1:237 See also Mary of Nazareth Mother of the Adityas, 1:315–1:316 Mother of the Dao, 1:303 Mother of the Dipper (Doumu), 1:304 Mothers Against Silence (MAS), 2:186 Mother Teresa, 1:259 Mountainwater, Shekinah, 2:341 Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, 1:165 Mowatt, Judy, 1:22 Mud-cloth design, 1:8 Mugyo, 1:76 Muhaddithat, 2:53 Muhammad (prophet), 1:15, 85, 2:43, 45, 52, 53, 57–58, 62, 63, 65, 67, 344 companions of, 2:99 daughter of, 2:56, 70, 344 on the hajj, 2:84–85 on marriage and family, 2:79–91 wives of, 2:52, 67, 68, 70, 88–89, 99, 344 See also Hadith Muhumusa (Rwandan queen), 1:21 Mujaji (Rain Queens), 1:19–20 Mujeristas, 2:362 Multiculturalism, 2:73, 317 Mummies of Ûrümchi, 2:37 Mupu Shaode (shaman), 1:73 Murata, Sachiko, 2:101, 102 Murcott, Susan, 1:105 Murray, Margaret, 2:224 Murray, Pauli (saint), 1:187 Muˉrtipuˉjakas, 2:111 Musawah movement, 2:61, 341

425

426

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Museum of Jewish Heritage (NY), 2:155 Music, 1:1 in Confucianism, 1:287 and drumming, 2:318–320, 319 gospel, 1:172–173 kirtan (devotional song), 2:334 ritual 1:8 and spirituality, 2:262, 266, 267 Musicians, 1:3, 38, 39 Musindo, 1:76 Muslim diaspora, 2:48–49 Muslimgirl.com, 2:61 Muslims in Africa, 1:177 African American, 2:77, 78 Ahmadiyya, 2:69 Hindu violence against, 1:340 Indian, 1:323 invasion of Banda Aceh, Sumatra, 2:23 LGBTQ, 2:62 reverts, 2:76–77 See also Islam Muslim Women’s Freedom Tour, 2:78 Muslim Women’s League, 2:103 Muslim Youth Association in South Africa, 2:70 Myanmar Buddhism in, 1:113, 127, 128, 130, 134, 153 missionaries in, 1:226 Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens (Jiutian xuannuˉ), 1:304, 308 Mysticism, 1:265, 266, 2:222, 336, 345 Heathen, 2:221 Islamic (Sufism), 2:99–102 Jewish, 2:145, 161 monastic, 1:232 See also Kabbalah Mystics, 1:239–242, 258, 277, 278 Benedetta Carlini, 1:207 Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), 1:204–206 Hindu, 1:325–326 Julian of Norwich (ca. 1342–ca. 1416), 1:211–212 Margery Kempe, 1:212 nuns as, 1:261 Mystic visions, 1:41

Mythologies African, 1:1 Aztec, 2:8 Buddhist, 1:118, 126 Chinese, 1:78 Daoist, 1:303 Divine Feminine in, 2:309–311, 324, 326, 332, 344, 349 Finno-Ugrian, 2:265 Greek and Roman, 1:30–31, 39, 40, 42–43, 44, 45, 47, 58, 67, 2:259, 339 Hindu, 1:313, 324, 330, 335–336, 345, 349, 353, 357, 365, 368, 370, 383 Jain, 2:109 Jewish, 2:170–171, 173–174, 189 Mayan, 2:8 Mesopotamian, 1:55, 62–63, 64, 65, 2:353 Mexican, 2:308 Neolithic, 2:254, 260 Norse, 2:221 Old European, 1:45, 2:267 pagan, 2:231–232, 234 Saami, 1:80 Sanskrit, 1:321 Shinto, 2:270–271, 277–278, 284 Siberian, 1:79, 2:252 Yoruba, 1:9, 23 Naess, Arne, 2:314 Nahua culture (Sierra Norte de Puebla), 2:7, 343 Najia Belghazi Canter, 2:103 Nakao, Wandy, 1:105 Nakayama Miki, 2:285, 289 Namaskara Sutra, 2:112 Naming ceremonies, 2:12, 195 Sikh, 2:299 Nanak (Guru), 2:291, 297, 303, 304, 334 Nanih Waiya, 2:16–17 Nanna (moon god), 1:81–82 Naomi (biblical), 2:151 Naropa University, 1:113 Nasso, Iya, 1:4 National American Woman Suffrage Association, 2:134 National Association of Volunteer Interfaith Caregivers, 1:112



National Baptist Convention, 1:164 National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, 2:134 National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), 2:134, 135, 186 National Daoist Association, 1:310 National Organization for Women (NOW), 1:187 National Spiritualist Association, 2:351 Nation of Islam (NOI), 2:76–77 Native American religion activism, 2:3–6 ancestors, 2:6–8 arts, 2:9–11 ceremonies, 2:11–14 clothing, 2:14–15 creation stories, 2:15–17 kinship, 2:18–21 marriage and social status, 2:21–23 medicine women, 2:27–29 nature, 2:30–31 sacred place, 2:31–33 sacred spirits, 2:34–36 women warriors, 2:41–42 Native American tribes Akimel O’odham, 2:22 Apache, 2:9, 42 Arikara, 2:34 Blackfeet, 2:42 Cherokee, 2:18–19, 34, 42 Cheyenne, 2:42 Chickasaw, 2:16–17, 30–31 Chipewyan, 2:22 Choctaw, 2:16, 34 Chumash, 2:7, 32 Creek, 2:22, 42 Crow, 2:29 Fremont, 2:33 Great Plains, 2:7 Hopi, 2:10, 21, 22 Inuit, 2:7 Iroquois, 2:22, 23, 24, 25, 34, 359 Kashaya Pomo, 2:28 Kaska, 2:42 Kutchin, 2:22 Lakota, 2:19–20, 42 Lakota Sioux, 2:359 Mescalero Apache, 2:12

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Mohegan, 2:28 Nahuas (Sierra Norte de Puebla), 2:7, 343 Navajo, 2:12, 13, 35, 231 Nootka, 2:42 Northern Paiute, 2:239 Ojibwa, 2:42 Oneida, 2:42 Paiute, 2:17 Pawnee, 2:12, 34–35 Pomo, 2:10 Pueblo, 2:10, 33 Southern Paiute, 2:33 Standing Rock Sioux, 2:6 Zuni, 2:10, 26 Native faith groups, 2:228 Nature connection with, 2:30 cycles of, 2:30 as Divine, 2:325, 236 women’s link to, 2:324 Nature (Native American), 2:30–31 kinship with, 2:18 Nature Religion (Burma), 1:77 Navaab, 1:94 Navaratri/Durga Puja/Dashain festival, 1:335, 336, 350 Nayar people (India), 2:23 Nazism, 2:134, 135 Nefertiabet, 1:18, 18 Nefertiti, 1:19, 35, 36–37, 36, 38 Nehanda (Shona princess), 1:19 Neo-Confucianism, 1:284, 286, 287, 292, 295, 296–297 Neolithic burials, 2:244 Neolithic female figures, 2:253–256 chronology and geographic extent, 2:253 contextual evidence for, 2:253 forms of, 2:254–255 functions of the Goddesses, 2:254 Proto-Indo-European, 255 Neo-Paganism, 1:34, 2:215, 224, 236 seasonal festivals, 2:231–234 Neo-Platonism, 1:53, 2:49–2:50 Neo-Shamanism, 2:232 Nepal, Buddhism in, 1:116–117, 142, 146–147

427

428

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Nepantleras, 2:362 Network of Thai Bikkhuni Sangha, 1:112 Neumark, Martha, 2:118 Neville, Anne, 1:160 New Age movement, 2:312, 316, 333, 338, 355 Newar Buddhism, 1:116–117, 147 New moon observation, 2:197–198 New World Orisha Spirituality, 1:6 New Year for Trees, 2:139 Nhami Hill sanctuary, 1:20 Nichiren Buddhism, 1:140–142 Nicodemism, 1:275–276 Nigerian Celestial Church of Christ, 1:246 Nike, 1:31 Nimbarka, 1:360 Ninalla (wife of king Gudea), 1:60 9/11 terrorist attacks, 1:209–210, 2:78 Ninhursagˇa Mother Goddess, 1:62–63, 82 ˘ Ninimma, 1:82 Ninlil, 1:63–65, 82 Nin-UN-il (scribe), 1:81 Niqabs, 2:46, 47, 50, 69 Nirvana-Tantra, 1:355 Nisaba, 1:82 Nishan Shaman, 1:76 Nivedita (Sister), 1:339 Noadiah (biblical), 2:152 Noble, Vicki, 2:340 Noh theater, 2:278 Nollywood, 2:26 Nomads Clinic, 1:112 Norse culture, 2:220–221 Novick, Leah, 2:146, 193 Nunet, 1:37–38 Nuns adoption of New Age practices by, 2:357 as “brides of Christ,” 1:175, 232, 240, 2:344 Buddhist, 1:124, 129, 130, 146, 149–150, 151, 152, 153, 2:336 Christian, 1:167, 180, 221–222, 2:345 Daoist, 1:302, 307–310 hagiographies of, 1:257 Jain, 2:105, 108–111, 112, 113 and monastic life, 1:227–229 as mystics, 1:241, 261

ordination of, 1:134–136 as pilgrims, 2:338 and the Reformation, 1:274 Roman Catholic, 1:179, 185, 253–255 as teachers, 1:195, 261 in Thailand, 1:134 Theravada Buddhist, 1:104, 132–133 Tibetan Buddhist, 1:122, 2:341 See also Abbesses Nuns, Theravada, 1:104, 122, 132–133, 2:341 Nupe religious tradition, 1:3 Nusaybah bin Ka’b, 2:67 Nyabinghi Assemblies, 1:22–23 Oba Tero (Mama Monserrate Gonzalez), 1:4 Obeah, 1:3 Obi Dida, 1:24 Oblate Sisters of Providence, 1:186 Oceanus, 1:42 Ocha Bi (Fermina Gonzalez), 1:4 Octavia, 1:51 Oda, Mayumi, 2:361 Odinism, 2:220 Odinist Fellowship, 2:221, 225 Odyssey (Homer), 1:43–44 Oetinger, Friedrich, 1:264 Ofer, Dalia, 2:154 Oils, 1:10 Okonedo, Sophie, 2:191 Olcott, Henry Steele, 1:103 Olga of the Evenk, 1:74 Oli ceremony, 2:113 Oliveto, Karen, 1:187 Olmeda, Maria Luisa, 2:221 Olomo, Chief Oloye Aino, 1:6 Olowu, Princess Elizabeth, 1:9 Olympia, 1:65 Omm Ali (Fatimah of Balkh), 2:96 ˉ motokyoˉ, 2:275, 276, 277, 285 O Oneida Community, 1:246 Oracle bones, 2:38 Oracular women, 1:1, 17–22 at Delphi, 1:32–33 Oral traditions, 1:1, 4, 20, 2:29 Ordain Women, 1:234 Order of WhiteOak, 2:217



Ordination of women Buddhist, 1:23, 29, 112, 132–135 Catholic, 1:186 Christian, 1:165, 196, 223–225 Daoist, 1:307–310 Hindu, 1:368 homosexuals (Judaism), 2:205 Jewish, 2:115–116, 118, 121, 136, 159, 184, 194–196, 209 Mormon, 1:235 Protestant, 1:180, 183, 186–187, 246–250 See also Nuns; Priestesses Origin myths, 1:4 Indian, 1:323 Native American, 2:15–17 Ob-Ugrian, 2:252 Yoruba religion, 1:23 See also Creation stories; Mythologies Orisha-Ifa, 1:6 American, 1:3 Orisha veneration, 1:3, 4, 11, 23 Orisha-Vodou, 1:6 Orloff, Chana, 2:126 Orphic Mysteries, 1:39 Orr, Emma Restall, 2:217 Ortheia, 1:44–1:45 Orthodox Christianity, 1:242–243 in the United States, 1:184 Orthodox Judaism, 2:128, 131, 137, 139, 140, 158–159, 166, 181, 183, 184, 188, 205, 210 Oshunike, Iyanifa, 1:6 Osiris, 1:37 Ostriker, Alicia, 2:146, 179 Our Lady of Guadalupe, 1:81–82, 238, 2:26, 359 Our Lady of the Angels, 1:181 Our Lady of the Bark, 1:181 Ovid (poet), 1:33, 44, 77 Oxala, Sylvia de, 1:12 Oxford movement, 1:166 Oyotonji Village, 1:6 Ozelsel, Michaela, 2:101 Pachamma, 2:34 Padma. See Lakshmi Padma Shri, 2:292

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Pagan Federation, 2:238 Paganism, 2:215–238, 224–226, 325, 346 contemporary, 2:229 Druidry, 2:217–218 Eco-Paganism, 2:218–220 European, 2:229 and healing, 2:333 Heathenry, 2:220–222 introduction, 2:215–217 Levantine, 2:226 magic, 2:222–223 modern/contemporary/Neo-, 2:215, 224–226 Mordovian, 2:228 Mordvin, 2:226 non-Reconstructionist, 2:228 periodicals associated with, 2:225 priestesses and elders, 2:226–227 Reclaiming tradition, 2:311 reconstructionist, 2:227–229 ritual, 2:229–231 seasonal festivals, 2:231–234 See also Wicca Pagan spirituality, 2:222, 316 Painting of houses, 1:8 Pajapati, 1:98, 135–136 Palden Lhamo, 1:116 Palenques, 1:3 Palestine, 2:83, 159 Palestinian-Israeli conflict, 2:186–187, 187 Palladino, Eusapia, 2:351 Palmer, Lili, 2:190, 191 Palmer, Phoebe, 1:174, 185, 249 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 2:190 Pandora’s box, 1:158 Pappenheim, Bertha, 2:132–133, 135 Parashakti, 1:374 Pardes Rimonim, 2:193 Parker, Sarah Jessica, 2:190 Parliament of World Religions, 2:238, 291, 311, 334 Parrish, Essie, 2:28 Parsons, Agnes, 1:89 Parvati, 1:325, 333, 334, 337, 355, 359, 365, 373. See also Shakti Paryushana festival, 2:113 Pa Sini Jobu, 1:20 Passover Seder, 2:140, 179

429

430

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Patai, Raphael, 2:146 Paternalism, 1:286, 274 Pativrata, 1:346, 2:109 Patriarchy, 1:7, 22, 55, 196, 202, 203, 249, 251, 295, 309, 339, 365, 366–367, 368, 2:48, 59, 247–248, 296, 305, 317, 327, 328, 339, 349, 361 in Israel, 2:157 Paula (Roman noblewoman, Christian), 1:173 Paxson, Diana, 2:221, 225 Paxson, Ruth, 1:226 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 1:103 Peace activism, 2:134 in Israel, 2:159 Peacemaking, 2:82–84, 185–188 Peet, Amanda, 2:190 Pele, 2:360 Pentecostal churches, 1:164, 165, 201, 203, 224, 246 in Latin America, 1:182, 183 Pentecostalism, 1:249 Pepper, Beverly, 2:127 Perez, Laura, 2:360 Performance, 2:188–192 Perpetua (martyr), 1:271, 272 Perpetua of Carthage (martyr), 1:271, 272, 276 Persephone, 1:39–40, 41 Perseus, 1:44, 46 Persian-American Educational Society, 1:89 Pesach (Passover), 2:139–140 Peter Abelard, 1:207 Petroglyphs, 1:18, 74, 79, 2:17, 32, 258, 261, 263–264. See also Cave drawings Peyote ceremonies, 2:28 Pharaonic circumcision, 1:14–15 Philippines, 1:77 Philo, 2:124 Phoebe (early Christian), 1:271, 272 Photography, 1:171 Picon, Molly, 2:190 Pictographs, 2:32 Piercing, 1:16 Piercy, Marge, 2:339 Pilgrimage, 1:243–245, 356–358, 2:84–86, 114 hajj, 2:63, 69, 84–86

to the River Ganges, 1:357–358 specific motives for, 1:356, 357 Pilgrimage, goddess, 2:337–338 Pio (Padre), 1:265 Piper, Leonora, 2:351 Pistis Sophia, 1:219 Pius XII (pope), 1:254 Planets, 2:312 Plaskow, Judith, 2:172, 178 Pleiades, 2:24, 32 Plisetskaya, Maya, 2:191 Plum Village monastery, 1:113 Pohl, Lucie, 2:190 Polyandry, 1:55, 330 Polygamy, 1:193, 213, 233–234, 245–247, 275, 367, 2:51, 59, 62, 86–88, 98 in Islam, 2:59 Polygyny, 2:79–80 and Judaism, 2:161, 175 Polytheism, 1:34, 79, 2:23, 224, 225, 227, 344, 345 in Egypt, 1:35 Pompeia, 1:70 Pongal festival, 1:336–337 Pontifex maximus, 1:69 Pontus, 1:42 Poppaea Sabina (wife of Nero), 1:271 Porete, Marguerite, 1:277 Poro society, 1:8 Portman, Natalie, 2:190 Posner, Ruth, 2:191 Possession. See Spirit possession Postcolonial studies, 2:362 Pottery and pottery making, 1:7, 8, 66, 2:9, 11, 30, 31, 35, 243, 245, 246, 247, 266, 267 Powers, Harriet, 1:171 Prajnaparamita, 1:115, 136–138 Prakriti, 1:358–360, 379 Pre-Greek goddesses in the Greek Pantheon, 1:65–67 Prehistoric burials, 2:243–244 Prehistoric religions, 2:239–268 burials, 2:243–244 Crete, religion and culture, 2:245–249 Gimbutas, Marija (1921–1994) and the religions of Old Europe), 2:249–251



guardian spirits in Eurasian cultures, 2:251–252 introduction, 2:239–243 Neolithic female figures, 2:253–256 sacred script, 2:256–257 shamanism, 2:257–259 Upper Paleolithic female figures, 2:260–264 women in prehistoric religious practices, 2:265–268 Presbyterian church, 1:186, 209, 224, 246 in Latin America, 1:183 missionary activity, 1:226 Presbyterian Church (USA), 1:224, 248 Presbyterian Church in America, 1:224 Pretty Shield (Crow Nation), 2:29 Priesand, Sally J., 2:118, 121, 194 Priestesses, 1:1, 17–22, 27, 2:146, 192–194, 341, 343, 345, 358, 359, 360, 363 in African religions, 1:1, 3, 5, 6, 12, 13, 17–22, 163, 2:357 of Athena, 1:30–31, 67 of Bacchus, 1:69 Candomblé, 1:11–12 Christian, 1:183, 187, 210, 261 Daoist, 1:301, 307–310, 310 Druidical, 2:227 in Egypt, 1:18–19, 18, 38, 2:332 Greek, 1:32, 41, 49, 56 healing powers of, 1:12 Hindu, 1:314, 354, 368, 382 of Inanna, 1:55 in Israel, 2:143 Judaism (kohenet), 2:192–194 Mary Magdalene as, 1:218 Mesopotamian, 1:59, 58–61, 81, 82, 2:320 pagan, 2:226–227 psychic abilities of, 1:12 prehistoric, 2:241, 256, 257, 354, 355 queens as, 1:19–21 Roman, 1:49, 56, 68–71 and Shamanism, 1:76 Shinto, 2:269, 271, 281–283, 286–288 of Venus, 1:70 Wiccan, 2:226–227, 235, 331

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Yoruba, 1:23, 24 See also Clergy; Miko; Ministers; Rabbis; Shamans Priestesses, Nuns, and Ordination, 1:307–310 Priestesses and Elders, 2:226–227 Priestesses and oracular women, 1:17–22 Priestesses and their staff in ancient Greece, 1:67–68 Priestessing, 2:226 Priesthood, 1:4, 39, 69, 151, 155, 157, 219, 224, 225, 235, 253, 2:199, 206, 360 initiation, 1:4 pagan, 2:224, 226–227, 228, 235 Shinto, 2:288 See also Priestesses Priests, homosexual, 1:13 Primal, Diva, 2:334 Primal Goddess, 1:34 Primus, Pearl, 2:361 Prince of the Lilies, 2:246–247 Prisca (Priscilla; biblical), 1:271, 272 Prison dharma, 1:112 Prison ministry, 1:187–188 Prison reform, 1:112 Pritam, Amrita, 2:292–293 Prithivi, 1:114 Prithvi, 1:364, 379 Programme for Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa, 1:209 Project Dana, 1:112 Project on Being with Dying, 1:112 Prophetic painting, 1:171 Prophet’s wives, 2:52, 68, 69, 70, 88–89, 99, 344 Prostitutes and prostitution, 1:38, 51, 185, 382 Protestant denominations, 1:247–250 Protestantism in Africa, 1:176 and the arts, 1:170, 171 in Europe, 1:178 in Latin America, 1:182–183 non-denominational, 1:184 right-wing, 1:162 in South Africa, 1:177 in the United States, 1:184

431

432

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Protestant Reformation, 1:170, 179, 258, 269, 273–276, 2:346 and marriage, 1:246 Protoevangelium of James, 1:236 Prthivi, 1:373 Psychoactive, 1:41 Puberty, 1:16–17 Publicia, 1:70 Puja, 1:146, 152, 370, 380, 2:109, 112–114, 113 Purdah, 2:69, 89–91 Purim, 2:139 Purity/impurity, 1:178, 254, 2:90, 112, 148, 149, 159 menstrual and postnatal, 1:344, 346, 2:148, 152, 163, 200–201, 204, 208, 228, 269, 274 ritual, 1:147, 322, 344, 345, 346, 376, 2:123, 345 sexual, 1:14, 60, 175, 267, 289, 321, 339, 340, 2:58, 65–66, 131 spiritual, 1:117, 123, 342, 359, 369, 2:85, 99, 110, 138, 205 See also Caste; Chastity Purity rings, 1:175 Purusha, 1:359 Pythia of Delphi, 1:27, 32 Qasmuna, 2:201 Quakers, 1:185, 186, 194, 199, 224 Quanzhen school, 1:301, 302, 310 “Queening” ritual, 2:229 Queen Mother of the West (Xiwangmu), 1:303–304 Queen Nanny, 1:5 Queen of Heaven, 1:55, 237, 238, 2:144, 152, 354 Queen of Sheba, 1:22 Queens, as priestesses, 1:19–21 Queer people, 1:6. See also Homosexuality; Lesbians; LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals Quetzalcoatl the Plumed Serpent, 2:7 Quigley, 2:312 Quilombos, 1:3 Quilting, 1:171 Quinceañera, 2:27 Quinta Claudia, 1:70 Quirinus, 1:69

Quiverfull movement, 1:203 Qur’an, 1:15, 2:59, 61 gendered interpretation of, 2:49 on marriage, 2:86–87 nontraditional readings of, 2:48 woman-centered reading of, 2:362 See also Islam Qur’an and Hadith, 2:91–92 Raaj-Dharma, 1:345 Rabbis, 2:194–197. See also Ordination: Jewish Rabia Adawiya, 2:70 Rabiah al-Adawiyah, 2:96 Rabiya, 2:99 Rabiya al-Adawiyya, 2:100 Rachel (biblical), 2:150, 176 Racism, 2:5, 116 and Buddhism, 1:105 Radha, 1:318, 325, 326, 359 Radha and Gopi girls, 1:360–361 Radical women’s spirituality, 2:338–343 Rafea, Aisha R., 2:101 Rafea, Aliaa, 2:101 Raging Medusa (artwork by Cristina Biaggi), 1:45 Rahnavard, Zahra, 2:75 Raine, Lauren, 2:311 Rainer, Luise, 2:191 Raisin Institute, 1:185 Raja Parba, 1:331 Rama, 1:346, 366 Ramadan, 2:48, 73 Ramakrishna, Sri, 1:355 Ramayana, 1:324, 345, 347, 355, 366 Rambert, Marie (Marie Rambaum), 2:191 Randolph, Florence Spearing, 1:165 Rani Sati, 1:347 Raphael, Geela Rayzel, 2:193 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 1:339 Rasmussen, Knud, 2:35 Rassenschande, 2:156 Rastafari, 1:22–23 Ratri, 1:373 Raven, Arlene, 2:309 Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp, 2:156 Read, Joel, 1:187



Rebbetzins, 2:147–148 Rebecca (biblical), 2:150 Rebstock, Barbara, 1:275, 276 Reception history, 2:185 Reclaiming Community of San Francisco Bay Area, 2:311, 362 Reclaiming tradition, 2:225, 232 Reconciliation, 2:186 Reconstructionist movement, 2:195, 209 Reconstructionist Paganism, 2:227–229 Reed, Nikki, 2:190 Reform, 2:92–95 Reformation. See Protestant Reformation Reformed church, 1:224, 246, 273 Reform movement (Judaism), 2:118, 128, 161, 162 Regina sacrorum, 1:69, 70 Regla de Ocha, 1:13, 24 in Cuba, 1:14 See also Santeria Reick, Haviva, 2:156 Reiki, 2:333 Reincarnation, 2:24, 25, 105, 237 Relationship and Social Models in Scripture, Archeology, and History, 1:250–253 Relief Society, 1:234–235 Religious drumming. See Drumming Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993), 2:29 Religious leadership, ancient Roman religions, 1:68–71 Roman Republic, 1:69–70 Western Roman Empire, 1:70–71 See also Leadership roles (women) Remember the Women Institute, 2:155 Renunciation, 1:319, 341, 361–363, 2:111 by Hindu women, 1:362 See also Asceticism Reuveni, David, 2:161, 201 Reverts, 2:76–77 Rex Nemorensis, 1:33, 34 Rex sacrorum, 1:69 Reza Shah, Mohammed, 2:54 Richards, Louisa “Lula” Greene, 1:234 Rig Veda, 1:313, 315, 316, 321, 341, 348, 364, 369, 372, 378–381 Rihana, 2:100 Rita of Cassia (saint), 1:265

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Rite-of-passage ceremonies, 1:15 Rites of passage (Sikh) Amrita initiation, 2:299–300 death, 2:300–301 name giving, 2:299 weddings, 2:300 Ritual Jainism, 2:112–114 Paganism, 2:229–231 See also Rituals Ritual and Festival, women’s roles, 2:298–302 Ritual cloth, 1:8 Ritual dance, 1:1, 2:258, 266, 267, 289. See also Dance Ritual music, 1:3. See also Music Rituals, 1:1–2, 2:232 agricultural, 2:246 celebrations, 2:301–302 for female embodiment and empowerment, 2:231 female-specific, 2:230 full moon, 2:237 Guru Granth Sahib, 2:298–299 life-cycle, 1:374–376, 2:229–230 for menstruation (menarche), 1:356, 376, 385, 331, 2:13, 24, 229, 231 pagan, 2:219 rites of passage, 1:356, 2:13, 299–301 sabbat, 2:236–237 self-healing, 2:230–231 shamanistic, 2:259 stage-of-life, 1:2, 375, 375 See also Purity/impurity; Ritual; Ritual and Festival: Women’s roles Ritual singers, 1:3. See also Music Ritual societies, 1:18 Rivers, Joan, 2:190 Robin, Marthe, 1:241 Robinson, Edward, 1:165 Robinson, Ida B., 1:165 Robinson, Lizzie, 1:165 Rock art sites, 2:32 Roman Catholic Church, 1:4, 11, 24 African American women in, 1:165 and the Council of Chalcedon, 1:176 and divorce, 1:214–215 in England, 1:160, 161 in Europe, 1:178, 179

433

434

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Roman Catholic Church (Continued) and the Great Schism, 1:263 Gregorian Reforms, 1:261 in Latin America, 1:181 lay celibates, 1:179 missionary activity, 1:226 and the ordination of women, 1:224, 249 in the United States, 1:184 See also Nuns; Roman Catholic women religious Roman Catholic women religious, 1:225, 253–255 Romanticism, 2:224 Rosacrucianism, 1:263 Rosen, Norma, 2:179 Rosenthal, Rachel, 2:310 Rosh Hashanah, 2:138, 181 Rosh Hodesh (Rosh Chodesh), 2:137, 163–166, 197–199, 212 and birth, 2:198 history, 2:197–198 as a woman’s holiday, 2:198 Round dances, 2:30 Rovina, Hanna, 2:189 Royal Cemetery of Ur, 1:58–59 Rubio, Isabel, 2:221 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 1:187, 249, 251, 2:321 Ruhiyyih Khanum, 1:89 Ruiz, Augustina, 1:207 Rune stones, 2:317 Ruth (biblical), 2:122, 151 Ruyle, Lydia, 2:310–311, 310, 328, 329 Ryder, Winona, 2:190 Quan Yin. See Guan Yin. Saami people, 1:79–80, 2:37 Sabbats, 2:232, 236–237 Sacred Feminine, 2:193, 232 in prehistory, 2:262 Sacred groves, 1:21 Sacred Marriage festival, 1:55 Sacred place (Native American), 2:31–33 Sacred plant items, 2:31 Sacred script, 2:256–257 Sacred spirits (Native American), 2:34–36 Sacred stones, 2:28, 35

Sacred texts on women, 1:363–369 Buddhist, 1:138–140 Sacrifice, 1:1 animal, 1:4, 16, 69, 151–152, 322 blood, 2:12 human, 1:31, 59, 2:12, 15, 244 infant, 1:31 performed by women, 1:380–381 of reindeer, 1:80 Safiyyah bint Huyayy, 2:88 Saint Frances Academy, 1:186 Saint Joseph’s Academy and Free School (Saint Joseph College), 1:186 Saints, 1:255–259 American, 1:258 Muslim, 2:70 relics of, 1:243–245 widows as, 1:269 See also Canonization; Christian saints; Hindu saints Saints, Sufi, 2:95–97, 100–101 Sakyadhıˉtaˉ: The International Association of Buddhist Women, 1:104, 153 Saleh, Su’ad, 2:84 Salleh, Ariel Kay, 2:315 Salmonova, Lyda, 2:189 Salome Alexandra (d. 67 BCE), 2:124, 199–200 Salvation Army, 1:248 Salzberg, Sharon, 1:104, 111 Samhain, 2:232, 234, 236, 329 Sammu-ramat (Queen Mother), 1:61 Samoyed peoples, 2:37 Samskaras, 1:374–376, 375. See also Lifecycle ceremonies Sanchez, Thomas, 1:162 Sanders, Maxine, 2:224–225 Sande society, 1:8 San Francisco Zen Center, 1:105 Sanˇghaittaˉ (daughter of Emperor Asoka), 1:135, 152–153 San people, 1:9 Sanskrit mythology, 1:321 Santeria, 1:3, 4, 6, 13, 24, 2:357, 361 in Cuba, 1:24 See also Regla de Ocha Sappho (of Lesbos), 1:28, 52, 71–73, 72 Sarah (biblical), 2:150 Sarah, Francesa, 2:169



Sarah’s Tent, 2:193 Saraswati, 1:332, 337, 359, 364, 367, 368, 369–370, 373, 374, 2:278 Saraswati Puja (Vasant Panchami), 1:337, 370 Sargut, Cemâlnur, 2:102 Sari Saqati, 2:96 Sasaki, Ruth Fuller Everett, 1:103–104 Sasso, Dennis C., 2:195 Sasso, Sandy Eisenberg, 2:121, 179, 194–195 Sati (Goddess), 1:325, 355, 365 Sati (suttee), 1:313, 347, 353, 370–372, 376, 381, 2:304, 339 Sati-matas, 1:313, 370, 371 Satmar Hasidism, 2:147 Satsujo, 1:155 Sawdah bint Zam’ah, 2:88 Sayings of Mary, 1:219 Sayyidah Nafisah of Cairo, 2:96 Scarification, 1:10, 16 Schaleck, Malva, 2:126 Schapiro, Miriam, 2:127 Schmidt, Klaus, 2:263 Scholastica (saint), 1:160, 232 Schori, Katharine Jefferts, 1:224, 248 Schwartz, Jacqueline (Mandell), 1:104 Scott, Cora L. V., 2:351 Scott, Sister Concordia, 1:171 Scriptures. See Christian scripture; Hebrew Bible; Hindu sacred texts; Sikhism: scriptures and women Scrying, 2:317 Sculpture bronze casting, 1:9 of the Gorgon Medusa, 1:45, 45, 47 Seasonal festivals, 2:231–234 Sea Woman, 2:7 Second Great Awakening, 1:163, 185, 194 Second Vatican Council, 1:178, 179, 230, 249, 254–255 Sectarian Shinto, 2:287 Sefer Yetzirah, 2:167 Sekai Shindoˉkyoˉ, 2:276 Selassie, Haile I, 1:22 Self-Realization fellowship, 2:336 Selu. See Corn Mother Selva Pascuala mural, 2:258 Semple, Robert, 1:201

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Sen, Ramprasad, 1:355 Seneca Falls Convention, 1:185 Senufo funerary activities, 1:7 Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaisms, 2:200–203 Seton, Elizabeth Ann Bayley, 1:174, 186, 258 Seventh-Day Adventist church, 1:165, 182, 186, 199, 200 Sex and gender in Christianity, 1:260–262 in Judaism, 2:203–206 in Spirituality, 2:343–347 Sexism, 1:229, 2:116, 287, 293, 338 and Buddhism, 1:105 Sexual abuse, 1:22–23, 2:162 by clergy, 1:124, 181, 259 rape, 1:31, 49, 55, 64, 2:4, 66, 71, 155–156, 166, 174 Sexual imagery, 1:9, 143, 2:261, 262, 265. See also Lingam; Sheela na gigs; Vulva; Yoni Sexual satisfaction (women), 2:204 Sexuality, 1:51 and Christianity, 1:206–208 and spirituality, 1:207 Sexual orientation, 1:6, 28. See also Homosexuality; LGBTQ/LGBTQIQ individuals; Transgender persons Seymour, Jane, 2:191 Seymour, William, 1:185 Sha’arawi, Huda, 2:47 Shabbat (Sabbath), 2:137, 145, 206–208, 207 food preparation for, 2:141 Shaivism, 1:317, 319 Shakers, 1:165, 170–171, 199, 246, 249 Shaking Quakers, 1:186, 199 Shakta Tantras, 1:374 Shakti, 1:313, 325, 328, 331, 334, 335, 342, 357, 358, 359, 361, 365, 372–374, 377, 378, 383, 2:305, 364 Shaktism, 1:332, 356, 367 Shallow ecology, 2:322 Shamanism, 2:278 Mesolithic, 2:256–257 prehistoric, 2:257–259 in prehistoric religious practices, 2:257–259

435

436

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Shamanism in Eurasian cultures, 2:36–39 Shamanism in prehistoric religious practices, 2:257–259 Shaman-priestesses, 1:21 Shamans, 1:20, 21, 2:219, 333 blind, 2:285 in China, 1:74–75 in Eurasian cultures, 2:36–39 female, 2:359–360 gender of, 2:258 as “heritage bearers,” 2:40 in Japan, 1:75–76 in Korea, 1:76, 2:38–41, 40 in Manchuria, 1:76 Native American, 2:30–31, 32 Paleolithic, 2:243 responsibilities of, 2:36–37 Sarmatian, 2:259 Shinto, 2:281, 284 in Siberia, 1:79 in Southeast Asia, 1:76–77 women as, 1:73–75 Shamans and ritualists, 2:282–286 Shamans in East Asia, 1:73–77 Shamans in Korea, 2:39–41 Shams-i Finih, 1:94 Shams of Marchena, 2:99 Shange, Ntozake, 2:360–361 Shape-shifting, 2:25, 266 Shapiro, Miriam, 2:309 Shari’a, 2:71, 93, 97–99 and honor killing, 2:66 on marriage, 2:79 Shasta Abbey Zen Monastery, 1:105 Shaw, Miranda, 2:341 Shaykhism. See also Tahirih Sheela na gigs, 2:347–349, 2:348 Shekinah, 2:142, 143, 168–169, 190, 193, 198, 201, 354 in Kabbalistic literature, 2:145 in Rabbinic literature, 2:145 Shelamzion (Salome) Alexandria, 2:124, 199–200 Shemini Atzereth, 2:139 Shere, Holly Taya, 2:146, 193 Sher-Gil, Amrita, 2:293 Sheva, Ellie, 2:226 Shi’a Islam, 1:85, 2:49–50, 51, 53, 56, 69, 75, 80, 98

Shinji shuˉmeikai, 2:277 Shinri jikkoˉ no oshie, 2:277 Shinto, 1:76, 80, 2:269–290, 357 Amaterasu Omikami, 2:270–272 feminine virtues, 2:272–273 filial piety, 2:273–275 founders of new religious movements, 2:275–277 introduction, 2:269–270 Kami, 2:277–278 kinship and marriage, 2:278–281 priestesses, 2:281–282 Sectarian Shinto, 2:287 shamans and ritualists, 2:282–286 State Shinto, 2:287–288 Tenrikyoˉ, 2:288–289 weddings, 2:286–287 Shinto-related movements, 2:275–277 Shinto shrines, 2:269, 271, 273, 279, 282 Kamo shrine, 2:282 Shrine maindens, 2:282, 284, 287 Usa Hachimanguˉ shrine, 2:284 Shirer, Priscilla, 1:184, 187 Shiva, 1:317, 325, 332, 332, 334, 337, 342, 355, 359, 367, 371, 377 Shiva, Vandana, 2:314 Shiva lingams, 1:337 Shiva Rae, 2:363 Shivratri, 1:352 Shoˉtoku (empress), 2:284 Shrines, 1:44, 85, 92, 115–118, 145–146, 152, 205, 223, 238, 243–244, 257, 289, 305, 313, 318, 320, 337, 347, 356–358, 371, 2:246, 253, 273–275, 277–279, 281–283, 284–288, 298, 319, 338 household, 1:38, 336, 343–345, 346 Ise Shrine, 2:271, 282, 284 Kamo Shrine, 2:282 Shinto, 2:269, 271, 273, 279, 282 Usa Hachimanguˉ, 2:284 Women’s, 1:21, 23 Shrine maidens, 2:282, 284, 287 Shudras, 1:321 Siberia, 1:79 Sibylline Oracles, 1:27, 78 Sibyls, 1:77–78 Siddhartha Gautama, 1:139, 2:357. See also Buddha



Siddhi, 1:377, 384, 2:363 Signoret, Simone, 2:191 Sikh diaspora, 2:296 Sikhism, 2:291–304 art and performance, 2:292–295 feminist issues, 2:295–297 guru period, 2:297–298 introduction, 2:291–292 and kirtan, 2:334 ritual and festival, women’s roles, 2:298–302 scriptures and women, 2:303–304 Sikh Rahit Maryada, 2:296 Sikh scriptures and women, 2:303–304 Simmer-Brown, Judith, 1:113 Simos, Miriam (Starhawk), 2:146, 193, 219, 225, 328, 340 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 2:190 Singh, Amrit Kaur, 2:294 Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur, 2:295 Singh, Rabindra Kaur, 2:294 Sister Formation movement, 1:254 Sisters in Islam, 2:60–61 Sisters of Charity, 1:186 Sisters of Jesus Way, 1:167 Sisters of Mercy, 1:232 Sisters of Notre Dame, 1:232 Sisters of Saint Joseph, 1:232, 259 Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, 1:174, 186 Sisters of the Incarnation, 1:167 Sisters of the Love of God, 1:167 Sita, 1:346, 366–367 Sitatapatra, 1:115, 366 Siuda, Tamara, 2:226 16 cowry divination, 1:12 Sjöö, Monica, 2:306, 327, 328, 341 Slavery and the slave trade, 1:3, 2:77 and Christianity, 1:163, 164–165 and sex, 1:50 slave revolts, 1:3 and women, 1:48 Small Steps (Sarajevo), 2:84 Smith, Emma Hale, 1:234 Smith, Joseph, Jr., 1:233, 246 Smoking, 1:22 Snake dancers, 1:18 Snakes, 1:46, 2:332 Snow, Eliza R., 1:233

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Social Gospel, 2:118 Social justice, 1:171, 187 in monastic orders, 1:229 Social media, 1:187, 2:61 Social organization domination model, 1:252–253 partnership model, 1:251–252 Social rights, and Druzism, 2:50 Societies of Apostolic Life, 1:253 Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, 1:174 Society of Friends, 1:199. See also Quakers Society of Powerful Women or the Mothers (lya mi), 1:23 Soffer, Olga, 2:260 Soˉka Gakkai, 1:140–142 Sokei-an, 1:104 Solomon (biblical king), 1:22 Solomon, Rebecca, 2:125–126 Song of Songs (Hebrew Bible), 2:151, 344, 354 Song Ruoxin, 1:283, 289 Sophia, 1:263–265 as cosmic intelligence, 1:264 as female Creator, 1:263 as Holy Spirit, 1:263 as World Soul, 1:264 Soˉto Zen Buddhism, 1:104, 123, 133, 155–156 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), 1:165, 180, 224, 246–247 missionary activity, 1:227 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1:186 Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1:248 Spaisman, Zypora, 2:189 Sparks, Jordin, 1:187 Spider Woman, 2:33, 35 Spiral Dance, 2:311 Spiritism, 1:4 Spirit possession, 1:1, 3–4, 5, 2:276, 289 Spirit Rock Meditation Center, 1:104 Spirits, guardian, 2:251–252 Spirit selection, 1:21 Spiritualism, 2:350–352 enemies of, 2:351 women as spiritualist mediums, 2:350–351

437

438

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Spiritualist movement, 1:103, 274, 275 Spirituality, 2:305–365 art and performance, 2:308–311 astrology, 2:312–313 deep ecology, 2:313–316 divination, 2:316–318 drumming, 2:318–320 earth-based, 2:250, 361 ecofeminism, 2:321–326 and ecstasy, 2:363 feminist, 2:193, 218, 225 Goddess, 2:225, 326–330 green funerals, 2:330–331 healers, 2:331–334 introduction, 2:305–308 Kirtan, 2:334–335 and liberation struggles, 2:361 meditation, 2:335–337 Pagan, 2:222, 316 partnership vs. domination systems, 2:352–354 pilgrimage, goddess, 2:337–338 radical women’s spirituality, 2:338–343 sex and gender, 2:343–347 Sheela na gigs, 2:347–349 spiritualism, 2:350–352 spirituality and gender in social context, 2:352–356 syncretism, 2:356–358 woman’s, 2:342 women of color, 2:358–363 yoga, 2:363–365 Spirituality and gender in social context, 2:352–356 Spiritual practices, Afro-Cuban, 1:4 Spring equinox (Eostre), 2:232, 2:233, 2:236, 2:329 Sravasti Abbey, 1:104 Sree Ma (Holy Mother; Ma Sarada), 1:341–342 Sri Lanka, Buddhism in, 1:128, 130, 134, 135, 152, 153 Standing Rock Sioux tribe, 2:6 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 1:251 Starhawk (Miriam Simos), 2:146, 193, 219, 225, 328, 340 Star patterns, 2:24 State Shinto, 2:271, 282, 287–288 Stein, Edith, 1:241

Stettheimer, Florine, 2:126 Stewart, Maria W., 1:185 Sthanakvasins, 2:112 Sthenno, 1:44 Stickey, Joanna, 2:146 Stigmata, 1:239 Stigmatics, 1:265–266 historical overview, 1:265 interpretations of, 1:265–266 Stone, Merlin, 2:327, 339 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1:174, 185 Strasberg, Susan, 2:190 Strasbourg Melchiorites, 1:275 Streep, Meryl, 2:190 Stregheria, 1:34 Streisand, Barbra, 2:190 Stri-Dharma, 1:345–346, 1:347, 1:348 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1:186 Sudan, kadake queens of, 1:19 Sudanese Women’s Union, 2:70 Sufism, 2:49–50, 99–102 Sufi women, 2:95–97 Sukkoth, 2:138–139 Sulpicia, 1:70 Summer Solstice (Litha), 2:225, 232, 233, 236, 329 Sumo wrestling, 2:274 Sun Buer, 1:301 Sun Dance Ceremony, 2:19–20 Sunday, Billy, 1:203 Sun goddess, 1:78–80 Sunna, 2:57–58 Suppressed Histories Archives, 2:339 Supreme Council of Kenyan Muslims, 2:70 Surya, 1:355 Susan B. Anthony Coven No. 1, 2:225, 235, 327, 340 Susanna (biblical), 2:122 Suttee. See Sati (suttee) Suu Kyi, Aung San, 1:113 Suzuki, Beatrice Erskine Hanh Lanee, 1:103 Suzuki, D. T., 1:103, 105 Svetambaras, 2:105, 106, 107–111, 112, 113 Swabian Eve, 2:262 Swaminarayan, 1:360 Swiss Baptist churches, 1:180



Sydney, Sylvia, 2:190 Syed, Najeeba, 2:84 Symbiosis, 2:315–316 Synagogue, 2:208–211 Syncretism, 1:4, 11, 305, 2:356–358 and Druzism, 2:49–50 and Hinduism, 1:313 See also Candomblé Syria, missionaries in, 1:226 Szenes, Hannah, 2:156 Szold, Henrietta, 2:135 Taharat mishpachah (family purity), 2:204–205 Tahirih, 1:89, 93–94 Taiko drumming, 2:361. See also Drumming Taisen Deshimaru, 1:133–134 Taiwan Buddhism in, 1:130, 153 Confucianism in, 1:281 temples to Mazu, 1:305 Taliban, 2:54 Talmud, 2:123, 131, 173, 177, 180, 181, 183, 190, 193, 197, 199, 212 Talocan Toteizcalticanantzin, 2:7 Tamid, Shuv, 2:193 Tanit, 1:55 Tantaquidgeon, Gladys, 2:28 Tantra, 1:97, 106, 107, 110, 142–144, 377–378, 2:363–364 Buddhist, 2:336 Hindu, 1:355, 2:336 and the yoginis, 1:385 See also Buddhism, Tantric Tara, 1:102, 115, 129, 130, 144–147, 334 Green, 1:109, 145, 147 representations of, 1:145–146 White, 1:145 Tara Dhatu, 1:108–109 Tara Vrata, 1:147 Tarbiyat School for Girls, 1:89 Tarbotti, Arcangela, 1:229 Tarim mummies, 2:37 Tarot cards, 2:316, 317, 318, 327, 328, 340 Daughters of the Moon, 2:340 Motherpeace, 2:328, 340 Tartaria Tablets, 2:241–242, 241

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Tartarus, 1:42 Tarzi, Soraya (Queen of Afghanistan), 2:54 Tashi Tseringma, 1:116 Tashlik ritual, 2:138 Tattoos, 1:10, 16 Taweret, 1:38 Taylor, Elizabeth, 2:189–190 Tea ceremony, 1:148–149 Teej, 1:352 Teimei (empress), 2:286 Teish, Chief Oloye Luisah, 1:6, 2:341 Tekakwitha, Kateri (saint), 1:184, 258, 259 Temperance movement, 1:196 Temple of Sinawava, 2:33 Temple of the Sacred Tooth, 1:107 Temple wives, 1:155 Temples, Baha’i, 1:85, 86 Temples, 1:6, 12–13, 12, 18–19, 30, 31, 32, 37–39, 44, 45, 49, 55, 56, 58, 60–61, 63, 65, 66, 67, 72, 74, 78, 92, 103, 104, 108, 110, 112, 117–118, 127, 237, 263, 287, 301–302, 304–305, 309–310, 314, 325, 327, 329, 331, 337, 347, 355, 356–358. See also specific temples Tenrikyoˉ, 2:275, 285, 288–289 Tenshoˉ jinguˉkyoˉ, 2:275, 276 Terentia, 1:70 Teresa of Ávila, 1:239, 240, 241, 258 Teresa of Calcutta, 1:259 Termas, 1:110 Terry, Neely, 1:185 Tertia Aemilia, 1:68 Tertullian, 1:245, 271 Teubal, Savina, 2:192, 193 Textiles, 1:8, 30, 143, 296, 2:130, 309 dyeing of, 1:9 production of, 2:9–11, 14, 201 See also Clothing; Weaving Thailand abortion in, 1:101 Buddhism in, 1:118, 124, 127, 128, 134, 135 Thealogy, 1:249 in art and performance, 2:308, 311 in Wicca, 2:35 Thecla, 1:51, 271, 272 “The Fall,” 1:197–199 Themis, 1:65–66

439

440

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Theogony (Hesiod), 1:44 Theology in Bhakti, 1:318 dominion, 1:162 in goddess spirituality, 2:326 Pentecostal, 1:249 and sex and gender, 1:260 in shari‘a, 2:97 Theotokos. See Mary of Nazareth; Mother of God Thérèse of Lisieux, 1:241 Therigatha, 1:149–150 Thich Nhat Hanh, 1:111, 113 Third Order of Saint Francis, 1:269 Thomas Aquinas, 1:162 Thornton, Penny, 2:312 Threefold Law, 2:237 Three Sisters, 2:34 Thurman, Howard, 1:165 Tibet, Buddhism in, 1:134, 142, 146 Tibetan Chiang people (China), 2:24 Tibetan Lamaism, 2:27 Time, cyclic, 2:32 Titanesses, 1:42 Titans, 1:42 Tlaltecuhtli, 1:333, 334 Tohfah, 2:96 Tolkien Society, 2:217 Torah, 1:15, 2:128–129, 131, 137, 139, 148, 167, 178, 180, 198, 209, 210 oral vs. written, 2:177 Torrez, Bernice, 2:28 Traditional medicine, 2:332 Chinese, 1:306–307 Traditional plants and herbs, 1:4 Trances, 1:12. See also Mysticism Trans-Atlantic slave trade. See Slavery and the slave trade Transcendental Meditation, 2:336 Transcendental movement, 1:103 Transgender persons, 2:26, 244 Jewish, 2:203–204 and paganism, 2:228 and Wicca, 2:237 See also Gender fluidity Transsexuals, 1:190 as devadasis, 1:327 and Draupadi festivals, 1:330

Tree of Life, 1:76, 79, 263, 2:145, 168, 222, 336 Tribalists, 2:362 Trinity Broadcasting Network, 1:187 Triple Goddesses, 1:33, 44–45, 47 Trivia, 1:33 Troth, The, 2:221, 226 Truth, Sojourner, 1:164, 164, 185 Tsomo, Karma Lekshe, 1:104 Tsunesaburo, Makiguchi, 1:140 Tubman, Harriet, 1:164 Tucker, Sophie, 2:190 Tunisia, 1:20 Turan, 1:55 Turner, Edith, 2:337 Turner, Victor, 2:337 Tweedie, Irina, 2:101 Two-Spirit Womyn’s Sun Dance, 2:361 Tyler, Edwina Lee, 2:361 Uan Afuda cave burials, 2:243–244 Udekaw (shaman), 1:73 Ulanova, Galina, 2:191 Ulford, Isabel, 1:212 Uma, 1:334, 373 Umm Abdallah, 2:100–101 Umm al-Darda, 2:98 Umm Habibah Ramlah bint Abi Sufyan, 2:88 Umm Salamah Hind bint Abi Umayyah, 2:88–89 Umm Zaynab Fatimah bin ‘Abbas al-Baghdadiyah, 2:98 UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, 2:159 Underhill, Leah, 2:350 Union for Traditional Judaism, 2:121 United Ancient Order of Druids, 2:217 United Church of Christ, 1:250 United Methodist Church, 1:187, 248 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 1:90 United Pentecostal Church, 1:183 United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (Believers), 1:199, 249. See also Shakers United States



Buddhism in, 1:103–105, 108 Catholic communities in, 1:161 Christianity in, 1:184–188 enslaved Africans in, 1:3 Islam in, 2:76–79 Reconstructionist paganism in, 2:228 women and work in, 2:213 Universal House of Justice, 1:85–86, 95, 96 Universalist Church, 1:186 Upanishads, 1:348, 362, 364, 373, 375, 378, 380, 2:364 Upasana Kanda, 1:332 Upaya Prison Project, 1:112 Upaya Zen Center, 1:112 Upper Paleolithic burials, 2:243 Upper Paleolithic female figures, 2:260–264 Uqqal, 2:50 Uralian peoples, 2:251–252, 265 Uranus, 1:42 Urnanše (king), 1:59, 59 Ursulines, 1:174, 185, 232, 254 Uru’inimgina (king), 1:60 Usa Hachimanguˉ Shrine, 2:284 Usas, 1:364, 373 Ushas, 1:379 Utah Territorial Women’s Suffrage Association, 1:234 Vac, 1:364, 370, 373, 379 Vagina, 1:47 Vaishnava Hindu, 1:360 Vajracharyas, 1:107 Vajrayana, 1:116 Valiente, Doreen, 2:215, 224, 235 Vallabhacharya, 1:360 Vancouver Holocaust Center, 2:156 Van Ginneken, Jacques, 1:227 Van Schurman, Anna, 1:194 Varna, 1:321–322, 323 Vasant Panchami (Saraswati Puja), 1:337 Vasudhara, 1:115 Vat-Savitri Amavasya festival, 1:335 Vaughan, Genevieve, 2:342 Vedas, 1:364 Vedbaek Mesolithic cemetery, 2:243 Vedic Hinduism, 1:378–383

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Veganism, 2:325 Vegetarianism, 2:219, 298, 302, 325 Veiling, 2:45–47, 69, 73–76, 296. See also Hijab “Venus” of Laussel, 2:262–263, 352 “Venus” of Lespugue, 2:263 Vernon, Margaret, 1:160 Vestal virgins, 1:49, 69, 70 Veves, 1:5 Vidyadevis, 2:107 Vidyapati, 1:360 Vietnam Buddhism in, 1:118 Confucianism in, 1:281, 284, 294 Vighneˉs´wara, 1:316 Viking Revival, 2:221 Vinaya Pitaka, 1:100 Vincˇa peoples, 2:253, 267 Violence domestic, 1:185, 381, 2:62, 161 honor-related, 2:66–67 sexual, 1:181, 331, 2:155, 156, 162, 230 See also 9/11 Terrorist attacks; Holocaust Vipassana meditation, 1:104 Vipassana movement, 1:104 Virgen de los Desamparados, 1:305 Virginity, 1:48, 95, 176, 214, 221, 251, 254, 257 consecrated, 1:175, 221, 242 of Mary of Nazareth, 1:236 perpetual, 1:221, 236 See also Athena; Pythia; Vestal virgins; Yemoja Virgin Mary. See Mary of Nazareth Virgin of Guadalupe, 1:181–182, 238, 2:26, 359 Vishnu, 1:318, 328, 332, 332, 342, 349, 351, 355, 360, 367 Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), 1:339 Vision quests, 2:28, 30, 32 Visions, 2:42 Vodou (Vodoun, Vodun, Voodoo), 1:3, 5, 163, 2:356, 361 Vogel, Karen, 2:340 Von Bora, Katharina, 1:274, 274, 276 Vrata, 1:110, 147, 349, 356, 380 Vulva, 1:9, 55, 2:16, 17, 32, 264, 265, 266, 347–349

441

442

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Wadud, Amina, 2:49, 55, 59, 60, 60, 61, 63, 77, 84, 362 Wah! (Wah Devi), 2:334 Walburga, 1:160 Walker, Alice, 2:339–340, 360–361, 360 Wang Chongyang, 1:301 Wang Fengxian, 1:309 Wangjia Hutong Women’s Mosque, 2:102 Ward, Mary, 1:160 Wardley Society, 1:199 Warfare and raiding, 2:41–42 Wax casting, 2:333 Way of Tea, 1:148–149 Weaving, 1:7, 8, 9, 50, 57, 66, 380, 2:10–11, 35, 245, 246, 247, 250–251, 260, 266, 311, 359 Weber, Ilse, 2:156 Weddings Indian, 2:296–2:297 in Muslim communities, 2:80–2:81 Shinto, 2:286–2:287 Sikh, 2:300 See also Marriage Weigel, Helene, 2:191 Wei Huacun, 1:308–309 Weil, Simone, 1:240, 241 Weisberg, Ruth, 2:127 Weiss, Andrea, 2:179 Weisz, Rachel, 2:191 Weitzman, Lenore, 2:154 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 1:174, 185 We’Moon calendar, 2:341 Werbemacher, Channah Rochel, 2:169–170 Wheatley, Phillis, 1:185 Wheel of the Year, 2:232, 326, 329, 341 Whirling Dervishes, 2:336 Whitby Abbey, 1:160 White, Ellen Gould Harmon, 1:186, 199, 199–200 White, James Springer, 1:200 White Buffalo Calf Woman, 2:359 White Buffalo Maiden, 2:2, 19 Whitehead, Isabel, 1:160 White Painted Woman, 2:12 White Sisters, 1:254

Wicca, 2:146, 215–216, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 232, 234–238, 325, 340 beliefs and practices, 2:236–237 contemporary, 2:317 Dianic, 1:27, 34, 2:225, 229, 317, 338, 2:362 divination techniques, 2:317–318 history and background, 2:234–235 Neo-Pagan, 1:34 and pilgrimage, 2:338 status in society, 2:238 women and, 2:235–236 See also Witchcraft and witches Wiccan spirituality, 2:316 Widowhood, 1:215–216, 267–271 and Christianity, 1:215–216, 267–271 and the cult of female chastity, 1:289 Hindu, 1:347, 353, 368, 371, 376 Jewish, 2:150 modern Western, 1:269–270 Vedic, 1:381 See also Sati (suttee) Wife of Valor (Proverbs), 2:212 Willard, Frances, 1:185, 196 Willis, Jan, 1:105 Winans, CeCe, 1:172, 172 Windvogel, Laura (Lady Skollie), 1:9 Winger, Debra, 2:190 Winters, Shelley, 2:190 Winter solstice (Yule), 2:232–233, 236, 329 Winti religious tradition, 1:3 Wise, Louise Waterman, 2:135 Wise, Stephen S., 2:135 Witch burning, 2:339 Witchcraft and witches, 1:24, 346–347, 2:224, 225, 227, 229, 230, 232, 333, 327 Dianic, 1:27, 34, 2:225, 229, 317, 338, 362 Italian American, 1:34 See also Wicca Witchcraft Act (1912), 1:21 Witch trials, 1:258 Wittenmyer, Annie, 1:196 Wole Shoujian, 1:301 Womanhood initiations, 1:18



Womanhouse, 2:127 Womanism, 2:360–361, 362 Woman’s Missionary Union, 1:227 Womb, 1:32, 139, 237, 329, 2:32, 91, 150, 153, 180, 198, 218, 229, 230, 231, 239, 251, 265, 303, 304, 309 of divinity, 1:42, 43, 64, 115, 116, 253, 374, 377, 2:145 of Earth, 1:46, 2:24, 25, 32, 33, 34 Women as abbesses, 1:157, 160–161, 204–206, 221, 257, 261 abuse of, 2:155 as anchoresses, 1:211–212, 277 as Anglican/Episcopalian religious, 1:166–168 in the Apocrypha, 1:168–170 as artists, 1:7, 170–171, 2:125–126 Asian, 2:362 Athenian, 1:57 biblical, 2:139, 152 Brahmin, 1:322 and the caste system, 1:321–324 as children, 1:48–49 Christian, interfaith dialogue post 9/11, 1:208–211 and Christian art, 1:170–173 Christian attitudes toward clothing, 1:189–193 as Christian monastics (contemporary), 1:230–231 as Christian monastics (medieval), 1:157–158, 221–223, 231–233 as Christian monastics (monastic life), 1:227–230 of color, 1:163–166, 174, 186, 2:306, 358–363 Confucian virtues, 1:290–291 Dalits, 1:323–324 as dancers, 2:275, 361 as deacons, 1:243 and deep ecology, 2:313 discrimination against, 1:314 domination of, 2:313 dress codes for, 1:189–193 as druids, 2:217–218 in early Buddhism, 1:150–152, 97

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

in early Christianity, 1:157, 169, 271–273 and ecofeminism, 2:322 education for, 1:88–91, 93–96, 160 and “The Fall,” 1:197–199 feminine virtues of, 1:118–120 as filial daughters, 1:292–293 five classes in Daoism, 1:300 as founders of Christian denominations, 1:199–201 gathering of silk by, 1:285 Greek and Roman, 1:48–51 Hasidic, 2:148 as healers, 1:305–307 and Hindu ideals of womanhood, 1:339–340, 345–348, 364, 366–368 homosexual, 1:52, 206–208, 2:361 Islamic ideal of womanhood, 2:67–68 under Islamic rule, 2:200–202 and Judaism, 2:163, 204, 209 as jurist scholars, 2:97 in the labor force, 2:159 in leadership roles, 1:68–71 leading prayers, 2:49, 60, 61, 62, 77, 78, 102, 208 literacy among, 1:81–82, 89 as magicians, 2:222–223 making vows, 2:151 as manifestations of Shakti, 1:378 marginalization of, 2:91, 123, 287–288 as mediums, 2:152, 275 menstruating, 2:12, 113, 148, 152, 155, 204, 209, 228, 274, 304, 322, 363 mestiza, 2:360 in the middle ages, 1:221–223, 231–233 and military service, 2:158 as ministers, 1:223–225 in Minoan civilization, 1:251–252 as missionaries, 1:225–227 Mormon, 1:233–235 as mourners, 1:38 as musicians, 1:170, 171–172, 204, 205, 2:156 Muslim, 1:208–211 as mystics, 1:239–242, 258, 277, 278 naming of, 1:48 Native American, 1:174, 184, 258, 2:361

443

444

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Women (Continued) in the New Testament, 1:242–243 as nurses, 1:167, 174 Palestinian, 2:83 as peacemakers, 2:82–84 as performers, 2:188–191 political agency of, 1:300–301 powers of, 1:13 as preachers, 1:218 in prehistoric religious practices, 2:262, 265–268 pre-Islamic Arab, 2:359 preparation of silk by, 1:286 as priestesses, 1:49, 2:192–193, 363 as priests’ wives, 1:155 as property, 1:56–57 as prophets, 1:275, 2:152 in public life, 1:49–50 as rabbis, 2:136, 194–196 in the Reformation, 1:273–276 religious roles for, 2:13, 75, 158, 345–346 restrictions on, 2:296 rights of, 1:330, 91–92, 103 role in Buddhist funeral practices, 1:121–122 role of, 2:162 roles and responsibilities in marriage, 1:351–353 Roman, 1:57–58 as Roman Catholic religious, 1:253–255 and sacred script, 2:256–257 as saints, 1:157, 241, 255–259 as scribes, 1:27, 81 seclusion of, 2:69, 90 sexual abuse, 2:155 as shamans, 1:73–77, 2:258–259, 363 and Shinto, 2:274 Sikh, 2:291, 304 Spartan, 1:57 as spiritualist mediums, 2:350–351 and spirituality, 2:229–231, 341 spiritual power of, 1:24, 2:24 as spoils of war, 1:31 as stigmatics, 1:265–266 subjugation of, 1:229, 2:64, 297 subordination of, 1:158, 197–198, 260, 296, 364–365, 2:272–275

subordination of (Vedic), 1:377–378 as teachers, 1:128, 142, 194–195, 243, 272, 364, 2:52–53, 72, 92, 96, 97–98, 133, 201 and textile production, 2:10–11, 14 as theologians, 1:187, 205, 249, 2:146 three classifications, 1:380 voting rights for, 1:196, 234, 2:133– 134, 161 as warriors, 2:41–42 and Wicca, 2:235–236 as widows, 1:50–51, 215–216, 267–271 as writers and poets, 1:81–82, 157, 170, 185, 188–189, 204–205, 222, 232, 276–279, 301, 316–320, 367, 380, 2:31, 100–101, 146, 156, 179, 201, 292–294, 339, 339–341, 360 and yoga, 2:363 See also Motherhood; Ovid (poet); Priestesses; Sappho (of Lesbos); Tahirih Women and Mothers for Peace, 2:159 Women and work, 2:211–214 in ancient Israel, 2:211–212 in the diaspora, 2:212–213 in modern Israel, 2:213–214 in the United States, 2:213 Women Engendering Peace, 2:159 Women for Palestine, 2:83 Women in Baha’i scriptures, 1:95–96 Women in Black (WiB), 2:159, 2:187 Women in early Buddhism, 1:150–152 Women in Early Christianity (to 300 CE), 1:271–273 Women in prehistoric religious practices, 2:265–268 Women in the Holocaust (seminar), 2:154 Women in the Reformation, 1:273–276 Women of color, 1:74, 163–166, 186, 2:306, 358–363 Women of Nazareth, 1:227 Women religious in Africa, 1:177 Anglican/Episcopalian, 1:166–167 and chastity, 1:175–176 Christian, 1:176 interfaith organizations, 1:177 Roman Catholic, 1:225, 253–255 Women’s Buddhist networks, 1:152–154



Women’s changing roles, 1:296–298 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 1:185 Women’s circles, 1:153, 2:341 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), 2:134, 135, 186 Women’s March, 2:311 Women’s Missionary Union (WMU), 1:248 Women’s Mosque of America, 1:211, 2:102 Women’s movements Jewish, 2:132–136 in the United States, 2:134 Women’s organizations, 2:102–104 Women’s shrines, 1:21, 23 Women’s Spirituality, 2:229. See also Spirituality Women’s Spirituality Program, 2:362 Women’s studies, 1:279, 2:153, 321 Women’s Studies in Religion program (Harvard), 1:196 Women’s suffrage. See Women, voting rights for Women’s temples, 1:123, 135, 145–147, 154 Women’s Union Missionary Society of America, 1:226 Women Surviving Holocaust (meeting), 2:154 Women Wage Peace, 2:187, 187 Women warriors (Native American), 2:41–42 Women writers in early and medieval Christianity, 1:276–279 Wonder Woman, 1:27, 33, 34, 35 Woodcraft movement, 2:217 Woodhull, Victoria, 2:351 Woods, Grace Winona, 1:226 Woosley, Louisa, 1:224 World Council of Churches, 1:246 World Soul, 1:264 World’s Parliament of Religions, 1:103 Worship services, embodied, 1:3 Worth, Irene, 2:190 Wotanism, 2:220 Wounded Knee massacre at, 2:20 occupation and protest, 2:5, 361

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Wovoka, 2:20, 239 Writers (women) Baha’i, 1:92 Christian, 1:188–189, 199–200, 258, 276–279 Confucian, 1:283–284 Ecofeminist, 2:321 Feminist, 1:249, 2:339 Goddess spirituality, 2:327–328, 341 Greek, 1:71–73 Jewish, 2:178, 193 Mesopotamian, 1:81–83 Muslim, 2:55, 77, 100, 101, 102 Pagan, 2:193, 217, 235 Sikh, 2:293 songwriters, 1:171, 2:179, 338 Writers and poets, ancient Mesopotamia, 1:81–83 Wu (dancing women), 2:258 Wurushemu, 1:78, 80 Wu Wei and the Feminine, 1:299, 310–312 Xicanistas, 2:360, 362 Xi Wangmu, 1:74 Xochiquetzal, 2:35 Xu (Empress), 1:283, 289 Xue Tao, 1:301 Yahweh (YHWH), 2:144, 152, 153, 344 Yajurveda, 1:378 Yaksis, 1:383, 384, 2:107 Yakshinis, 1:114 Yamatohime, 2:284 Yemoja, 1:4, 23, 24 Yeshivat Maharat, 2:184, 2:196 Yeshivat Mechon Hadar, 2:122 Yiddish Public Theater (NY), 2:189 Yiguando, 1:126 Yin and yang, 1:285, 288, 292, 294, 299, 300, 303, 311–312 Yoga, 1:116, 143, 2:305, 333, 334, 335, 346, 363–365 Kundalini, 1:377 schools of, 2:364 tantric, 2:354, 363, 383 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 2:365 Yoginis, 1:138, 357, 374, 377, 378, 383–385, 2:363

445

446

COMPREHENSIVE INDEX

Yom Kippur, 2:138 Yoni, 1:337, 357 Yoruba, 1:163, 2:359 drumming, 2:318 indigenous religions, 1:20–21, 23–25, 2:361, 362 Gelede masquerade, 1:7, 13 Orisha worship, 1:3, 4, 23 spirituality, 1:3 Yoruba diaspora, 1:23 Yoruba Temple (Harlem), 1:6 Young, Brigham, 1:233 Young Buddhist Association of Thailand, 1:128 Young Women organization (Mormon church), 1:234–235 Young Women’s Christian Association, 1:187 Yousafzai, Malala, 2:52, 52, 55, 83 Yule (winter solstice), 2:232–233, 236, 329 Yu Xuanji, 1:301 Zailism, 1:126 Zan Center of Syracuse, 1:105 Zapotecs, 2:34 Zar religion, 1:20

Zaynab bint Jahsh, 2:88 Zaynab bint Khuzaymah, 2:88 Zell, Katharina Schütz, 1:274, 275, 276 Zell, Matthäus, 1:275 Zelophehad, daughters of, 2:150 Zen Buddhism, 1:103, 104–105, 148–149, 154–156, 2:335 iconography of, 2:361 Japanese, 1:154–156 Zen Center of Los Angeles, 1:105 Zen Peacemaker Order, 1:113 Zen Studies Society, 1:105 Zero Hour (sculpture), 1:9 Zevi, Shabbetai, 2:161, 201, 209 Zhengyi school, 1:302, 310 Zion Canyon, 2:33 Zionism, 2:126, 135, 162, 187 Zi Shoushen, 1:301 Zobayda (Princess), 2:96 Zodiac, 2:312 Zohar, 2:167, 169, 171 Zornberg, Aviva, 2:179 Zoroastrian followers of Sufism, 2:101 Zschech, Darlene, 1:171 Zu Shu, 1:301 Zwingli, Huldrych, 1:275