New Religions, Women's Roles in
New Religions, Women's Roles in
The term new religious movements, or NRMs, refers both to radically new systems of religious belief and practice and to groups that make significant innovations in existing religions. Moreover, the use of the term new is often relative, as many religions that bear this label have been in existence for decades, and scholarship on NRMs takes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century movements into account as well. Because NRMs commonly offer their members new perspectives on powerful concepts such as the sacred and the human, and because they often experiment with social structures, they are particularly important to the study of sex and gender in religion. Though NRMs exist around the world and share many of the same general traits, scholarship on women's roles in NRMs has generally focused on U.S. movements.
New religious movements often begin their lives in tension with the surrounding society. They are new and unfamiliar and most cultures expect religion to be old and familiar. Moreover, NRMs often consider their own teachings to be improvements over those of existing religions. Whereas such tensions can lead to the persecution of NRMs, they also disconnect such groups from prevailing social norms, allowing them to experiment with aspects of social organization such as gender roles.
NRMs that withstand the challenges of transition from new religion to established group often leave their experimental nature behind in a process called the routinization of charisma. Some groups emerge from this process still in tension with the surrounding society and may consider this state of being central to their identity. Others, such as Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS church, or Mormons), gradually come into closer conformity with the surrounding culture as they become institutionalized.
Women's roles are not automatically included in the social experimentation of NRMs. Alternative gender roles may be available only for women with a special status, most notably the founders of NRMs, and gender roles that are more liberal than those favored in the broader society are often among the first aspects of a new movement to change as the movement becomes institutionalized. Alternative gender roles in new religious movements also range from those far stricter and more conservative than in the surrounding society to those far more permissive and diverse. Because of the latter possibility, women in U.S. history have repeatedly made names for themselves as the founders and leaders of new religions—even though some of the organizations that grew from those new movements no longer offer women the same prominence.
GODDESSES AND DIVINE MOTHERS
In addition to providing alternative roles for human women, some NRMs also consider the divine to be entirely or partially female. Though female deities and female humans cannot in any way be conflated, when an NRM that encompasses female deities is located in a society where the divine is generally considered to be male, the female divine can sometimes serve as both inspiration and justification for human women's roles in the religion. Among the new religions that have gained some prominence in the United States, one of the earliest women to speak of a female aspect to the divine was Mother Ann Lee (1736–1784), who founded the Shakers in 1770. A Christian sect known for their celibacy and for the ecstatic dance that gave them their name, the Shakers believed that God had both feminine and masculine aspects. Furthermore, they believed that only when both of these aspects had been represented on Earth would the Kingdom of God be at hand. The life of Jesus (6 bce–30 ce) represented the deity's male aspect; Shakers thus expected the Second Coming of the messiah to be in female form. After Lee's death, some of her followers came to believe that she herself had been the incarnation of God's female aspect.
Other Christian NRMs of the nineteenth-century United States also held that God was both feminine and masculine. As did the Shakers they interpreted this ambi-sexuality in parental terms, understanding the female aspect of God as mother to be paired with the more traditional Christian image of God as father. Among these were the early LDS church (founded in the 1820s) and Christian Science (founded in the 1860s). Both of these movements retain a concept of the maternal divine, although it has been muted somewhat in the LDS church.
In the latter twentieth century the most prominent purveyors of female divine imagery in the United States were the NRMs that fall under the general rubric of neo-paganism. These include Wicca, or witchcraft (founded in the 1950s), which claims to be a reemergence of pre-Christian European religions. Though most Wiccans describe the divine as encompassing a goddess and a god, feminist witches and other feminist groups inspired by neopaganism have tended to stress goddess imagery over the male divine, finding in goddess images a direct and powerful route to the affirmation, celebration, and empowerment of human women. This emphasis on the female divine led in the 1980s and 1990s to the rise of the Goddess movement, a loose conglomeration of beliefs, practices, and commodities celebrating (and sometimes appropriating) female divine figures from around the globe and across history.
FOUNDERS AND LEADERS
Perhaps because of prevalent assumptions at the time about the inherent religiosity of women (at least those who were white and middle class), the nineteenth-century United States saw the rise of numerous NRMs founded wholly or in part by women. Lee was a forerunner here; she was followed by Ellen White (1827–1915), whose visions in the mid-1840s confirmed the reinterpretation of William Miller's (1782–1849) millenarian prophecies and thus paved the way for the founding of Seventh-day Adventism. White continued to have visions for many years, and these were central to shaping the Adventist faith. In the late 1860s Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), a contemporary of White's, combined the mental healing practices of the day with Christianity in the new religion she named Christian Science, and female as well as male students of Eddy's went on to found non-Christian variations on her teachings that make up the family of metaphysical churches. Other nineteenth-century NRMs also featured women prominently. Beginning in 1848, sisters Maggie (1833–1893) and Kate Fox (1839–1892) hosted séances that became the foundation for Spiritualism, whereas Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) and Colonel Henry Steele Olcott (1832–1907) blended Spiritualism with rather vague understandings of Hinduism and Buddhism to develop the Theosophical Society in 1875.
The twentieth century saw yet more women founders of NRMs. One of the most famous was the young and dramatic revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890–1944), founder in the early 1920s of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (which, interestingly, does not ordain women despite having been founded by one). More egalitarian was the Peace Mission movement founded by Father Divine (1877–1965) in the second decade of the twentieth century; this religion drew a largely African-American following. After Divine's death in 1965, leadership of his movement was taken over by his wife, a white woman known to her followers as Mother Divine. In the latter part of the twentieth century, following the 1960s resurgence of both feminism and NRMs, several more women came to prominence as founders and leaders. Among them are Gurumayi Chidvilasananda (b. 1955), who took on the leadership of the Hinduism-based Siddha Yoga movement in 1982, and Zsuzsanna Budapest (b. 1940) and Starhawk (b. 1951), founders, respectively, of the Dianic (established in 1971) and Reclaiming (established in 1979) branches of Wicca.
CONSORTS
With the cult scare of the 1970s came increased suspicion that NRMs were the sites of gross sexual improprieties. Though this suspicion was largely unfounded, the social experimentation in NRMs has certainly led to a variety of experiments with sexual norms. At one end of this spectrum are celibate groups, such as the Shakers; at the other are groups such as the nineteenth-century Oneida Perfectionists (in existence from 1840 until 1879), who believed that those whom God had prepared to enter into the sacred kingdom no longer needed earthly institutions such as marriage. The Oneida Perfectionists treated sexual intercourse as any other kind of social activity between a woman and a man; though initiated generally by the male, it was engaged in after an elaborate process of formal invitation and formal acceptance and was expected not to form exclusive bonds between the participants. The twentieth century saw a similar range of heterosexual roles for women, from their status as wives and mothers in the conservative social structure of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, also known as the Hare Krishnas, founded in 1965) to the widespread sexual permissiveness of Rajneeshpuram (in existence from 1981 until 1985) in central Oregon. Some neopagan groups incorporate symbolic sexuality (usually heterosexual) into their rituals, especially between the high priest and high priestess.
LAY WOMEN
Whereas many NRMs offer greater opportunities for women than do institutionalized religions, NRMs vary immensely and thus are hardly a reliable source of gender equality. Some NRMs, for example, experiment with social structures by making them stricter. This is certainly true of Pentecostal churches, which, despite the prominence of women in their leadership in the early years after the 1906 Azusa Street Revival, have generally not ordained women since at least the mid-twentieth century. The LDS church followed a similar pattern, and both groups became increasingly strict in their gender roles during the wider social changes of the 1930s and 1940s. In Pentecostal groups as well as in the LDS church, gender roles follow a strict binary, with women expected to maintain the home and raise children while their husbands provide financial support. By the late twentieth century, however, some leeway had developed in these roles, allowing women to work even while continuing to place primary value on their roles in the home. Similar norms hold in ISKCON, with the added expectation that once his children are old enough, a man will take ascetic vows and devote himself fully to his religion. Likewise, the Nation of Islam (founded in the 1930s), radical as it is in its understanding of race, offers women strictly conservative roles within the movement. Such gender role strictness has served as a source of stability for some women, such as young women who find in ultra-Orthodox Judaism a clarity of rules and guidelines in stark contrast to the casual autonomy of sexual ethics in mainstream U.S. culture.
NRMs also offer egalitarian roles for women. The Oneida Perfectionists, for example, were among the first to popularize bloomers, and their founder, believing pregnancy to be both burdensome and risky for women, advocated birth control on the part of men. Theosophy and Spiritualism also offered nineteenth-century U.S. women significant freedom, and women's public work as mediums prepared many Spiritualist women for suffragist activism. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a plethora of NRMs offered egalitarian roles for laywomen, ranging from the feminist focus of the Goddess movement and some branches of Wicca to an insistence on the irrelevance of gender in movements such as Siddha Yoga.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Braude, Ann. 2001. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. 2nd edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dawson, Lorne L., ed. 2006. Comprehending Cults: The Sociology of New Religious Movements. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Eller, Cynthia. 1993. Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America. New York: Crossroad.
Goldman, Marion S. 1999. Passionate Journeys: Why Successful Women Joined a Cult. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Herrick, Tirzah Miller. 2000. Desire and Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller's Intimate Memoir, ed. Robert S. Fogarty. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lindley, Susan Hill. 1996. "You Have Stept Out of Your Place": A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
Palmer, Susan J. 1994. Moon Sisters, Krishna Mothers, Rajneesh Lovers: Women's Roles in New Religions. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.
Pechilis, Karen, ed. 2004. The Graceful Guru: Hindu Female Gurus in India and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wessinger, Catherine, ed. 1993. Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Melissa M. Wilcox