God Gave Us The Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism

by Christel Manning

What does it mean to be a religious conservative, particularly for women, in America today? While it appears that people are returning to conservative religion because they are fed up with the excesses of liberalism, including feminism, a closer look at the lives of religious conservatives reveals a more complex reality. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant communities, Christel Manning explores the diversity among women who have returned to tradition. Arguing that America has undergone profound cultural and economic changes in the last thirty years, which create tension between women's lives and traditional gender roles, she demonstrates that conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, and Evangelical Protestants negotiate those tensions in different ways. Manning also shows that women in conservative religious communities share many of the same concerns as secular women.



Manning looks at how the religious communities profiled have been influenced by feminist values and describes the ways in which these women negotiate gender roles at work, religious services, and at home. She explains how they deal with the inconsistencies created by their attempts to integrate feminist and traditionalist norms. In highly accessible prose, Manning examines their attitudes towards the feminist movement, its impact on American culture, and the extent to which the women seek to resist it. God Gave Us the Right explains how these different views of feminism reflect the diverse theologies and historical experiences of the three communities.

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Christel Manning is Professor of Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University (CT). She has a Doctorate and Masters degree in Religious Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara.

She teaches the introductory course in Religious Studies, as well as electives on women in world religions, religion and sexuality, cults and sects, and Eastern religions.

Her research areas include the intersection of religion, gender, and sexuality; the sociology of new or marginal religious movements; and, most recently, the study of those unaffiliated with religion.

She was born in southern California and raised in Germany. She has traveled all over Europe and the United States and more recently India and Turkey. She currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and daughter.

http://www.sacredheart.edu/academics/...

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Academic feminist expresses tedious incredulity that women belonging to "conservative" religions might not all be stupid drones and might even have some feminist beliefs, even though they eschew the label "feminist." Inexplicably lumps what sounds like fairly liberal Catholics and Modern Orthodox Jews into the oh-so-scary-conservative box, along with some middling-average Evangelicals. Might have been interesting if she had actually talked to some *conservatives* like SSPX women, or Hasidic women, but given the disrespectful and flippant attitude of the researcher it's a wonder she was even able to establish rapport with these relatively mainstream women. Unfortunately Manning's treatment of the subject answers her research question of "why do these women reject feminism'; because institutional, academic feminism regards many average, normal women as gullable freaks, and treats us with less respect than we get from the average man and most religious institutions.