Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 15:3 (Summer 2001)
Article: Book Review Religious Women Look At Feminism
Author: Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

PP 15:3 (Summer 2001) p. 20

Book Review
Religious Women Look At Feminism

Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

Reviewed by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis. This review was originally published in Christian Scholar’s Review (vol. XXX:2, Winter 2000). Groothuis is the author of Good News for Women: A Biblical Picture of Gender Equality (Baker, 1997) and Women Caught in the Conflict: The Culture War Between Feminism and Traditionalism (Baker, 1994; repr. Wipf & Stock, 1997).

Editor’s note: Because this book does not directly pertain to the ministry concerns of CBE. it is unavailable from CBE’s Book Service.

God Gave Us The Right: Conservative Catholic, Protestant, And Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple With Feminism, by Christel Manning, Rutgers University Press, 1999 xi + 283 pp.

In this carefully done ethnographic study, religion professor Christel Manning offers an intriguing assessment of the lives and beliefs of women in conservative religious traditions today. Manning surveys and assesses responses to feminist social values and the secular feminist movement by women in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, a charismatic evangelical church, and a Catholic parish with a fairly large conservative constituency.

She finds that religiously conservative women are not all alike; different religious traditions produce different responses to the issues and tensions in their lives and communities. Manning also finds that these women share many concerns with women in general (e.g., balancing work and family, ensuring good child care, winning cultural respect for motherhood, discomfort with certain aspects of the feminist movement), and that they have accepted and appropriated many feminist values (e.g., vocational choice for women, equal opportunity and equal pay in the workplace, equal opportunity for political leadership and other positions of authority). However, religiously conservative women’s appropriation of feminist values is highly selective and individualized in their negotiation of roles, responsibilities, and authority in the home, and is nearly suspended altogether in their views of women’s place in the church or synagogue.

In religious conservatism, Manning notes, women’s ordination is typically seen “as a symbol of the liberal world they are trying to define themselves against” (p. 105). Thus, women in all three traditions believe women ought not serve in certain positions of religious authority. As a rationale for this restriction, Catholic women cite the doctrine of their church that the priest represents Christ and only a male can perform that function. Evangelical and Orthodox Jewish women tend to assert that women are not emotionally fit to lead a church or synagogue, or that women should leave this arena to ...