Women & Religion
Feature Story Phoenix Magazine
July 2004


Christianity, Judaism, Islam... when you get right down to it, they all
have a lousy track record when it comes to the treatment of women.

     Listen to this: “One has only to reread the Gospels looking for the participation of women to realize that Jesus was truly a feminist, that is, one who believes in the equality of women and men. It is equally clear from such rereading that Christianity is an Equal Rights religion. That the ignorance, arrogance and hypocrisy of the Church fathers should have denied this equality over the centuries is a staggering thought.”      
       What’s just as staggering is where those words come from. They’re in a new introduction to an 1895 book written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton – yes, that suffrage leader – titled The Woman’s Bible.
       Few people even know this book exists – it was out of print for half a century – but in 1974, a group of feminists reissued it in hopes of inspiring the very kind of discussions that Dan Brown’s murder mystery prompted in 2003. My friend, Barbara, found it somewhere and shared her copy with me.
       The Woman’s Bible grew out of the very first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. These bold, courageous women produced a manifesto that didn’t mince words: “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having its direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.” And that’s just the introduction!
       The convention listed 18 grievances – two of them decried the lack of religious equality for women.
       It’s not as though organized Christianity didn’t have chances to mend its ways. In 1870, criticism of the first Authorized Version of the Bible, which had been published in 1611, led both England and America to form revision committees. Neither one included any women, even though one of the world’s most accomplished scholars at the time was Julia Smith – she had done five translations of the Bible from Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
       All of this rankled a woman like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized a group of women to present the Bible in a new light.
       One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Newsweek magazine put “Women of the Bible” on its cover, and quoted a dozen “new voices” – Biblical scholars who are finding the feminine side of religious history.
       But it’s unfair to pick on just the Christians.
       The Torah isn’t much kinder, but I know several very feisty Jewish women – and supportive men – and I have hope that their voices are being heard. I have yet to hear of Muslim women seriously challenging the sexism of Islam, but I can hope, can’t I?
        Then again, I don’t know, since even the sexist Catholic Church thinks the Muslims have gone too far. The Vatican has issued an official decree “discouraging” Catholic women from marrying Muslim men, noting “profound cultural and religious differences” between the two faiths, particularly the rights of women, who are “the least protected member of the Muslim family.”
        Women are struggling to find their place at the table – literally – and it’s important to know the mothers of equality led the way in this, too. 

      Some Islamic women tell us Western women that we’re too hung up on the burka – the head-to-toe covering that is demanded in some Islamic societies.
       You can’t see scenes from Afghanistan or other parts of the Middle East without seeing a faceless, covered shape in the background. I’ve seen documentaries shot from inside the burka, showing what a woman sees as she moves down the street in her garb, and you don’t see much when you’ve got a tiny screen window in front of your eyes.
       It’s always seemed to me – and seems to most women outside this religion – that it isn’t a very subtle way to erase women from society: to just make them invisible.
       I recently saw the Afghan movie Osama, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more depressing movie. It was set in the reign of the Taliban, when the strictest of Islamic interpretation was enforced. Under this reign, which we have at least temporarily disposed of by invading that country after 911, a burka-covered woman wasn’t allowed on the street without a male escort. The family we see has lost its only son to the war, and is left with a grandmother, a mother that works in a hospital, and a little girl.
       The family will literally starve to death in their home unless they find a man to escort the mother to work and take the grandmother to the market.
       To save themselves, they cut the little girl’s hair and put her in boy’s clothes. When pushed for a name, the child becomes Osama.
       But then the Taliban rounds up all the little boys for religious school and our imposter is caught in a lie she can’t possibly maintain. As you can imagine, this story doesn’t end well.
       This is one of the first movies to come out of Afghanistan, and for that reason alone, it was worth seeing. For what it said about religious intolerance and persecution of women was absolutely profound. (I saw this movie in the midst of researching a story on the polygamist community of Colorado City in Northern Arizona – considered by some to be “the Taliban in our own back yard” – and the parallels were breathtaking.)
       I’m wondering if the day will ever come when a book like The DaVinci Code will inspire open and honest discussion of women left out of the Koran.  

      I’m still pretty ticked off at how women are treated by most religions, but I’m also encouraged by all those voices – some from history, some from today – that won’t stay silent.
       Imagine someday reading a Holy Book that tells the whole story of religion. With everyone getting her and his fair share. Now that will be a bestseller.