Women and Religion in the West

Challenging Secularization

Sonya Sharma, Kristin Aune

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754658702
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134773244
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is the relationship between women and secularization? In the West, women are abandoning traditional religion. Yet they continue to make up the majority of religious adherents. Accounting for this seeming paradox is the focus of this volume. If women undergird the foundations of religion but are leaving in large numbers, why are they leaving? Where are they going? What are they doing? And what's happening to those who remain? Women and Religion in the West addresses a neglected yet crucial issue within the debate on religious belonging and departure: the role of women in and out of religion and spirituality. Beginning with an analysis of the relationship between gender and secularization, the book moves its focus to in-depth examination of women's experiences based on data from key recent qualitative work on women and religion. This volume addresses not only women's place in and out of Christianity (the normal focus of secularization theories) but also alternative spiritualities and Islam, asking how questions of secularization differ between faith systems. This book offers students and scholars of religion, sociology, and women's studies, as well as interested general readers, an accessible work on the religiosity of western women and contributes fresh analyses of the rapidly shifting terrain of contemporary religion and spirituality.

PART 1
Christianity

Chapter 1

Religious Change in the West: Watch the Women

Penny Long Marler

The thesis of this chapter is that religious change in the West – particularly the rise and decline of Christian denominations and congregations – is strongly influenced by long-term and largely unexamined changes in women’s lives. These changes stem directly from the demographic transition accompanying the industrial revolution and the gendered division of labour that supported it. Important to this transition and accompanying socio-economic and religious changes was the northwestern European or ‘nuclear’ family ideal. As the family moved from a unit of production to a unit of consumption, the woman became the primary (re)producer of children and religious piety in the domestic or private sphere. In this way, women’s unpaid domestic – and for single or poorer women, paid domestic or manufacturing work – supported the wage economy. At the same time, women’s unpaid religious work supported the expansion of religious institutions. Care for others at home and church was the province of women and self-mastery through work the province of men.

As western economies shifted away from manufacturing to technology and service, a number of important social and cultural changes affected the family and especially women. In twentieth–century Europe and North America fertility rates fell as a result of rising economic and educational aspirations among the middle-class, expansion of tertiary employment sectors, increased public and private support of working families, and the contraceptive and equal opportunity revolutions. Women’s paid work became an integral part of the postindustrial consumer economy. Care for others at home and church increasingly conflicted with work schedules and career demands; older ideals of feminine piety and domesticity clashed with new concerns for vocational fulfillment as well as spiritual and physical self care. Such changes inevitably affected women’s religious involvement, and by consequence of socialization, the religious identification of their children. Despite the fact that religious elites continue to be predominantly male, as the women go, so goes the church.

Several observations are important here: first, women’s greater involvement in religious congregations has been generally taken for granted and/or accounted to natural differences1; and second, when women are studied more often than not the focus is on their role as clergy. Excluded from power in mainstream Christian denominations, women have been largely overlooked as important research subjects. Indeed, as women have aspired to or achieved those positions, they have become more interesting (see, for example, Carroll, Hargrove and Lummis 1983; Lehman 1985; Lawless 1988; Wallace 1992; Lehman 1993; Nesbitt 1997; Zikmund, Lummis and Chang 1998; Chaves 1999; Ingersoll 2003). Only very recently have studies examined lay women’s groups and parachurch (or transdenominational) movements (Davidman 1991; Kaufman 1991; Winter, Lummis and Stokes 1994; Griffith 1997; Brasher 2001). Not surprising from this perspective, such research appears at an acknowledged low point for traditional institutional religion in the West.

This chapter focuses primarily on the cases of the United States and the United Kingdom. As liberal societies that moved in a postindustrial direction earlier than other European nations, the UK and the US provide important illustrations of new developments in women’s family, work, and religious experience.2 Inasmuch as the argument examines the relationship between labour market change and religion, this chapter also follows the recent work of Hochschild (2003) and McGee (2005) and proposes a neo-Weberian treatment of the subject. The Protestant ethic that birthed the spirit of western industrial capitalism is now a postindustrial and global capitalist ethic animated by the spirits of evangelical Christianity on the right and feminist spirituality on the left. Moreover, the primary carriers of expressive (post)Christianity – either in the differentiated sphere of home, hearth, and church or in the dedifferentiated reality of the twenty-first century work lifestyles and holistic spirituality – have been women.

Demographic transition in the West

The development of the West from a pre-industrial through an industrial to a postindustrial economy reflects the classic stages of demographic transition (see Fig. 1.1).3 Despite high birth rates, sustained population growth prior to the seventeenth century in Europe was checked by a combination of war, famine, plagues, and epidemics. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, public sanitation improved and better transportation increased access to food supplies. Disease was reduced; mortality declined; and life expectancy rose. Because birth rates remained high, first, Europe, and then, North America, realized dramatic population growth (Population Bulletin 2004: 6).

Figure 1.1 The classic stages of demographic transition

In the nineteenth century birth rates began to fall in the developed countries. From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the birth rate in the US dropped from an average of seven to four children per woman. Urbanization, industrialization, later age at marriage, economic growth and rising class expectations all contributed to this decline. During the world economic crises of the 1930s, the total fertility rate fell further to about two children per woman in the United States and dropped even lower in Europe. In the fifties and sixties post World War II ‘baby boom’, US fertility rates temporarily rebounded to turn of the century levels, while in Europe the rate climbed to 2.8 children per woman. The protracted fertility declines in the West after 1970 in both the US and Europe coincided with social trends especially affecting women and families. Consequently, the total fertility rates in many European countries fell below 2 children per woman by 1980, signaling the beginning of real population decline and what population experts call a ‘second demographic transition’ (Population Bulletin 2004: 7).

This chart shows the declines in fertility rates for major world regions in the 1950s and in 2003 (see Fig. 1.2).

As described, both North America and Europe witnessed rather steep declines in fertility from the immediate post-war period to the present. Reported fertility rates in less developed regions are higher but also show decline. What is important to note is the fact that the first demographic transition from pre to postindustrial economies in Europe and North America occurred much more slowly. Because of advanced capitalism in and global corporate expansion from the West, the demographic transition in developing countries has occurred at a more rapid rate.4 The global expansion of advanced capitalism insures that western consumerist and Christian, especially evangelical and neo-Pentecostal, values are exported.5

Figure 1.2 Fertility levels in major world regions: 1950s and 2003

The next chart provides a closer look at the total fertility rates in the US and the UK from 1960 to 2000 (see Fig. 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Total fertility rate in the US and UK: 1960–2000

As compared with the US, fertility rates in the UK had been lower, longer.6 While the US experienced a larger increase in its post-World War II fertility rate than did the UK, the decline thereafter was very similar (Kupinsky 1977). Total fertility rates for fifteen European Union nations echo this trend with Ireland starting and ending at a higher level (3.76 in 1960 to 1.87 in 1995), Germany exhibiting the lowest levels (2.37 in 1960 to 1.35 in 1995), and Finland, Sweden, and the UK falling in between and near the EU average (Drew 1998: 14–15).

Recent fertility differences between the UK and the US are largely due to immigration. As Hakim observes, similarity in steep declines in both countries – and the West, generally – reflect responses to the contraceptive and the equal opportunity revolutions. Increasingly, older cultural and religious conventions about gender roles are giving way to increased diversity and ‘choice’ from the standpoint of individual women as to their family and work behaviours and commitments (Hakim 2000: 1–83).7

The nuclear family ideal

According to Peter Laslett, the four aspects that combined to create the western family ideal included: a large proportion of nuclear households with kin composition restricted to parents and unmarried children, a late age of maternity, a narrow age gap between spouses, and a high incidence of servants (Laslett 1977). That this family ideal was realized only at certain junctures and among middle and upper classes is clear, and that its emergence varied across western nations is also clear. This nuclear family image functioned as both a socio-economic ideal and a Christian one: ‘for a man shall leave his mother, and a women leave her home …’ (Smith 1993: 399).8

In the UK, the nuclear family ideal was demographically realized among the upper classes prior to the twentieth century. From the turn of the century until World War II, the older family wage economy declined, the family consumer economy emerged, and the middle-class expanded greatly. Tilly and Scott (1987) observed that in the early decades of the twentieth century, the numbers of married women ‘at home’ increased as a result of the contraction of economic sectors traditionally employing women such as the garment trade; the overall increase in men’s real wages which made the single, male breadwinner model more widely available; increased life expectancy, especially of men; a decline in family size; and the prolonged residence of working children in the household. The socialization of children also became the principal concern of married women as investments for the future. Indeed, turn of the century autobiographies are testaments to the social, economic, and emotional importance of the ‘mum’ in British family life.

In North America, the expanse of land and the availability of ‘unfree’ domestic labour – at first, indentured servants and increasingly African slaves – made the nuclear family pattern more generally available and at an earlier time.9 Neo-local as contrasted with combined households proliferated in pre and early industrial America, and age at first marriage was considerably lower than in northwestern Europe (Smith 1993). The result was rapid population growth, especially as mortality rates declined and life expectancy increased in the nineteenth century. As urbanization escalated in the later half of the nineteenth century, large scale immigration from Europe provided a boon to the economy; a trend toward increased age at marriage made single women available for manufacturing jobs; men went to work; and married women, especially white married women, remained at home (Kupinsky 1977). According to Bose (1987: 278–279), the availability of surplus labour and the rise of the ‘cult of true womanhood’ largely explain women’s exclusion from the paid labour force in the US. Ironically, during the depression era of the 1930s, the lack of available jobs also spurred a revival of the feminine domestic ideal, much as it did after World War II, because of the perceived threat to men’s jobs.10 Otherwise, the initial pattern across the twentieth century among married women who worked outside the home was a staged one: single women worked prior to marriage and childbearing; interrupted work after marriage to bear and rear children; and resumed work after their children were weaned, started school, and/or left home. This is a pattern similar to the long-term experience of women in the most developed countries in Europe (Stolte-Heiskanen 1977).

Despite a longer period of decline in nuptiality in the UK as compared to the US, during the post World War II period the proportion of nuclear family households converged.11 This chart shows a similar pattern of decline in the proportion of households ‘married with children’ and an increase in non-family households, especially the category ‘living alone’ (see Fig. 1.4).12 Over the last thirty years, this shift in household configuration is largely a result of the postponement of first marriage and childbirth as well as increased cohabitation prior to or instead of marriage (Festy 2000; Cliquet 2003). These trends reflect a move away from the nuclear family ideal.

The trend toward a diversity of family forms emerged first in the Nordic countries which have tended to be precursors of European wide patterns. For example, common-law couples constituted only one per cent of all couples in Sweden in 1960. By 1975, that figure rose to 11 per cent, and by 1996, 23 per cent of all Swedish couples were in consensual, common-law unions. The UK followed a similar but lagged trend line: by 1996, 11 per cent of all couples were in common-law unions. In the US, the proportion of adults of the opposite sex living together rose from one per cent in 1970 to three per cent in 1980, to five per cent in 1988, and to seven per cent in 1996. Living together is particularly prevalent among the young. In late 90s Sweden, 70 per cent of couples aged 16 to 29 lived together. In the UK, the figure was 53 per cent and in France, 41 per cent. Even in Ireland, Spain, and Italy where overall cohabitation rates were low, the rates for young couples were much higher – 29, 12, and 11 per cent, respectively. In the US, 23 per cent of all couples under 25 years of age who were living together were unmarried (Martin and Kats 2003: 11).13

Figure 1.4 Household distribution in the US and UK: 1980–2001

The nuclear family ideal is challenged in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by increases in divorce. Since 1960, divorce rates tripled in both the US and Europe. By 2002, the divorce rate in most western European countries was nearly 30 per cent. The divorce rates in Scandinavia, the UK, and the US, were at least 20 percentage points higher, down somewhat from peaks in the eighties and nineties (Festy 2000: 4; Cliquet 2003: 6). Recent stabilization of divorce rates in Northern Europe, the UK, and the US are generally attributed to the rise in cohabitation and lower rates of remarriage among the divorced (Drew 1998: 18–21).

Births to unmarried women also increased dramatically. By 1994 in Sweden the percentage of live births outside marriage reached 51.6 per cent compared with Greece and Italy, both below three per cent. Trend data from the US and the UK present an interesting contrast with other European data. In 1980, the US had higher levels of births outside marriage. By 1990, however, the percentage more than doubled for the UK and continued to rise thereafter. In 2001, nearly 40 per cent of all live births in the UK were to unmarried women – a figure similar to that of France and rivaling 1995 levels in Norway (Drew 1998: 18–21) (see Fig. 1.5). Differences between the UK and US largely reflect the fact that in Europe the majority of non-marital births are to unwed parents living together. Births to unwed teenage mothers in the US, on the other hand, are much higher than in any industrialized nation (Martin and Kats 2003: 12).

One consequence of the contraceptive revolution is voluntary childlessness, another challenge to the nuclear family ideal. In a wide-ranging survey of research in the US and Euro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction Women, Religion and Secularization: One Size Does Not Fit All
• Part 1: Christianity
• Part 2: Alternative Spiritualities
• Part 3: Islam
• Index