Sex and Secularism

Joan Wallach Scott

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400888580
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

How secularism has been used to justify the subordination of women Joan Wallach Scott's acclaimed and controversial writings have been foundational for the field of gender history. With Sex and Secularism, Scott challenges one of the central claims of the "clash of civilizations" polemic—the false notion that secularism is a guarantee of gender equality.Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism.Challenging the assertion that secularism has always been synonymous with equality between the sexes, Sex and Secularism reveals how this idea has been used to justify claims of white, Western, and Christian racial and religious superiority and has served to distract our attention from a persistent set of difficulties related to gender difference—ones shared by Western and non-Western cultures alike.

CHAPTER ONE

Women and Religion

THE ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN with/as religion was a hallmark of the secularism discourse. Writing in 1908, the French suffragist Hubertine Auclert refused the idea—regularly used to deny women the vote—that enfranchising women would mean more votes for the church party. The idea that religious sentiments disqualified women was “a bogeyman, as imaginary as the ones used to scare little children.”

Why are believing women treated more strictly than believing men? Men aren’t asked for their philosophical ideas when they are given a ballot: priests, pastors, rabbis are treated no differently than free-thinkers.¹

The attribution of innate religious sensibility to women as a group, she argued, was a pretext. Religious men were allowed to vote because they were men; women were denied the vote because they were considered inferior beings. The hypocrisy of self-proclaimed secularists on this issue infuriated her: they were perpetuating religious teachings about women’s inferiority even as they refused the suffrage to women because of their supposed religious attachments. Auclert insisted that their hypocrisy extended to their toleration of forms of religion even more oppressive to women than Christianity. In Algeria, she wrote in her 1900 book, Les femmes arabes en Algérie, the recognition of Qurʾanic law for matters concerning the family, marriage, and sexuality perpetuated the degradation of native womanhood. If French women were to be allowed to participate in the “civilizing mission” as citizens, they would bring enlightenment to French administrators and so to Algeria. As it was, the denial of the vote to “cultivated white women” while it was granted to “savage blacks” undermined the secular mission.² “To secularize France is not only to cease paying for the teaching of religious dogmas, it is to reject the clerical law that follows from these dogmas and that treats women as inferior.”³

Auclert put her finger on the problem I address in this book: the fact that the discourse of secularism, despite its promise of universal equality, made women’s difference the ground for their exclusion from citizenship and public life more generally. But I will suggest that it was not, as Auclert insisted, because religious ideas about women were left in place. Instead, the apostles of secularism, in France and elsewhere, offered what they took to be entirely new explanations for women’s difference from men, rooting them in human nature and biology rather than divine law. Gender difference was inscribed in a schematic description of the world as divided into separate spheres, public and private, male and female. In fact, in this context the association of women with religion was not a relic of past practice but an invention of the discourse of secularism itself.

The notion of sharply differentiated spheres represented the public/private opposition as both spatial (the home and the church as opposed to the polis and the market) and psychological (an interior realm of affect and spiritual belief as opposed to the exterior realm of reason and purposive action). Public and private were, like a heterosexual couple, portrayed as complementary opposites. The world of markets and politics was represented as a man’s world; the familial, religious, and affective domain was a woman’s. Woman’s role was to fill the void left by competitive individualism, to offer the moral glue that could cement individuals together in a national enterprise. Sexuality figured on both sides of the equation: women’s morality must tame men’s aggression; men’s reason must bring women’s passion under control. Sometimes—in what Elizabeth Hurd characterizes as Judeo-Christian secularism⁴—this meant that women’s propensity to religiosity was seen in a positive light (the United States, England); in other instances, the attraction of women for religion was construed by secularists as dangerous (France, where laicism was the ideology, being the prime example). But either way, the sexual division of labor was taken to be the crux of the religious/secular divide. The counterpart to the reasoning male citizen was a woman whose piety was at once a brake on and a manifestation of her inclination to excessive sexuality. In this scheme of things, religion was privatized and feminized at the same time.

This was, to be sure, an idealized representation that universalized bourgeois norms and practices. As such, it excluded the lives and activities of multitudes of women, many of whom worked for wages, did not marry, and—if they did—exercised important influence inside and outside their families; it also excluded the lives and activities of those men who, for various reasons (race, dependency, lack of property), were deemed not to fit the category of the rational, abstract individual. Social historians have richly documented the distance between idealized norms and lived experience. But my point is that idealized norms still matter, not only in the expectations set for individual subjects, but because they set the terms for law, politics, and social policy.

Hurd has described two ways in which the regulation of the relationship between religion and politics has been conceived. The first, which she calls laicism, takes a strong stand about the absolute need to exclude religion from politics. The second, which she labels Judeo-Christian secularism, is more accommodating. It holds that the Judeo-Christian tradition provides the basis for the values of secular democracy.⁵ The differences stem from the fact that in the nations of the Christian West, the versions of secularism differed depending upon the particular form taken by organized religion in relation to state power. Catholicism presented the greatest challenge to emerging nation-states; it was represented as an international force that undermined popular allegiance to the nation. Catholicism’s hierarchical, patriarchal, and dogmatic ideology was denounced by secularists as antithetical to liberal values of individual freedom and belief. In states with Catholic majorities (France, for example) secularism was synonymous with republicanism and defined as anticlerical, an effort of male reason to salvage female credulity from the seductive wiles of Jesuit priests. At the same time, even in the stricter laicist regimes, there were nods to religion as a guarantor of morality and to women as the embodiment of the moral dimension of religious teaching and thus as the guardians of social cohesion and stability. Notes one historian, “most of the men who tried to separate the Churches from the State, wanted to make society more Christian even while they made the state more secular.”⁶ Properly tamed, religion could become an aspect of the national patrimony and an instrument of colonial rule. In states that were predominantly Protestant, in contrast (the United States and parts of Germany, for example), secularism was presented as an aspect of the Christian tradition, defined as the liberal alternative (the right of individual conscience), not only to Catholicism but to the oppressive religions of “the Orient.” Even as Protestant “free thought” seemed to provide openings for feminist claims, its proponents, for the most part, insisted upon gender distinctions based on the idea of separate spheres. Men were in the world, women at home, and this according to the laws of nature. Churches were subordinated to state law in different ways in different countries: disestablishment in the United States; establishment of a single state religion in England; redefinition of what counted as a legitimate, tolerated religion in France. There were also variations in things like state maintenance of church buildings, state certification of clerical competence, surveillance of educational curricula, and observance of religious holy days as state holidays. In all cases, however, the association of women with religion was the same. And the purported decline of religious influence over the course of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth did nothing to alter the way in which the relationship between women (emotional, inclined to superstition) and men (reasonable, practical) was conceived. If anything, religion was depicted as an increasingly feminized affair, an experience apart from and outside of history, identified this way not only by those who had little use for it but also by those who sought its consolations.

French Anticlericalism

The French Revolution was a critical moment in the reordering of the relationship between church and state. The role of the Catholic Church in legitimating the monarchy meant that a stark opposition between the religious and the secular structured revolutionary discourse and institutions. When it was permitted, religious practice was regulated by the state, which paid wages to priests who swore allegiance to the new regime. Although the association of women and unreason was evident much earlier, it was the Revolution of 1789 that established the link in republican political discourse between women and religion. Writes historian Paul Seeley, “the Revolution’s embodiment of the citizen as a rights-bearing and confessionally neutral male depended on a derogatory identification of religion with the female.”⁷ Like the female sex, religion was considered the source of the irrational and the violent; it was also the domain of the traditional and the hierarchical.

Historian Olwen Hufton noted that the actions of counter-revolutionary women in peasant villages, those who defended nonjuring priests and clandestinely practiced Catholic rituals for baptisms and burials, “provided the evidence for the politicians of the Third Republic [almost a century later] to withhold the vote from women.”⁸ During the dechristianizing campaign in year II of the revolution, the example of resistant village women became synonymous with women in general. So, while one comment from a représentant en mission was directed at a specific group of women (“And you, you bloody bitches, you are their [the priests’] whores, particularly those who attend their bloody masses and listen to their mumbo-jumbo”),⁹ another extended the condemnation to women as a whole (“Remember, it is fanaticism and superstition that we will be fighting against; lying priests whose dogma is falsehood … whose empire is founded upon the credulity of women. These are the enemy”).¹⁰ In this view of things, women were the knowing consorts or the inevitable dupes of treasonous clerics. In either case, it was the greater emotional vulnerability of their sex that accounted for their actions. The opinion of a Dr. Moreau, writing in 1803, was widely shared: “Women are more disposed than men to believe in spirits and ghosts; … they adopt all superstitious practice more readily; … their prejudices are more numerous.”¹¹

Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, there was in France an intensifying struggle between clericals and anticlericals in which the question of women figured prominently. Secular republicans adorned their city halls with busts of Marianne (an idealized classical feminine figure)¹² in the same years that church authorities revived the cult of the Virgin Mary; historians of the Middle Ages produced what Zrinka Stahuljak calls “pornographic archaeology”—accounts of the perverted sexual escapades of supposedly celibate priests and nuns—even as Catholic recruitment of women religious grew by leaps and bounds.¹³ The opposition between rational patriotic republican men and their unreliable, unreasonable women usually invoked statistical evidence on its behalf. And it is certainly true that the French Catholic Church drew increasing numbers of women to religious congregations and lay charitable activity over the course of the century. The ratio of men religious to women religious changed dramatically, from 3:2 in 1803 to 2:3 by 1878; and the number of nuns increased tenfold from about 13,000 in 1808 to 130,000 by the end of the century. Well after the removal of clerical teachers from public schools in the 1880s, the religious education of young children, particularly girls, remained in the hands of Catholic sisters. And the church recruited large numbers of married bourgeois women to its philanthropic associations, making (in the estimation of one historian) the “charitable lady … among the most ubiquitous public figures in the 19th century city [Paris] that most epitomized the modern age.”¹⁴

Voluntary charitable activity, although performed in public, was considered an extension of women’s familial and domestic role. The recruitment of women for this work was, to be sure, the result of a concerted effort on the part of church authorities to undermine the secularists, but it succeeded by appealing to exactly the image of women the secularists endorsed—one that emphasized their subordination to male authority, their role as agents and reproducers of morality, their self-sacrificing, caring maternal instincts, and their intuitive spirituality. It was in those terms that nineteenth-century bourgeois Catholic men described their faith—as inspired by the women in their lives. Both devout Catholic men and skeptical republicans, Seeley writes, “affirmed their political and religious identities by tying Catholic faith and ritual to a private female sphere.”¹⁵ In an odd inversion of causality, the stereotyping provided by republicans may well have helped to produce the very alliance they most feared. At the very least, it did little to counter the terms of the church’s appeal to women. But that may have been beside the point. Importantly, the anticlerical portrayals of the religious inclinations of women worked to equate masculine identity with republicanism. On the one hand, anticlericals called upon republican husbands to turn their wives away from priestly influence; on the other hand, the depiction of women as inherently superstitious confirmed the natural division of labor between the sexes and justified the inequality that followed from it.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the writings of Jules Michelet, the great historian of the French nation and an ardent anticlerical. Michelet was born in 1798 in the waning days of the French Revolution; he died in 1874, in the early years of the Third Republic. In addition to vivid histories of the lives of kings and courtiers, revolutionaries and their enemies, he wrote inflammatory moralizing treatises on love, women, and the family, as well as denunciations of the perversities and evils of priests, confessors, bishops, and other representatives of the Catholic Church. In his quest for knowledge about women and their bodies, he attended lectures on gynecology and embryology at the Collège de France, and he obsessively monitored his young second wife’s monthly rhythms with the persistent attention of an experimental scientist. His writings on these topics drew criticism as well as praise, and I don’t offer them as evidence that all of France shared his opinions.¹⁶ What they do illustrate is the way in which a great historian associated women and religion in secularism’s polemical campaign.

Michelet’s writings on women, the family, and the church were directed at husbands. Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille (1845) opens with a shocking announcement. “It was generally thought that two people were sufficient for a marriage, but that has changed. The new system … has three constituent elements.” These are “the man, strong and violent; the woman, a creature weak by nature; the priest, born a man and strong, but who wants to make himself weak so as to resemble a woman … and so interpose himself between them.”¹⁷ As result of this invasion, “our wives and our daughters are raised a...