Women in New Religions

An in-depth history of selected New Religions that highlights the roles of women in their founding and continual practiceWomen in New Religions offers an engaging look at women’s evolving place in the birth and development of new religious movements. It focuses on four disparate new religions—Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, The Family International, and Wicca—to illuminate their implications for gender socialization, religious leadership and participation, sexuality, and family ideals.Religious worldviews and gender roles interact with one another in complicated ways. This is especially true within new religions, which frequently set roles for women in ways that help the movements to define their boundaries in relation to the wider society. As new religious movements emerge, they often position themselves in opposition to dominant society and concomitantly assert alternative roles for women. But these religions are not monolithic: rather than defining gender in rigid and repressive terms, new religions sometimes offer possibilities to women that are not otherwise available. Vance traces expectations for women as the religions emerge, and transformation of possibilities and responsibilities for women as they mature.Weaving theory with examination of each movement’s origins, history, and beliefs and practices, this text contextualizes and situates ideals for women in new religions. The book offers an accessible analysis of the complex factors that influence gender ideology and its evolution in new religious movements, including the movements’ origins, charismatic leadership and routinization, theology and doctrine, and socio-historical contexts. It shows how religions shape definitions of women’s place in a way that is informed by response to social context, group boundaries, and identity.

InWomen and New ReligionsLaura Vance offers a creative strategy for furthering this work of integration., This second volume is particularly interesting because, while much has been written on European traditional religion, these newer denominations have not had as much neutral examination., This work emphasizes the necessity of examining gender in the quest to understand religions., This is an important volume in the series onWomen in Religion. It is both engaging and insightful and offers critical information about new religions and the role and influence women have had in their developments., This book has much to offer in terms of both history and sociological frameworks for evaluation, and for that reason it should work well in classrooms that focus on topics including gender and religion, new religious movements, and American religion, among others.

Laura Vance is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Brevard College. She is the author of Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis.