Feminist Inquiry in the Sociology of Religion 277
journey, my own discoveries, my own engagement with questions raised by discourses
in the sociology of religion, feminist thought, and the particular groups I have studied –
and puzzled about – over the years.
Perhaps a first question is to ask whether we are not now “postfeminist.” In both
popular and academic cultures I sometimes encounter the claim that feminism is some-
thing that has come and gone. Popular news magazines such asTimeandNewsweek
have featured the death of feminism in cover stories in 1990 and 1998, respectively.
At the same time, second-wave feminists continue to pursue such goals as equality in
employment, health care for women, reproductive freedoms, and an end to violence
against women. The new generation of “third-wave” feminists write their ownMani-
festas(Baumgardner and Richards 2000), run Internet sites, and organize for their own
feminist goals.^2 Likewise, feminist graduate students in the 1990s were likely to be told
that feminism was over as a movement of import for sociology: Feminists had some
insights, but sociology had learned what there was to be learned from feminism. And
moved on. While gender might be considered a variable, feminism was not theoreti-
callyinteresting.^3 I, and the approximately one quarter to one third of American women
who label themselves feminist in national opinion polls, disagree with this assessment.^4
Yet, it is also the case that long-term movements are not static. Second-wave feminists
raised their children, girls and boys, in a different world from the one in which they
had grown up. Rather than feminism being a revelation, for many third wavers, “Fem-
inism is like fluoride...it’s in the water,” (Baumgardner and Richards 2000: 17). Early
successes (and failures) produced changes in the frames that recruit later participants.
Third-wave feminists do not necessarily look or talk like second wave feminists did. The
1990s’ feminist zines, such asBust(first published in 1993) andBitch(first published
in 1995), offer different content for a mostly younger audience from the still existing
feminist publishing ventures of the 1970s,Off Our BacksandMS., but the difference
does not signify the death of feminism.
The idea of an ongoing social and cultural movement is captured by the notion
that feminism is a discourse. Jane Mansbridge speaks in terms of the movement as
“accountability”:
Most politically active feminists in any country work in occupations whose primary
goal is not to advance feminism. When their work affects women, these feminists
turn for conscious inspiration to the women’s movement. They also feel accountable
to that movement. The entity...to which they feel accountable is neither an aggre-
gation of organizations or an aggregation of individuals. It is a discourse. It is a set of
changing, contested aspirations and understandings that provide conscious goals,(^2) One example is the creation of feminist.com. For a list of organizations, as well as electronic
and print resources, see Baumgardner and Richards (2000).
(^3) For one account of graduate school in the 1990s, see Becker (2000).
(^4) The political scientist Jane Mansbridge has looked at the poll data and reports the following:
“If an interviewer from a national survey organization phones and asks the question, ‘Do
you consider yourself a feminist?’ from a quarter to a third of American women these days
answer ‘yes’. This percentage is not much smaller than the percentage who consider themselves
Democrats or the percentage that consider themselves to be Republicans. Nor does it seem to
vary dramatically by race or class. In 1989, when a survey asked a representative sample of
women in the United States, ‘Do you consider yourself a feminist?’ 42% of Black women said
‘yes’ compared with 31% of white women. As many working class women as middle class
women said ‘yes’” (1995: 27).