278 Mary Jo Neitz
cognitive backing, and emotional support for each individual’s evolving feminist
identity. (1995: 27)This view of feminism as changing and contested signals an openness and unbound-
edness, a yeastiness essential to the bread and beer of feminism.
Academic feminists are a part of this discourse. Starting with the problem of inequal-
ity between men and women, the discourse shifted as writers came to realize that we
also needed to understand inequalities among women. We needed to think about how
race and class and gender intersect in particular ways for different groups of women,
creating different oppressions and opportunities (Collins 1991). Postcolonial writers
reconfigured boundaries and brought feminist thought into the borderlands (Spivak
1988; Trinh 1988; Anzuldua 1987). Postmodern queer theorists questioned the stability
of gender categories (Butler 1990). From a beginning in which second-wave feminists
sought to examine and explain women’s common oppression, some feminists have
moved to deconstructions of the category of “woman” itself (Wittag 1981/1993). Femi-
nist researchers working today do not assume that “woman” has a universal meaning.^5
Yet, feminism, much changed, with and without modifiers, persists as the most useful
word to identify a way of thinking that begins with questions about the status and
experiences of particular groups of women.
All of this ferment has produced new knowledge and new ways of thinking about
women, men, and the relations between/among them. Although that thinking has
been incorporated unevenly into the academic disciplines, there is now a considerable
body of literature that examines gender in relation to religion. Women are now visible
in a way that they were not before 1970. Feminism as discourse had an impact on
academic life as well as in the popular culture.
In the 1970s those of us hoping to make a feminist revolution in academia spoke
of three approaches to studying women. We acknowledged that the first question was
likely to be “Where are the women?” Because women were, for the most part, invisible,
early feminist writing largely took the form of critiquing male knowledge on this basis
(e.g., Wallace 1975). The second approach was a response to the first: We called it
“add women and stir.” In this approach scholars take women as the object of study,
using conventional disciplinary concepts and frameworks. This approach produces new
knowledge about women and gender relations, but not necessarily new questions (e.g.,
England 1993). Some feminists suggested a third approach: They asked, What questions
would emerge if we put women’s experience at the center of the analysis, as active
subjects and as knowers? How would our concepts and theories be disrupted? How
does beginning in the location of women present new ways of thinking about key
processes and institutions?
What difference can it make to begin with the location of women? The historian
Ann Braude provides an example. Her analysis suggests a rethinking of the concept
of secularization.^6 Braude examines the historical claims that religion declined in the
United States during the colonial period, was feminized during the Victorian period,
(^5) To see the multiplicity of current issues and framings among feminist researchers, seeFeminisms
at the Millennium, a special issue ofSigns, Volume 25, Number 4.
(^6) For a recent review of this concept in sociology, see Swatos and Christiano (1999). Their essay
is an introduction to a special issue of the journalSociology of Religionon the secularization
debates.