Feminist Inquiry in the Sociology of Religion 279
and gave way to a secular order in the twentieth century. She states that “attention
to gender helps to explain why these motifs, and the historical claims which ground
them have held such explanatory power for historians, even though, from an empirical
perspective, they never happened” (1997: 87). The received view, a tale of the growing
absence of religion from the public sphere, reflects the theological views of a particular
group of Protestant men, who observed the growing absence of mainline Protestant
(male) ministers from the public realm. The story told from the location of women
looks quite different. In her essay, Braude outlines a story that begins with the fact
that women have always constituted a majority of participants in American religious
life. The story she tells is organized around theincreasing involvementof women. In her
version of the story, given their numerical dominance, it is women’s exclusions from
the conventional narrative that must be explained. This places women’s participation
in the context of male power. Braude’s story differs from the story about decline that
dominates the literature: The common understanding of secularization “incorporates
into the story of American Religion assumptions about women’s powerlessness” (1997:
97). If women’s power were considered in a positive light, then the dominant story
would assume that the decline of mainline male participation in the public realm meant
the decline of religion itself. Putting women at the center of the analysis changes the
questions as well as the answers.
BECOMING VISIBLE: WOMEN AND GENDER
The last decade has seen a tremendous increase in the visibility of women. Increasing
numbers of studies incorporate questions about women and gender. In looking at this
literature, we can see instances where conventional approaches fold in women, but
there also are instances where studying women leads scholars to ask new questions. In
this section, I review a large literature that increasingly shows us where the women are
and demonstrates how gender matters to sociologists studying religion.
Critiques of Androcentric Biases
Early and often, Ruth Wallace has raised the question, “Where are the women?” in the
sociology of religion. The question has had a number of meanings in her work: She has
questioned both the absence of research conducted from a feminist perspective and
also the lack of opportunities for women in leadership positions, in both the organiza-
tions we study and the organizations through which we report our studies. She has been
concerned about the relative absence of opportunities for women as leaders in religious
organizations, especially the Roman Catholic Church in the United States (1975, 1992,
1997). She also has been concerned about the absence of women leaders in organiza-
tions where gender and religion are likely to be studied (2000). Several other scholars
have examined the androcentric biases in the work of particular theorists. Erickson
(1993) examines the work of Weber and Durkheim in the founding generation, and
Otto and Eliade, from subsequent cohorts, on the distinction between the sacred and
profane. The use of rational choice theory in the sociology of religion also has been
criticized for androcentric biases from a feminist interpretivist perspective (Neitz and
Mueser 1997) and from a critical perspective that borrows from Gramsci and Freud
(Carroll 1996).