282 Mary Jo Neitz
(1999) broadens the questions about relations between feminist and religious values
by looking across these religious families. In her sites, the meanings of both orthodoxy
and feminism are contested, and this work serves to remind researchers of the benefits
of problematizing both categories, rather than taking them for granted.
Gender and New Religious Movements
Gender relations in new religious movements, which include both religions new to
North America and newly founded religions, continue to be a source of interest to so-
ciologists of religion. Susan Palmer’s controversial work argued, among other things,
that new religions are places where women experiment with gender roles and sexuality
(1993). In an interesting comparison of Brahma Kumaris in India and in Western coun-
tries, Howell (1998) contests and clarifies some of Palmer’s claims. Marion Goldman’s
(2000) study of women followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh investigates the psycho-
logical as well as social and cultural reasons why followers were disproportionately high
achieving women. Goldman and Isaacson (1999) offer a too rare comparison of gender
role ideologies in Christian and non-Christian based new religious movements.
Anglo-Roman Catholic Women
Feminist research on white Roman Catholic women has several strands, starting with
those documenting the continuing feminist resistance to the male leadership of the
church hierarchy. Katzenstein (1995, 1998) examines feminist organizations within
the Catholic church, including Woman Church and the Women’s Ordination Confer-
ence, in terms of practices of a discursive politics through which activists “are engaged
in the construction of a knowledge community whose view of the institutional church
and of the society is self-consciously at odds with the present day Catholic hierarchy”
(1998: 107). Michele Dillon (1999a) also studied the Women’s Ordination Conference
and along with Catholics for a Free Choice, and Dignity (an organization supporting
gays and lesbians within the Catholic church) examined these organizations within a
broader emancipatory project initiated by the Second Vatican Council which located
the authority within the Roman Catholic Church among the “People of God.” Dillon
shows how the people she studied use the church’s own doctrines to dispute the reason-
ableness of positions taken by church authorities, and argues that these groups’ contes-
tation of Vatican authority offer evidence for pluralism within the Catholic Church.
Several writers tell the story of the opportunities and constraints experienced by
women in Roman Catholic communities of sisters (Ebaugh 1993; Wittberg 1994;
Wallace 2000). Others study lay women and their participation in congregational life.
For example, Manning (1997) looks at how liberal and conservative Catholic women
talk about reproductive choice and women’s ordination. She suggests that, unlike
Protestants and Jews who choose a denominational affiliation corresponding to their
liberal or conservative leanings, the Catholic women must deal with each other in the
same organization. Yet she is unsure whether this “moderating tendency” is enough
to counter the polarized viewpoints of the two camps of women. Thus, the research
on both lay women, sisters, and on leaders of resistance movements portrays a church
that is polarized over gender issues.