Tweet
Here's a decent little article that lays out the drive among Jewish, Catholic, and Muslim women for more leadership roles in their congregations. No mention of LDS.
http://www.phikappaphi.org/forum/spr...spring2014.pdf
A few selections:
http://www.phikappaphi.org/forum/spr...spring2014.pdf
A few selections:
The religious communities that most fiercely reject women's religious leadership tend to be especially ambivalent about the modern commitment to individualism, a trend critics view as a threat to the family.
As men were encouraged to pursue their own individual interests in the marketplace and cultivate an ethic of toughness and self-reliance [in the late 18th and 19th centuries], women were encouraged to devote themselves to preserving the traditional religious virtues of humility, charity, self-sacrifice, and nurture. Women, in other words, were expected to soothe the ills of the modern world by standing apart from it. . . . It can be easier to defend "the way things have always been" (even if "always" dates only to the late 18th and 19th centuries) than to imagine alternative ways of thinking about gender, work, family, and religion.
Since women (particularly mothers) are elevated as symbols of selfless love, it is not surprising that conservative religious communities can sound contradictory about female religious leadership, stressing women's piety while refusing to allow them into the pulpit. Many detractors seem to fear that if women become like men - become priests, imams, ministers, or rabbis - women will no longer stand as witnesses against the corrosive forces of modernity. . . . The more a religious group rebuffs modernity, the more likely it is to place restrictions on women's religious leadership.
Comment