Boundaries and Silences in a Post-Feminist Sociology

Sociology of Religion, Winter, 2000 by Penny Edgell Becker

So I was surprised when pastors from Unitarian and American Baptist churches, in an early focus group for the Religion and Family Project, talked about the public implications of organizing a church's ministry around a two-parent, heterosexual family, of giving a religious imprimatur to norms of family practice that seem increasingly out of place in what Furstenberg (1999) has called the era of the post-modern family. Around 20 percent of the pastors in our clergy survey, almost all liberal Protestant, said they do not use the term "family ministry" at all because it is exclusionary, echoing in their open-ended responses some of the themes from the focus group. This led me to examine more seriously my assumptions about the "private" family, and I sought out colleagues to find out more about approaches to the family that take its "publicness" for granted.

It is not that the religion-and-family literature is wrong about the substance of the relationship between religion and family. But it does, I think, ignore the feminist understanding of the private as political, along with the feminist understanding of the family as itself a public institution, structured in large part by the state and the economy, mediating between individuals and a host of other institutions. As a result, a boundary is erected between sociologists of religion and others who study the family from a human development, feminist theory, or gender-and-work perspective. The latter, who usually have an explicit feminist commitment, often ignore religion entirely or assume that any religious influence on family life is harmful to women. [6]

This approach also leads to some silences within the sociology of religion, where attempts to answer feminist questions have a kind of awkwardness that comes from starting with a framework that accepts the family as a private realm of individual freedom and self-expression. Stacey and Gerard (1990) raise an oft-repeated question when they ask why any modern woman would embrace a conservative religion (specifically evangelical Protestantism). They answer it by arguing that these groups are not, in effect, as oppressive to women as feminists have supposed. Clearly beginning with a goal of making a straightforward critique of these groups as patriarchal, they end up making a sharp distinction between rhetoric and practice; in the latter, they find a kind of pragmatic egalitarianism ameliorating an ideology that symbolicly affirms male "headship" in the home. [7]

I always confront these studies with some surprise -- not at the evangelicals, but at the feminists. I grew up in an evangelical Protestant environment, and am not surprised to find that the very strong women I remember were not "oppressed" in the sense some scholars seem to expect them to have been. And I am sympathetic to arguments that not privileging long-term career attainment over family-oriented goals is not in itself anti-feminist, and that to equate the two bespeaks the biases of a white, middle-class feminism that may not apply so well across economic and ethnic boundaries. I am not calling for a feminist analysis of conservative religious groups that views the women within them as having no agency or as having a kind of "false consciousness" underlying their experiences of religion and family as satisfying and positively self-expressive.