Religion and Women

This book discusses the position of women in the Native American, African, Shinto, Jaina, Zoroastrian, Sikh, and Baha’i faiths for the first time in a single volume, and evolves a conceptual framework within which their positions could be comprehensively considered. The contributing scholars provide an enlarged database for a more thorough discussion of the questions pertaining to women and religion in general, and simultaneously advance the theoretical frontiers in women’s studies. Religion and Women belongs to a trilogy about women and world religions edited by Arvind Sharma the first and third volumes being respectively, Women in World Religions and Today’s Woman in World Religions.

Arvind Sharma is Professor at McGill University. He is the editor of the two other volumes in this trilogy, Women in World Religions and the upcoming Today’s Woman in World Religions, both published by SUNY Press.

The publication of Women in World Religions (SUNY Press 1987) represented an innovation. In that book seven women scholars wrote about the position of women in seven different religions of the world. The book was so well received that we decided to imitate ourselves. The present volume extends the phenomenological standpoint, with its sensitivity to the adherents’ point of view, to include a treatment by women scholars of the position of women in Native American, African, Shinto, Jaina, Zoroastrian, Sikh, and Baha’i faiths. It thus constitutes a companion volume to the previous work and we hope will be welcomed as such.

As the authors demonstrate so clearly in the individual chapters and Katherine Young so visibly in her general Introduction, when it is the question of the texture of women’s experience in the religious traditions of the world, to think of religions as different is a matter of relative indifference, for the major themes of women’s experience often cut across them.

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