Religion and gender — the contested terrain

Every major religious tradition has been shaped by patriarchy — has encoded male authority into its institutions, its texts, its rituals, and its theology — and every major religious tradition has also contained, from the beginning, women who found ways to resist, subvert, and transform that authority. The arguments about women's ordination in Christianity, female religious leadership in Islam and Judaism, the role of gender in Hindu ritual life, the feminist re-reading of Buddhist philosophy: these are not peripheral controversies but central ones, touching the question of who gets to speak for the sacred. The traditions that are willing to examine this honestly are discovering resources within their own heritage that patriarchal readings had suppressed.