Having Your Cake And Eat It Too Summary

Religion and feminism are often seen as two conflicting ideas. Especially seen in Christianity, previous research has shown that many Christians do not identify as feminists as they believe the traditions and liturgy are patriarchal. Most importantly, feminism is defined as the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes and religion as a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices. Now how are these two principles related? This work will analyze the relationship between feminism and religion despite the limited amount of research in existence. In the Journal of American Academy of Religion, Katherine Young writes of how feminism and religion are two related ideas. In Having Your Cake and Eating it Too: Feminism and Religion, Young draws from the ideas of Rita Gross and her feminist approaches to religion. She distinctly references two key terms: politics and psychology over religion and feminism over women’s studies. Gross states that politics and psychology are two religious dimensions that are typically not classified as religious, in respect
She differentiates the three waves of feminism and determines the second wave is more concerned with women’s studies whereas the third wave shifts to gender studies in terms of academia. Primarily looking at Christianity, Woodhead maintains that women are more religious than men are not only due to their societal position in the home, but also because they were socialized differently than men. Another significant theme is the theory of secularization and how gender is a principal variable. Essentially, Woodhead argues that in order to prove any of the aforementioned theories, more research must be done as religion and feminism is not a widely studied