What would a religion founded by a woman look like?

Obliq wrote: »

Excuse me? No. They're grinding at the assumptions you make here about me.

When/where have I ever given any of you a reason to think discussing women is off limits? I do remember having a proper go at people in general discussing suicidal ideation as if it was a legitimate ambition for women who don't want to be pregnant. Otherwise, I think I've left ye all with enough rope to effectively hang yourselves without my help. (I kid, I kid) :pac:

Oops. I was being tongue in cheek considering we've had all these threads lately about abortion etc. where celibate men get their oar in and then you have a thread where two guys are debating the issue of pregnancy on a fictitious female religion. I only picked your name out as it was already on thread. Sorry for any teeth damage!

Bannasidhe wrote: »

Spent a day at a Shaker village in Eastern Mass many years ago. Very interesting it was too.

Apparently, if I remember correctly, they used to adopt children and when those children were adults they were given the choice to stay or leave.

They also considered every task an act of worship so did everything to the best of their ability - along strictly enforced gender lines natch so no cooking for men or carpentry for women.

Bloody lovely furniture, can't comment on what their food was like as there weren't any Shaker women left to cook any....

Ah to be the owner of the local takeaway

If you look at the entirety of human history and then look at how things have improved so radically after women got the vote I think it is safe to say that religion would have been a lot more inclusive, understanding and concerned with improving people's lives, and less concerned with burning and punishment.

Peregrinus wrote: »

If you look at the entirety of human history, the gap between men getting the vote and women getting the vote is pretty small. In Ireland, for example, it's the gap between 1867 and 1922; in the UK, between 1867 and 1928. Anything that happened after women got the vote also happened after men got the vote. Expectations (which were widespread before female suffrage) that women's voting patterns would be radically different from men's have not been borne out. I'd say this particular example, to the extent that it's relevant at all, goes rather against your point.

What I was really getting at was women participating in political decision making. Up until they got the vote they were entirely excluded from power. Up until that point men exercised it pretty much exclusively, I would have thought that was obvious to someone who seems to have a firm grasp of history......

Peregrinus wrote: »

You're saying Queen Elizabeth I had no power? Marie de Medici? Catherine the Great?

Up until comparatively recently most people, male and female, were entirely excluded from power. Those who did have access to power were mostly male, but as between males and females who had access to power, I don't see the females behaving significantly differently from the males, do you?

In the last two hundred years or so, a wider range of people has had (limited) access to power through the ballot box, though those with their hands directly on the levers of power are still overwhelmingly male. In so far as there has been a change in the way power has been exercised in that period, I'm inclined to ascribe that to democratisation in general rather than to female suffrage in particular, not only because many major changes precede female suffrage but also because there is no evidence that women exercise power any differently from men.

You are being ridiculous. Please don't try and take the hundreds females who have exercised power in a serious way throughout human history and compare it to the tens of thousands of men, it makes you look foolish.

The point I am getting at is that since women have been able to exercise political power at the ballot box (long after men, forget the expanded franchise, men dominated for thousands of years) conditions have improved massively for people as we have focused on social issues, it was women who killed laissez faire politics and it was women who have overwhelmingly voted for (and thus allowed to pass) every single progressive piece of legislation in Ireland and the UK.

If you need further evidence take a look across the ditch, indeed I will even sully myself by quoting that wretched excuse for a human being Ann Coulter "it would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950—except Goldwater in '64—the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted."

Dades wrote: »

sheikhnguyen, by all means get stuck into Peregrinus' posts, but refrain from getting stuck into the poster, thanks.

point taken.

sheikhnguyen wrote: »

... it was women who have overwhelmingly voted for (and thus allowed to pass) every single progressive piece of legislation in Ireland and the UK

Girls are made from sugar and spice and all things nice.
Boys are made from slugs and snails and puppydog tails.

Women are still very under repesented in politics so if men werent also voting for these things they wouldn't pass.
If there are 100 TDs/MPs voting on a bill and it passes by 51% and only 10 of the voting body is female who voted for it?



EDIT: added quote which I somehow left out.

sheikhnguyen wrote: »

You are being ridiculous. Please don't try and take the hundreds females who have exercised power in a serious way throughout human history and compare it to the tens of thousands of men, it makes you look foolish.

The point I am getting at is that since women have been able to exercise political power at the ballot box (long after men, forget the expanded franchise, men dominated for thousands of years) conditions have improved massively for people as we have focused on social issues, it was women who killed laissez faire politics and it was women who have overwhelmingly voted for (and thus allowed to pass) every single progressive piece of legislation in Ireland and the UK.

If you need further evidence take a look across the ditch, indeed I will even sully myself by quoting that wretched excuse for a human being Ann Coulter "it would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950—except Goldwater in '64—the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted."

Are you quoting a woman who is an examplar for how women are just as capable of being unpleasant as men out of irony?

sheikhnguyen wrote: »

You are being ridiculous. Please don't try and take the hundreds females who have exercised power in a serious way throughout human history and compare it to the tens of thousands of men, it makes you look foolish.

Bannasidhe wrote: »

The examples you gave really are the exceptions that prove the rule that women were, on the whole, barred from exercising political power in their own right.

Sure. I accept that, until the last hundred years or so, women were very largely excluded from access to power.

My point is a much narrower one. Although women were largely excluded from power, they were not entirely excluded. And, if sheikhnguyen’s thesis is correct, where they did have access to power, we would expect to seem them exercising power in a different way from men. And I’m not seeing that myself.

And maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised at this. Sheikhnguyen states her thesis in these terms:

sheikhnguyen wrote: »

The point I am getting at is that since women have been able to exercise political power at the ballot box (long after men, forget the expanded franchise, men dominated for thousands of years) conditions have improved massively for people as we have focused on social issues, it was women who killed laissez faire politics and it was women who have overwhelmingly voted for (and thus allowed to pass) every single progressive piece of legislation in Ireland and the UK.

A huge amount of progressive legislation was passed before women had the franchise - Catholic emancipation in 1829, the Reform Act of 1832, the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the Reform Act 1867, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1870, the Ballot Act 1872 (introduced the secret ballot), the Land Acts, the Housing of the Working Classes Act 1885, the Local Government Act 1898, the National Insurance Act 1911, the Representation of the People Act 1918, to name but a few. True, we can point to still more reforms after the extension of the franchise - the establishment of the NHS, for example, in 1948 - but I await evidence that these reforms happened because of the extension of the franchise (as opposed to, say, the change in social attitudes resulting from experience of the great depression and the second world war).

Rather than see progressive reform as the result of women’s enfranchisement, I suggest it’s closer to the truth to see women’s enfranchisement as the result of progressive reform. I’d accept, of course, that women’s enfranchisement may have entrenched and intensified the pace of progressive reform - but only when I’d seen the evidence.

sheikhnguyen wrote: »

If you need further evidence take a look across the ditch, indeed I will even sully myself by quoting that wretched excuse for a human being Ann Coulter "it would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950—except Goldwater in '64—the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted."

This is helpful but, to be frank, not very helpful. The first point is that, in many of elections since 1950, a majority of women did in fact vote for the Republican candidate. I only have figures for elections from 1980, but on those figures the Republican candidate won the women’s vote in 1980, 1984 and 1988 (and, contrary to what Coulter says, the Democrat won the men’s vote as well as the women’s in 1992). The only case since 1980 of a Democrat being elected where a Republican won a majority of the men’s vote is Clinton, 1996. So if women are determining the outcome of elections, they are not consistently determining them in favour of the Democratic candidate.

Secondly, it takes a mindset like Coulter’s to see a Democratic victory as a triumph for the progressive cause. US politics is distinguished by the extraordinary lack of ideological alternatives offered to voters. Probably 80-90% of Democratic politicians would be at home in the Republican party, and vice versa. We could postulate that American women would vote overwhelmingly for a socialist candidate, or even for a social democrat, but we’ll never know, because they’ve never really had the option.

sheikhnguyen wrote: »

Although you are right that female sufferage is not the only thing driving progressive reform it is I think the main one. Here is a paper on it.

http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/faculty/aidt/papers/web/Women_Suffrage.pdf

Very interesting. Thanks for this.

A couple of thoughts:

1. The paper shows that women’s enfranchisement is associated with a shift in public spending priorities towards social spending, and away from other forms of spending, and this is both a short-term and a long-term effect.

2. It doesn’t establish your suggestion that women’s enfranchisement is the major cause of such a shift (though, of course, it isn’t inconsistent with your suggestion either).

3. I think it’s interesting that the shift is associated with women’s enfranchisement, rather than with having more women parliamentarians, or ministers, or prime ministers, or presidents, or whatever. As we know, these groups are still overwhelmingly male-dominated in all or almost all countries, so the progressive effect is bottom-up rather than top-down. Leaders - male and female, but still mostly male - are responding to the concerns of the voters, and those concerns shift as women are admitted to the ranks of voters.

4. It’s interesting to map this onto the question raised by the OP. The OP asks about a religion founded by a woman, but obviously we can conceive of a religion being founded by a woman but being supported largely by men, or by men and women more or less equally. If we map what we see in the political world onto the religious world, we shouldn’t be looking at the founders of religions, or at the popes and patriarchs (telling word!) who currently lead them, but at the people in the pews who support the religion through attendance, through participation, through donations, etc.

5. In (most) churches those people don’t have votes, but nevertheless church leaders do have to pay attention to them, because church leaders need their attendance, participation, contributions, etc, in the much same way that politicians need votes. In other words, there’s a similar opportunity for “bottom-up” influence without actually occupying positions of leadership.

6. It is in fact the case that in most churches, at any rate in western society, women dominate (numerically) in the pews. More women attend church than men, more women participate/volunteer in other ways. And, in the Catholic church at any rate, there are far more women than men among the NCO class, as it were; there are more nuns than monks. And all this has been the case for as long as anyone has been counting.

7. And, on the basis of what we see in politics, you’d expect that to translate into churches attaching a high priority to social causes and ministries.

8. And, lo, this is exactly what we find. Churches are heavily engaged in education, medical and social care, relief of poverty, etc. It’s a huge part of church life.

9. All of which suggests that, if the question is reframed as “what would a church influenced by women, and by women’s concerns and priorities, look like?”, then the answer may be “it would look pretty much like the churches we actually have”.

10. This seems surprising, because at first glance you might think that a church responsive to women’s concerns and priorities would not exclude women from positions of leadership, as most do, either explicitly or through culture and practice. But that presumes that women’s concerns and priorities including having access themselves to positions of leadership. This may not be the case. The evidence you’ve presented suggests that, in the political field, women do not use their votes to elect women parliamentarians, presidents, etc; they use them to influence policy and to affect government actions in favour of social priorities and values. And they may be using their bottom-up influence in the churches in exactly the same way.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Very interesting. Thanks for this.

3. I think it’s interesting that the shift is associated with women’s enfranchisement, rather than with having more women parliamentarians, or ministers, or prime ministers, or presidents, or whatever. As we know, these groups are still overwhelmingly male-dominated in all or almost all countries, so the progressive effect is bottom-up rather than top-down. Leaders - male and female, but still mostly male - are responding to the concerns of the voters, and those concerns shift as women are admitted to the ranks of voters.

Yeah i mentioned that to someone else earlier in the thread. Parties have responded to female voters policy prefrences and those prefrences were generally socially progressive. It is also worth noting that women tend to vote more than men as well further tilting their influence on government.

As for the church thing I wouldn't know what a congregation looks like nowadays I haven't set foot in a church in 10 years.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Fair point. Two responses:

1. There are churches that are involved in AIDS programmes that do involve condoms. We tend to hear about the ones that aren't.

2. You're assuming that ordinary-person-in-the-pew in those regions favours condom-based AIDS strategies. This may not be the case. Just because women can be or are influential in churches doesn't mean that they will use their influence in ways that line up with our enlightened liberal values and priorities.

On the wider point, do churches dictate the perceived needs of their members, or respond to them? Both, of course, given that churches are in the business of moral reflection and ethical formation. But unless we patronisingly assume that all the women in churches are little more than sheep, there's no reason to think that their values and priorities are dictated entirely by their church leaders in an exclusively top-down process.

So, you are arguing that organised religions tend to be as responsive to, and as willing to be lead by, their followers as political parties are?

'enlightened liberal views and priorities'? That's an interesting choice of phrase in connection to AIDS-related fatalities, P. Especially if we're talking about the role of organised religion in helping raise AIDS awareness, and preventing the spread of the disease.