If the meaning and extent of secularisation has occasioned as much disagreement as agreement among commentators, the mapping of developments within European religious traditions since the beginning of the eighteenth century - a period characterised by considerable cultural, intellectual and socio-political change, and not unconnected challenges to religious faith and allegiance - also produces a sometimes untidy outline that requires careful qualification and definition. Although purporting to witness to unchanging truth, religion does not remain unaltered after contact with challenging theories or practices, and one of the characteristics of the past three hundred years has been religious fragmentation as a consequence of resistance to new ideas: the confusions and anxieties thereby generated have been compounded at times by a reluctance to disturb the status quo and by a degree of class-based angst. For example, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, often credited with, or blamed for, the injection of a degree of scepticism towards religion was an elitist movement, directly affecting only small groups of intellectuals, some of whom were anxious to keep it that way, imagining that their new ideas might have unsettling effects on the existing order. The story of Voltaire’s wish that his wife and servants should continue to believe in God is well known but still instructive. Although he had abandoned religious belief himself, he recognised that their faith inspired in members of his household a morality that protected him and his property, and he was anxious that it should not be upset.
But as literacy spread and the lower classes could no longer so easily be protected from material that might disrupt their belief systems, Christians of all classes had to become more open to both philosophical and scientific advance, and sometimes to allow the incorporation of once unacceptable ideas into orthodox belief and praxis. But, as Owen Chadwick has reminded us, this presented no long-lasting difficulty. Christian theology and ecclesiology has always shown itself capable of adjusting to new knowledge. ‘When a theory could be shown to be well-founded [churches] hesitated and cast regretful glances backward, but accepted it because it was true and soon were again serene.’11 Scientific observation and discovery is but one area where this has occurred. As we consider the changing relationship between women and religious institutions, specifically Jewish and Christian ones, we may also observe an occasionally reluctant but nevertheless inexorable move towards the acceptance of ‘modern’ attitudes to women in all areas of life, as changing ideas about women’s role in society have been shown to be ‘well founded’ and to challenge long-held perceptions about their role within and outwith religious organisations.
Although Christianity has been the dominant European religion since late Roman times, the history of the continent and its several religions is comprehensible only within the context of the wider world. Geographically and historically Europe has been and is increasingly linked with regions far from its borders, and the religions that flourish on European soil are witness to those connections. But the plurality that has resulted has frequently been an agent of difficulty, dissension and strained loyalties. Religion has constituted the major supra-local bond everywhere in Europe, binding together co-religionists and giving to religious adherence and loyalty the ability at times to strengthen and at others to threaten politically imposed boundaries. The resultant persecutions and wars of religion, or wars with strong religious associations, have been a frequent and are still an undiminished element in European experience, as the situations in regions such as the Balkans and Northern Ireland demonstrate only too clearly.
The European past and its culture, while deeply rooted in Christian history, has also been enriched by encounters with other religions, and in spite of sporadic tensions has been coloured particularly by contributions from Judaism and Islam. European Jewish communities have a long history. They have frequently suffered the disadvantages and discriminations that attach to minorities - they have been used and abused, valued and persecuted; in some situations they have sought to maintain their ethnic and religious distinctiveness, in others they have found it politic to assimilate to the host population. In modern Europe, such social assimilation only became possible after the emancipation of the Jews and the slow and uneven process of social acceptance.12 The break-up of ‘classical Judaism’ in the eighteenth century meant that many experienced a loosening of ties with the ancient world view that had been fostered by their tradition and were challenged to reconceptualise what it meant to be a Jew. It has been argued that this sometimes painful process permitted the acceptance of Enlightenment ideas of humanity and universality and eventually led to a form of religious modernity that legitimated the adoption of a critical approach to historical sources and, in consequence, permitted questions to be asked about the relationship between the individual Jew’s ethno-religious identity and his or her emerging national identity.13 The forms such questions have taken have inevitably been determined by local circumstances and have resulted in sometimes surprising alliances. In France, for example, in spite of its hostility to religion, many Jews identified with the Revolution that had brought them citizenship. In nineteenth-century Germany many Jews, even if convinced Zionists, were keen to remain loyal to the state while attempting to cling to their ethnic identity; as J. Reinhartz has shown, only a minority were even tempted to go to Palestine until events after 1933 left few other choices open to them.14 It was within this context that it became possible for some, but not all, Jews to reconsider their religion’s traditional views about many aspects of life, including the treatment of women.
Islam also has a long European history, beginning with the conquest of most of the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century and extending its influence to Sicily, southern and much of coastal Italy and France. In the process, it made a vital, though sometimes little acknowledged, contribution to the economic, cultural and intellectual life of the whole continent. Although Muslims were finally ejected from the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century, pockets of loyalty to the faith persisted in other regions of Europe, most notably in the east and in the Balkans, the sites of other waves of Muslim expansion.15
This mosaic of differing religious loyalties across the continent has been further complicated by war and colonialism and by the migration and settlement patterns that followed in their wake, particularly during the twentieth century. In spite of attracting sporadic hostility and violence, thriving Jewish populations grew up in many European cities, only to be decimated by Nazi persecution, leaving small remnant communities. The post-1948 exodus to Israel further reduced an already dwindling population, although the number of Jews in France has since increased as a result of immigration from North Africa. By contrast, Islam has become steadily more visible since the midtwentieth century. Once-colonised Muslim peoples from North Africa have been recruited as additions to the French labour force; Britain has been glad of the services of labourers from her former colonial possessions in the Indian subcontinent and the West Indies, thereby initiating a process whereby Muslim immigrants have been joined by adherents of other religions such as Hinduism and Sikhism as well as by local variants of Christianity. Migrant workers from Turkey have contributed to the diversity of the populations of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. To this mix, dominated by the Abrahamic religions, have been added other traditions such as Buddhism with memberships both immigrant and convert. The Nordic countries, too, have experienced a fundamental change in ethnic composition in the second half of the twentieth century, as immigrants, many of them Muslim, have begun to establish permanent communities.16 Although the numbers are small, some have converted to Christianity, while some native Europeans have found religious satisfaction in Islam: a similarly statistically insignificant number of conversions between Judaism and Christianity have taken place.
Refugees and people granted asylum from life-threatening situations in their own countries have also contributed to alterations to the contours of the religious landscape. Italy, although historically an exporter of labour, has found itself the destination of choice for refugees and asylum seekers from North Africa and, more recently, from the Balkans and former Yugoslavia. Wars, social unrest and famine throughout the world have produced the tragedy of large numbers of displaced persons, many of whom have tried to gain entry into wealthy European societies in order to make tolerable lives for themselves and their families. The very diverse geographical origins of refugees, when added to those of longer-established communities, have had a profound impact on the European manifestations of the major monotheistic religions so that they exhibit a wide social, linguistic and ethnic mix, demonstrating what Anne-Sofie Roald has characterised as varied ‘cultural base patterns’ that have coloured religious conventions with associations of national or local customs.17 These have sometimes acquired an almost ineradicable link with particular cultic practices so that the boundaries between local custom and religious practice have become confused and blurred, in some cases labelling as religious practices that are tribal, rather than theological, in origin. To take just one example, female circumcision, often wrongly believed to be an Islamic practice but in fact associated with a number of predominantly tribal, rather than religious, populations, may assume religious significance in some immigrant communities that, in the European situation, may well be Muslim. As Yasmin Ali has commented, in such circumstances, when a justification is demanded for some practice or belief rooted in ‘ethnic’ tradition, there is frequently a knee-jerk appeal to Islam as a means of avoiding having to face the question.18 This, combined with the reluctance of host populations to gainsay what may be considered sacred to religious tradition frequently results in unspoken attitudes characterised by disgust on one side and defensiveness on the other.
Changes in the religious composition of local communities have received concrete expression in the built environment. As once-Christian populations have become less committed to attendance at religious services, and as newcomers have found it necessary to express their religious identity, so churches have closed and mosques have opened. In 1970, for instance, there was only one mosque in Italy. By the mid-1990s, the country had more than sixty mosques and about 120 Islamic prayer halls. A similar pattern may be observed in northern Europe. Denmark’s first mosque was built in 1969, but by the 1990s between seventy-five and 100 buildings that could be classified as mosques were to be found there.19 The experience of Italian and Danish cities is replicated throughout western Europe.
None of the major European religions is exempt from confusion and division, and the social and theological differences that each reflects often give rise to a variety of attitudes towards women. Christian churches and denominations are notoriously schismatic. The ancient divisions into eastern (Orthodox) and western (Catholic) versions of the faith have been further complicated in western Europe by the consequences of the Protestant Reformation and the later splintering of the Protestant churches into countless denominations and sects, adding colour and theological interest but giving rise to a long history of interdenominational hostility, only partly tempered by ecumenical activity in the twentieth century. Judaism, too, presents a far from united faqade and the divisions between Jews, while frequently the topic of jokes that attempt to make light of them, in reality are serious theological or procedural differences. There are, for instance, marked differences in interpretation of Jewish religious law, culture and customs between Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, in part reflecting their geographical origins, and between Orthodox, conservative and liberal strains of Judaism, as a consequence of the uneven process of assimilation to western European culture. And Islam is similarly fragmented. Migration has produced different ‘versions’ of Islam, for example, reflecting the grafting of Asian or North African custom onto the Muslim root and producing practices that give rise to a range of different lifestyles and markedly different expectations of women’s roles, all of which may in certain circumstances claim religious authority. This is in marked contrast to religions such as
Hinduism and Sikhism, whose memberships tend to be rooted in narrower ethnic and linguistic traditions and are, therefore, less likely to exhibit wide variations in practice.20
The variety of religious belief found on European soil is such that its impact on women, whether as members of religious institutions or in their individual experience, can be described and quantified in only the most general terms. Nevertheless, although it is clear that women have frequently found their faith to be an essential and deeply rewarding part of their experience, it is possible to highlight those areas of life which all religions presume to regulate and to identify examples where female adherents have suffered what they have perceived to be adverse demands leading them, in some cases, to question the roles they have found themselves expected to adopt.
Given so colourful and varied a mosaic of faith, is it possible to assess the extent to which religious experience has been important to European women - or, for that matter, to men - in the past three centuries? What measures can be used? As Gail Malmgreen has observed, mere membership of a church (or, she might equally have added, a mosque or a synagogue) or even observance of its rites and attendance at its services does not necessarily indicate either commitment or active support, still less inner belief.21 If that is true of the nominally observant, might it also be true of those professionally religious women whose Christian commitment exceeded mere attendance and who chose to join spiritual communities, such as convents or lay sororities, thus making a public statement of adherence to a Rule and, it might be supposed, to a conviction that God had called them to a particular way of life? Even in those cases, the complex interplay in women’s lives between belief, social custom, class and personal circumstances combine to make impossible the quantification of anything so nebulous and intensely personal as ‘faith’ and ‘religious experience’. Moreover, such evidence as we have is limited to the experience of a few women. It is impossible to discover what ‘ordinary’ women thought or believed, and we are driven to have to work with such estimates as have been made on the basis of those written records - for example, registers, diaries and letters - that have happened to survive. But they are, by and large, records generated by or about men and women of relative importance, or with the ability to write, and cannot possibly be representative of the major part of a population which, even in our period, lacked the skills or the resources to create for the future a picture of their present. Nor, it has to be said, was much interest in their lives evinced until twentieth-century social historians began to pay specific attention to history ‘from below’. In the process, they uncovered women’s past and initiated a series of discoveries that have increased as a consequence of second-wave feminism since the 1970s and the urge to include women in the historical narrative. Much has been recovered, but even so, their illiteracy or lack of social importance has allowed most of our foremothers (and forefathers) to become quasi-anonymous figures in a landscape largely peopled by others of their kind. Although our view of the history of women’s religious experience is, therefore, necessarily a cloudy one, there is little reason to doubt that the perceived certainties of religion served many of the same functions in the past as they appear to serve in the present. They have supplied personal comfort and security in an unstable and unsafe world, offered meaning and explanation for daily life and have helped women to make sense of their experience within the perspective of an alternative and eternal reality. Moreover, at a practical day-to-day level, churches of all denominations have frequently provided almost the only relief from their domestic situation that some women could enjoy without attracting criticism. They have been places where family concerns could be shared with other women and where a range of prayerful and other overtly religious activities have taken place. In addition, as Tammy Proctor has noted in her contribution to this book, churches and other places of worship also provided scope for leisure activities for women; while their menfolk had many other opportunities for social life, frequently denied to their wives and daughters, women were able without censure to use the church as a meeting place.22
World History
