Secularisation
Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. This is a controversial and thought-provoking analysis of triggers towards the rejection of Christian commitment in Britain. Brown highlights the significance of the 1960s in the development of a view of the world that no longer finds formal religion a useful tool for understanding and managing life’s events.
Mcleod, Hugh, Religion and the People of Western Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Mcleod’s book gives a very useful overview of religious belief and practice in western Europe that helps to provide a context for any discussion of women and religion.
McLeod, Hugh and W. Ustorf, eds, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. This is a collection of essays exploring the nature and multiple forms of secularisation from sociological, theological and historical perspectives. Although it is not an easy read, it helps to demonstrate the complexity of both the abandonment of religious belief and its significance.
General histories of women
None of the works listed below focuses specifically on religion, but by describing many aspects of women’s lives, including religion, they help to demonstrate its place in individual women’s lives and its impact on other areas of their experience and to reduce the temptation that the historian of religion might too sharply separate religious from other experience.
Abrams, Lynn, The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918. London: Longman, 2002. This broad-ranging work is a valuable introduction to women’s lived experience and works from the premise that significant changes in the ways that women constructed their identities took place in the period roughly dating from the French Revolution.
Bock, Gisela, Women in European History, trans. by Allison Brown. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. This work illustrates the conditions that women have faced and explores their struggle for civil, political and social rights through discussion of their ideas and ideals.
Hufton, Olwen, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe. London: Harper-Collins, 1995. Volume I explores in considerable detail the history of women’s lives from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, by considering the interaction between belief and practice - between those religiously and culturally constructed ideals of womanhood and the realities of daily living. It sets the scene for later studies and enables those of us interested in later periods to understand some of the roots of the ways in which womanhood has been constructed.
Offen, Karen, European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Offen explores the ways in which male hegemony in Continental Europe has been challenged. She sets out to read history from a feminine perspective and argues that sexual difference is at the heart of human thought and politics.
Women and religion
Beck, Wolfgang and Saul Friedlander, eds, The Jews in European History. Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 1994. This collection of essays explores aspects of European Jewish experience from the Middle Ages to the second half of the twentieth century. Although the study of women is secondary to its main purpose, it provides a useful context by demonstrating the tensions experienced by Jewish people in their attempts to retain their identity while accommodating to their social context.
Holden, Pat, ed., Women’s Religious Experience. London: Croom Helm, 1983. A series of essays that use case studies to explore women’s experience of religion in a variety of social situations. The overall theme is that women may not necessarily view their experience of institutional religion as oppressive but rather that their exclusion from some of its demands may leave them free to explore and celebrate their own worth.
Malmgreen, Gail, ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Focusing specifically on England, Malmgreen and her fellow contributors explore the extent to which women’s spiritual impulses and religious vocations persisted in a more or less hostile environment as sources of strength, self-definition and accomplishment.
Mernissi, Fatima, Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. A Muslim sociologist from Morocco, Mernissi writes about her faith and its institutional expression from a feminist and critical perspective. Her work is sometimes controversial but always stimulating.
Roald, A. S., Women in Islam: The Western Experience. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. From her experience as a Swedish convert to Islam, Roald explores what it means to be a Muslim woman attempting to live out her faith in an advanced European society. Her particular insights enable the non-Muslim reader to understand both the experience of living as a convert and the tensions that being part of so visible a minority may produce.
Ruether, Rosemary and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds., Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Is it legitimate for women to exercise leadership roles within the Judaeo-Christian tradition? Ruether and McLaughlin explore some of the theological and social issues and their possible resolutions.
World History
