Women represented restorative morality, and were assigned the role of preserving and rebuilding values eroded by the world of competitive politics and markets. In the process, gender shaped politics – as a male domain. Women – and the clergy – resisted, but this resistance cemented connections between femininity and religion.
Joan Wallach Scott’s first chapter goes over what is now familiar ground for feminist social and political scientists. She discusses the historical construction of the feminised private sphere, in tandem with the expulsion of religion from politics. Despite the evolution of secularism in the 20th and 21st centuries, extremely difficult and incomplete struggles to expand women’s rights have continued (including excruciating battles for suffrage). The fact is, true gender equality would profoundly disturb the West’s political and social order. There has been reluctance on the part of the state to address matters associated with the feminised private sphere.
But the stylised opposition between a secular and emancipated West, against a religious and oppressive East, has masked the persistence of difficulties related to sex and gender in the West. To show this, she draws on a wide range of historical sources on the revolutions of the 18th century, and the emergence of modern constitutional governance. The separation of church and state, and the inauguration of Euro-Atlantic democracies, resulted in a second separation – between the feminised private sphere of religion, tradition, emotion, and family, and the masculinised public sphere of the state. In this book, Joan Wallach Scott demonstrates that gender equality and women’s rights were never conceived as part of secularism. Joan Wallach Scott’s account shows the hypocrisy underlying these assertions. As Scott shows, the West has claimed sexual liberation and gender equality as key features of secularism, and as the clearest marker of superiority over Islam. In an exposé of the sexism and racism at the origins of secularism, Joan Wallach Scott argues that the notion of secularism has in fact been put to the service of the conservative, Christian, West, in the ‘clash of civilisations’ that has substituted Islam for the old adversaries of the Cold War. Yet in her new book, Sex and Secularism, feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott does just that. It would seem an odd moment therefore to question how well secularism advances feminist social change goals. Secularism – the separation of religious institutions from the state, and the elevation of enlightenment notions of reason and equal rights over divine revelation for the chosen few – is in trouble. By Joan Wallach Scott, Princeton University Press, 2018
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