ABSTRACT
This chapter views gender as a category of analysis applied to NRM studies especially by the 1990s, although significant work along these lines had already been done. NRM studies before the 1980s gave little attention to gender. Not surprisingly, most NRM studies scholars were male. But female NRM studies scholars pioneered in bringing gender into the discussion. They made important breakthroughs, in studying first NRMs from the past, where women’s leadership was evident, and then more recent NRMs that gender-oriented scholars studied ethnographically. Second-wave feminism is largely responsible for women scholars at this time making the field take notice of gender. Feminist spirituality is highlighted here. Many of the groups that feminist scholars studied ethnographically in the 1990s and beyond were in this loose affiliation based on female-centered images of deity and community.
