ABSTRACT
By adopting a scientific method and seeking to understand religious practice as human activity, the supposedly neutral and objective study of religions followed an androcentric and colonialist agenda. A feminist approach to the study of religion, therefore, seeks to expose inequality: both the androcentrism hidden in the insider/outsider approach to the field and the androcentrism embedded in religion(s) that a purely phenomenological account of the data ignores. With the rise of first-wave feminism and its focus on suffrage in industrial societies, awareness grew of the marginalization of women in the Christian religion and in society. In the global north, the study of religions expanded substantially in the 1960s. Consequently, the beliefs and practices of cultures other than Christian ones became the focus of analytic studies whose starting point was a Protestant assumption that religion is a private matter, whereby the individual assents to a set of propositions.
