Introduction

The Introduction opens by observing that feminist idoloclasm is concerned not with the vandalization of material sacra but with the liberation of women’s consciousness from captivity to the power of false or distorted images of the feminine. After discussing the modern nature and sources of feminist criticism of alienation, the Introduction lays the groundwork for the book’s account of feminism as variously liberating not only women but God from patriarchal ideologies that colonize, estrange, and control the activity and possibility of both through objectification. The Introduction also notes that despite the book’s focus on second wave religious feminist theory and praxis, its argument extends across four waves of feminist thought and draws together religious and secular feminism by the common threads of a criticism of idols that precedes criticism of gender inequality and its injustices.