ABSTRACT
This chapter explores more fully some of the counter-intuitive aspects of the gender identity politics of a non-Christian subset of fundamentalist women in the United States and compares their politics to those of contemporary radical, cultural feminists. The return to fundamentalist Biblical religion among the New Christian right in America has been accompanied, with less media attention, by a renewed interest in Jewish orthodoxy. The specialness of woman and the importance of her sphere of activity were stressed throughout the interviews and often juxtaposed to a rather rigid conception of what they described as feminism. The majority of these women define feminism as a movement which dismisses differences between men and women and focuses on the world of work, where equal pay is the most important issue. Like women-centered feminists, many ba'alot teshuvah and, indeed, other women of the new religious Right in America, celebrate gender differences.
