Theological Challenges to Religious Women’s Rights

Abstract

This chapter will contrast the human rights notion with the theological positions of three of the world’s major religions. Volumes have been written about each; these pages will provide a brief overview of equality and women. While each of these religious traditions contains a broad spectrum of interpretation on every social and religious topic, and the fullest compatibility with human rights norms for women, those positions that contribute to the conflict between religious freedoms and women’s rights will receive particular attention. The chapter will demonstrate that in some religious communities the rights notion is so different from essential theological beliefs that its moral authority is eroded and the construct itself is disabled as a tool for securing religious women’s rights. Alternately, the human rights idea can be so modified to adapt to religious teachings that the idea of gender equality is lost and the rights construct, as some religious communities employ it, is again unable to promote women’s actual rights.

And do you not know that you are (each) cm Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert — that is, death — even the Son of God had to die.

Tertullian (c. 155–c. 255), De cultu feminarum 1:1¹