"One of The Guardian's Best Books of 2017" Joan Wallach Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and adjunct professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include The Fantasy of Feminist History, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton), and Gender and the Politics of History.
How secularism has been used to justify the subordination of women
Joan Wallach Scott's acclaimed and controversial writings have been foundational for the field of gender history. With Sex and Secularism, Scott challenges one of the central claims of the "clash of civilizations" polemic-the false notion that secularism is a guarantee of gender equality.
Drawing on a wealth of scholarship by second-wave feminists and historians of religion, race, and colonialism, Scott shows that the gender equality invoked today as a fundamental and enduring principle was not originally associated with the term "secularism" when it first entered the lexicon in the nineteenth century. In fact, the inequality of the sexes was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. Scott points out that Western nation-states imposed a new order of women's subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics. It was not until the question of Islam arose in the late twentieth century that gender equality became a primary feature of the discourse of secularism.
Challenging the assertion that secularism has always been synonymous with equality between the sexes, Sex and Secularism reveals how this idea has been used to justify claims of white, Western, and Christian racial and religious superiority and has served to distract our attention from a persistent set of difficulties related to gender difference-ones shared by Western and non-Western cultures alike. "Sex and Secularism offers a series of bracing and illuminating reflections on a whole culture of oppression that ought to have been exposed much earlier."---Pankaj Mishra, The Guardian "Sex and Secularism must be praised for drawing attention to the history of secularism and gender inequality. Scott's message is no doubt timely in light of the powerful effect of the #MeToo campaign, which should give anyone pause before boasting about the superior treatment of women in the secular west."---Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Guardian "Scott's ardent and principled opposition to the prejudice and hostility expressed towards Islam – more specifically towards Islamic countries, societies and practices – by 'secularists' in Europe (principally France) and the United States is timely and necessary."---Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Times Literary Supplement "In Sex and Secularism, Scott broadens her scope geographically and temporally. Here the subject is women's relationship to secularism in modern western nation-states. This is a big and complex subject for a compact volume, but Scott is especially well-positioned to tackle it. . . . A challenging, timely, and important book. . . . Readers of Sex and Secularism will be forced to rethink their assumptions about the role of women and their bodies in contemporary political debates."---Susan B. Whitney, Literary Review of Canada "Sex and Secularism is a challenging, timely, and important book. . . . Her aim, she continues, was to 'open--not to definitively close--a conversation about the place of gender equality in the discourse of secularism.' That she has definitively done, as few other scholars could."---Susan Whitney, Literary Review of Canada "In her new book, the eminent feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott['s] . . . aim is to sketch a speculative history of the relationship between sex and secularism: to uncover how ideas about the proper place of religion and the proper place of women have influenced ea
