Contenu du sommaire : Femmes et Religions

As association dominated by Appollonism, Pythagoreanism was marginalized in Greek lands by the (selective) refusal of bloody sacrifies and the consumption of meat by very strict rules of living and by religious and intellectual revelations that relied on an initiation. Considering that philosophy - « striving toward wisdom » - is an asceticism which allous the purification of Souls and, correlatively, of bodies, it confers to the attainment of scientific knowledge - mathematics, astronomy, music, medecine - an essential place in the relation that it establishes with the divine. Because it wished itself, from the beginning, an association open to both sexes, Pythagoreanism allowed some women to accede to scientific knowledge and to the chance to speak and to write. Immersed in a world that considered access to philosophy represents for women a transgression of limits peculiar to their sex and thus risking sexual licentiousness and perversion, women Pythagoreans insisted on showing in their writing that learned women were, more than others, good wives, good mothers and good house-keepers. It's in this sense that, taken up by Christian morality and taken out of context that they were to figure in Treaties on Famous Women.

Roman women were excluded from any kind of power and confined to a subordinate and dependant status in religious as well as private and public matters. However, in crucial times of Roman history (primitive period, Second Punic War, Civil Wars), the religious activity of some women, sometimes practised in a deviant or disreputable way, clearly shows the extent of their capacity to embody divine powers. Standing at the core of the civic and religious tradition, the Vestals played a role that is both exceptional and exemplary.

Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (11/2-16) is the first text within the monotheist religions to have linked women's veil with their relationship to God. This text, when compared to other texts from Paul and to some pagan customs of his days, allows to separate two streams from one another : Paul's theological tradition and the world's customs. Women's veil being the visible sign of their subordination to men, Paul did not manage to reconcile his theological tradition of fundamental equality among the baptized with the custom of the veil.

A small number of women in the Middle Ages were particularly interested in history - especially local history -, among which three in the germanic area singled themselves out by the originality of their contribution to this field : Hrotsvita of Gandersheim in the Xth century and in the XIIth century, Hildegard of Bingen and Herrad of Hohenbourg. The three of them were nuns, and they transmitted their accounts of the foundation of their respective convents : the first by means of metric poetry, the second through hagiography and the last in images.

Since the thirteenth century, anorexia nervosa does exist mainly as mystical anorexia. Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) is a significant example. A psychoanalytical perspective joint with a socio-historical approach lends to two tracks : first, her intrapersonal conflicts, second, the ideological world of her time, give us some keys to understand her processes. Mystical anorexia is bound to each characters's familial and personal history, as to the rise of female emotional mystic. Also, it is often a rebellion against matrimonial strategies of bourgeois families in merchant cities.

The arrival of printing produces a tremendous flowering of the Yiddish language in the Ashkenasy world. At the same time as translating the great sacred texts from the Hebrew, a rich and entirely unprecedented outpouring spreads into every level of society. However, very quickly Yiddish becomes identified with the emergence of a « religious » literature, written for and even by women. The link is so strong that the books are printed in their own specific typeface: waybertaytch (« women's yiddish »).The author analyses this phenomenon in the light of more recent anthropological research on the place of women in Jewish culture. At the heart of this is a reasoned connection which brings together the female with the religious, but which also keeps them apart according to established order : men submit to the written Hebrew word while women submit to Custom. Translating the Torah into Yiddish, allowing women to write in it is surely to admit the « feminine part » of Jewish spiritual life, the part that is their birth-right as expressed so clearly in the myths and rituals which link the Torah with women.

Bergier, one of the rare talented Catholic controvertists facing the Enlightenment, published in 1788 an important Theological Dictionary. His article « Women » was one of the first in a « catholic » dictionary, to treat « women » as a subject and not as a simple partner for « men ». With critical spirit and logic, he developped commonplaces (often close to the philosophers), apologetic (« what Christianity has done for women ») or controversial arguments. Twenty other articles treating feminine questions show that Bergier, if he considered women as equal to men before God, clung to the prejudices of his time concerning their place in society, such as their necessary « dependancy ». This « anti-equalitarianism » did not however go without calling some ideas in question again (paradoxical and rare at the time), and he often took the defense of women in the face of their condition.

The author studies the position of women within the algerian religious life and more broadly their position within the algerian society, with a socio-historical and anthropological approach. After a state of arts which shows the importance of women in the religious sphere of early islam, the author demonstrates that women, who were progressively marginalized, have invested mysticism as the locus of the expression of their relationship with the divine. Referring to a fieldwork that she conducted in western Algeria, she describes and analyses the forms and the ways of the implication of these women in the world of mahgrebian mysticism, the sense they give to their practices, the effects of their practices on their position in the society.

The statues of the Virgin which are objects of a particularly intense devotion have been and still are, in many areas of Europe, dressing with real garments. According to tradition, only women are allowed to change them and, consequently, to see and touch the body of the statue. However, the Church grants to priests only the right to handle sacred objects ; and women, of course, are excluded from priesthood. Therefore, how can one explain the Virgin's « ladies in-waiting » are women ? How do they fulfil this duty and what is its meaning for them ?

A critical reassessment of the religious practises, as set out in the overall data of the last two centuries available to us, leads one to question two set ideas. The progressive decrease of sexual dimorphism from the end of the 19th century which would suggest a narrowing of the gap between the behaviour of men ad that of women. The importance of the family as a means of transmitting comportments in relation to matters such as the practice of a religion. On the contrary it has been demonstrated that sexual dimorphism is a relatively stable phenomenon, despite certain modulations due notably to the inversion of dominant markers (whorshipping at Easter, then whorshipping on Sundays) in the 19th and 20eth centuries. The importance of sexual dimorphism in the 20eth century is apparent not only in the rural and urban surveys carried out in the fifties and the sixties, but also in the opinion polls which followed them and the recent few and far between surveys on the attendance at Sunday mass (Basse Normandie, 1986). Equally brought to the fore from a reexamination of some of the surveys of the fifties and the sixties, the non univocal role of the family configuration in its relation to their practice. From this analysis one can deduce that it is necessary to tackle the questions of behaviour and beliefs in a truly anthropological perspective in order precisely to define a female catholicism yet to be discovered.

Having both the authority of a recent official text (1992) with universal aims, and a style which makes it accessible to a large public, the new Catechism treats, among other subjects, women as much on a symbolic level as to prescriptions and ethical and cultual prohibitions. We have tried here to measure evolution and where they have taken place. The new status of women in society, the merits of certain feminist exegeses are briefly recognized. Eve is no longer presented as responsable for the Fall but, contradictorily, Mary is still the new Eve who allous redemption. Women are still most often evoked when discussing prohibitions and prescriptions touching the family and sexuality, and these prescriptions evolve only slightly. One woman takes ap as much room as all the others put together, Mary, model of submission and figure of the Church. This double representation prevents the Church from continuing to propose her as a concrete model for today's women, but freezes a symbolic image to which the practice of power within the Church still refers.

The problem of the priesthood of women in the Western Church must be examined in the light of the social categories (male/female, secular/clerical) invented by the Church during the Middle Ages. It was by creating systems of classification adapted to their increasing social insertion that, between the third and twelfth centuries, the clerks gradually contrived a complete exclusion of women from the priesthood, while defining at the same time, specifically feminine socio-religious functions. In the course of the thirteenth century, when the social order defined by the clerks was endangered by the original religious experiments carried out by women who, more or less explicitly, denounced their status of subjection within the Church, the ecclesial institution overcame that difficulty by suppressing all forms of rebellion, and by restating the classifications it had worked out in the course of the previous centuries.

This bibliographical bulletin has no other ambition than to inventory available works and describe their short-comings. Feminine religious practice in general and the place of women in ninetheenth century catholicism appear as high points in historiography. On the other hand, not enough is yet known about women's religion (spirituality, daily life…) and about feminine militantism in the twentieth century both inside and outside the Church.