Sacrificing the Career or the Family?

Abstract

This article addresses the question of women's agency in traditionalist religion, through a study of self-narratives by women in the Orthodox Jewish community of Antwerp, Belgium. Women who study or work outside the boundaries of their community were interviewed about their experiences in negotiating gender ideologies by moving in and between the `secular' and `religious' spaces of higher education, work and home. Various subject positions emerged in terms of either rejecting, separating or reconciling dominant community norms regarding women's proper role with personal trajectories of self-realization and individual autonomy. On the one hand, the results confirm the possibility of women's agency within religious-traditionalist settings and in that sense subscribe to some recent feminist theoretical challenges to secularism. However, it is argued that the younger generation faces more restrictions in negotiating religious and secular gender-role expectations in the Antwerp context. Their prospects depend on the dynamic between global fundamentalist tendencies and local liberal state policies of multicultural accommodation.

Constructing Professional Intervention with IPV Across Generations in a Faith-Based Society: An Intersectional Perspective

“…For example, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are religions with a distinct patriarchal structure, in which men have a higher and more important status than women. The hierarchy, the clear and rigid gender roles, and the distinctly important status of the community and the family over individual needs are common and taken for granted in all three religions (Haj-Yahia, 2000; Longman, 2008). An additional characteristic shared by faith-based communities is the perception of the surrounding society as a threat to their religious and social values.…”

Catholic Women as Subjects of Debate

“…From this perspective, the gendered positions, selfunderstandings and experiences of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities and those professing alternative spiritualities can comparatively be thought of through religion/secular dynamics. Such thinking has led to important insights amongst feminist sociologists and anthropologists that do justice to the religion/secular dynamics in which religious subjects and communities have to position themselves (Aune, Sharma, et al 2008;Bracke 2011;Fedele and Knibbe 2020;Longman 2008). However, whereas it is useful to explore young Catholic women's perspectives and experiences in Belgium as situated in and shaped by a secularising society and vis-à-vis secular others (Huygens 2023), Margot's positioning as a feminist by marking herself as not Muslim nor Jewish, tells us that young Catholic women's subjectivity needs to be additionally thought of through a lens of religious othering.…”

Navigating the Catholic Church in Belgium: Catholic women on female authority, reforms, and sexual difference

“…In particular, attempts have been made to argue the necessity of bringing together insights from these different disciplines (Bowie, 1998;Vuola, 2016). Women in various religious groups and communities have been the subject of analysis, particularly in empirical studies that aimed to highlight the everyday practices and strategies of religious women, thereby revealing the multiple possibilities for women to be fully engaged within religious traditions (Bracke, 2003;Longman, 2008;Trzebiatowska, 2013).…”