WOMEN'S STUDIES IN RELIGION. Women's studies in religion comprise the many and varied scholarly approaches to the study of religion that arise from commitment to the equal dignity of the sexes, that employ the category of gender as a necessary and key variable in the inquiry, and that focus explicitly on the dynamic and reciprocal interplay between religion and women's lives. Taken together these diverse approaches constitute a major body of research that has irreversibly altered the landscape of religious studies.

Women's studies emerged as a new field of inquiry across a number of academic disciplines in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the entry of greater numbers of women into higher education coincided with the second wave of feminism. The largely Western phenomenon of the women's liberation movement politicized women (and men) as they became aware...