Fifty years ago, there were virtually no women who served as primary religious leaders in local congregations, synagogues, mosques, or temples in the US. Today, a handful of groups have gender parity, and groups long considered locked into gender-binary patriarchies now have established groups that advocate for women’s religious leadership.
Our conference asks the following guiding questions. How do we, as scholars of religion, leaders of religious communities, and participants within religious communities, understand the changes we have observed in the last fifty years? How have women as religious leaders redefined religious leadership? How could the study of women’s religious leadership inform fields that ordinarily do not consider it, such as labor history or political science? And how exactly do we narrate the history of women’s religious leadership within our contemporary age, marked by dramatic polarization and rapid secularization?