Gender
inequality is increasing. According to a new study by the World
Economic Forum, it will now take 100 years to close the global gender
gap, up from its previous estimate of 83 years. It’s the first time the
organisation has recorded a worsening of women’s position in the world.
Could the retreat of secularism be partly to blame?
One long-held
assumption is that gender equality is an enduring principle of
secularism, characterised by the separation of the political from the
religious and the public from the private.
Countries with the highest
level of gender equality are among the most secular places in the
world: Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, New Zealand and Germany.
Meanwhile, secularism is rejected by many of today’s traditionalist,
conservative populist movements – in India, Turkey, Central Europe,
Russia, the United States and elsewhere – where gender inequality is
rife.
Yet the famed gender historian Joan Wallach Scott, in her new
book, Sex and Secularism, claims the opposite is true. “The notion that
equality between the sexes is inherent to the logic of secularism”, she
argues, “is false”. “Gender inequality”, she states, “is not simply the
byproduct of the emergence of modern Western nations; rather, that
inequality is at its very heart”. Secularism, she adds, has served to
account for this fact.
More troubling, Scott affirms that secularism
has most often been used to justify the claims of white, Western and
Christian racial and religious superiority in the present as well the
past. Strangely, the biggest threat to gender equality in the modern
era, according to her argument, has been neither the Catholic church,
Protestant fundamentalism, fascist movements, etc, but secularism.
Grasping
Scott’s counterintuitive argument requires an understanding of her
approach to the history of secularism. The traditional view sees
secularism as a long and gradual historical march to greater equality
between men and women that began with the French Revolution and
continues on today. She doesn’t see it that way.
Scott says she does
not take issue with secularism as a legal and political reality, but
rather with secularism’s champions who smugly claim that it is
inherently good for women. Her book aims to dismantle such arguments by
showing just how sexist the history of the secular West has been. By
focusing on debates about the self-congratulatory benefits of secularism
Scott offers a history of it that precludes any necessary relationship
to gender equality.
Her approach leads to several excellent
observations about the origins of modern gender inequality. The book is
at its strongest when showing how secularism in 19th-century Europe was
used as a weapon to oppose the threat of institutionalised Christianity,
while also serving as a defence of imperial rule over the “uncivilised”
peoples of Africa and Asia.
The repudiation of religion during this
time, Scott argues, was predicated on idealised distinctions between
what belongs in the public sphere (men, markets, politics, and
bureaucracy) and the private sphere (women, family and religion).
“These
distinctions had nothing in them of gender equality,” Scott rightly
observes; “rather, they were marked by a presumption of gender
inequality.” They were, in fact, used as justifications for not giving
women the right to vote, which in secular France – out of fear women
would vote for the church party – did not happen until 1944.
But the
lessons to be drawn from this are not spelled out. She asserts in
passing throughout the book that there are forms of genuine equality
outside the confines of secularism, presumably in religious traditions,
but she remains mute on whether she endorses them.
More importantly,
Scott does not explain why today, self-identified religious communities
are more supportive of legal inequality than secular ones. We know all
too well that there is sexism in the West, but by not discussing what
the anti-secularists say about women, she makes the secularists out to
be the villains of the story.
This oversight is largely due to an
inconsistency in Scott’s approach. Sex and Secularism claims to solely
be concerned with critiquing discourse around secularism, not the
political and legal reality of secularism. However, she doesn’t respect
that boundary when she repeatedly argues that real existing secularism
has been bad for women without contending with proof to the contrary.
The
fact is that plenty of feminists throughout the 19th century and 20th
century linked their emancipation with secularisation – or at least
emancipation from traditionalist churches. Scott puts this history
aside, by provocatively claiming that it was not really until the late
20th century that gender equality became a primary concern for
secularists, and this ultimately had to do with secularism’s new enemy:
political Islam.
Perhaps it is because Scott is a historian of
France, where she believes oppression of Muslim women in the name of
secular values is Islamophobic to the core. But whatever the reason,
Scott believes that the secular West as a whole is in a clash with Islam
due to its inability to imagine gender equality and religious freedom
outside the confines of secularism.
Scott is interested in knowing:
what kind of gender equality we have currently arrived at in the secular
West? A rather dismal one, she believes, in which such equality is
inseparable from a conception of sexual emancipation in service of
global capitalism: one which rejects Muslims from being part of the
Western community if they do not buy into our neoliberal ways of life;
one that foresees an inevitable clash of civilizations between the West
and Islam.
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 given anyone pause before boasting about the superior
treatment of women in the secular West.
But unless an alternative
arrangement proves more beneficial to closing the gender gap, the best
bet is to reform secularism, both in terms of public discourse and legal
initiatives – like those that marginalise women in France – so as to
remedy the sexism and abuses of power Scott has so brilliantly pointed
out. - Guardian News & Media
One long-held assumption is that gender equality is an enduring principle of secularism.