By Susannah Heschel. In childhood, this was my learned experience: not that I am a female, but that I am not a male. Maleness was not just about boys and men, but about a domain of life and I was to stand at its periphery. This awareness began when I was quite little – perhaps […]
By Sarah Imhoff. Manthologies are a network problem. I’m not talking about some technical connectivity issue; I’m talking about networks of humans. Who knows whom, how and why, and how they are connected. Anthologies full of the work of male scholars are not a problem solely because of networks, but thinking about the networking aspect […]
By Alison L. Joseph. It has taken me months to build up the courage to write this post about my personal contribution to the preservation of gender imbalance. But here’s the truth, even for a person who is committed to gender parity, achieving an ideal is very challenging. You might stop reading right now and […]
By Michal Raucher. Recently I opened my email to find an alert from an academic listserv about a book titled, Kashrut and Jewish Food Ethics, edited by Shmuly Yanklowitz. As an active member of the Society of Jewish Ethics and an associate editor of the Journal of Jewish Ethics, I eagerly scrolled down to read […]
By Mara Benjamin. man·thol·o·gy · noun · /manˈTHäləjē/: 1. A collection of writings by different authors, the vast majority of whom are men. 2. a popular form of scholarly production, produced by an intellectually myopic volume editor, an insufficiently critical publishing house editor, and the passive complicity of contributors. When I was asked to write […]
This should come as news to no one, but academe has a gender problem. Despite the fact that half or even more than half of doctoral degrees are awarded to women in the US, and even fewer awarded to women of color, female PhDs are still underrepresented in many fields. Additionally, women hold fewer (though […]
By Amanda Baugh. “Did you know that Disney Land is in Anaheim?” my four-year old son asked eagerly from the backseat as we began our spring break road trip. Although we were heading toward Anaheim, my husband and I had not mentioned that particular attraction. Instead, we were travelling so I could conduct research on religion […]
By Justine Howe. Omer, the instructor for the adult education class on the Qur’an I was observing, stood at the front of the classroom and gestured to where I was sitting at a desk in a public high school classroom. “Most of you remember Tina,” he said. “She is a doctoral student who is writing a […]
By Katherine Dugan. I became a single mom officially one month before I began ethnographic work among a group of young adult millennial-generation Catholic missionaries who have traditional ideals of marriage and families. I received the final divorce paperwork and celebrated my daughter’s second birthday weeks before I started spending hours each week in Bible study […]
In the Fall of 2009, I began ethnographic research with Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish women in Jerusalem, looking into their reproductive ethics. Haredi women have the highest birth rate in Israel, around 6-8 children per lifetime, and they strictly adhere to religious laws, as dictated by their rabbis. I wanted to know how they made reproductive […]