In “Gender and religious work”, (2000) 61(4) Sociology of Religion 467, Zoey A Heyer-Gray begins her consideration with a wry note of surprise that she is still studying the sociology of religion having come into it as a side-road, doing field work on other peoples’ projects. She realised that her challenge would be to bring her primary concerns of gender and inequality to bear on “the very particular and unique context” of religion. In exploring the religious work of women, she identifies as part of a broader tradition seeking to expand the concept of work beyond paid employment, and to make visible “invisible work”: that is work which may not be recognised as such, even by those who actually do the work. By doing so, feminist writers in this tradition seek to garner acknowledgement and respect for the work done by women, and lead to a more equitable division of tasks.
The core of this note is her framework for research, but she does report on qualitiative fieldwork carried out in three Christian sites in the US. She found that in across the three – a Catholic church, an independent Christian church, and a Southern Baptist church – women performed a similar array of tasks outside of the formal Sunday worship. In the formal Sunday worship, however, women were much more visible in the Catholic church than in the other two, with Heyer-Grey reporting that “Women did not perform any ‘public’ roles in these churches other than singing and/or playing an instrument”. She concludes with a call for more work:
“[T]he way in which something divine or sacred is in fact accomplished or captured by such a seemingly mundane process as “work” – and how this process is in turn gendered – remains to be explored”.
Indeed!
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