How the role of women changed American religious life in the twentieth century?

How the role of women changed American religious life in the twentieth century?

Introduction

Women played a major role in changing the American religious life I the twentieth century. Is freedom of religion compatible with the recognition of human rights for women? Both U.S. law and international law (as embodied in treaties and other documents of the United Nations) prohibit discrimination based on religion as well as sex and provide affirmative protections for both religious freedom and gender equality. These documents reflect an assumption that governments both can and should protect women's human rights and religious freedom to engage in traditional religious and cultural practices. But how valid is this assumption?

Upon examination, it is evident that tensions exist between these two spheres of rights. This tension is especially prominent with respect to the religious freedom of lawmakers to legislate their religious beliefs, on the one hand, and women's human rights to reproductive freedom, on the other. In the United States, lawmakers, like other citizens, are entitled to the free exercise of their religion under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Despite their special roles as public officials, lawmakers are similar to most other citizens in viewing themselves as religious persons. In fact, lawmakers may be even more religious as a body than citizens generally. Given the centrality that religion has to the moral identity of many believers, a demand that religious adherents set aside or bracket their religious convictions in the spheres of lawmaking may infringe upon, and even violate, their sense of identity as well as their free-exercise rights.

The Platform for Action ("Platform") drafted at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China, in 1995 frames women's rights" as indivisible, universal and inalienable human rights". The linkage of reproductive rights and women's human rights has been consistently endorsed in United Nations' sponsored reports, conferences, agreements, and conventions. The Platform also states: "The human rights of women include their right to have control over and decide freely and responsibly on matters related to their sexuality, including sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence", that "the right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility, is basic to their empowerment" and "forms an important basis for the enjoyment of other rights". Given how fundamental reproductive rights are to women's other rights, when religious lawmakers use their religious freedom to restrict reproductive rights, it serves to weaken, if not completely undermine, the goals of establishing women's rights as human rights.

Within the international sphere, women's human rights have often been given lower priority than the protection of religious freedom. Within the United States as well, the Supreme Court has dealt with the tension between religious freedom and women's rights in ways that have given priority to religious ...