Secularization and Gender: an Historical Approach To Women and Religion in the Twentieth Century

In 1916, James Leuba, a psychology professor at Bryn Mawr College, published a lengthy study documenting belief and unbelief among university professors and their students. The findings dismayed some and cheered others; according to Leuba's survey, as men progressed up the academic ladder, their religious beliefs slowly disappeared. The most eminent scholars and scientists appeared to be the most secular. What Leuba also found, but chose not to analyze in depth, was that unbelief correlated with gender. Among college men, 56 percent professed belief in a personal God, and 31 percent saw God as imper sonal (Leuba's terminology). Among women, however, 82 percent believed that God was personal, and only 11 percent impersonal. Despite the existence of other parallel studies indicating similar dis parities between men and women, Leuba ignored the potential sig nificance of this evidence other than to dismiss the religiosity of fe male college students as a sign of intellectual immaturity. During their adolescent years, he hypothesized, young women—but not young men—found their desires for intellectual freedom and for a rational organization of opinions and conduct ... effectively balked ... by the tender ties of home and the authority of the church (Leuba 1916: 186, 201, 283-84). Even in college women, a highly motivated and intelligent lot, domesticized piety won out over critical thinking. In spite of Leuba's obvious condescension toward his female sub jects, the suggestion that women and men experience secularization in different ways is worth pursuing in more detail. For the past 200 years, for example, statistics on American religious adherence show consistent female majorities. Women are much more apt to form religious voluntary institutions, to be missionaries, to be consumers of religious books and periodicals. To be sure, the: gender disparity raises as many questions about male irreligiosity as it does about female religiosity, and, in that sense, offers a constant temptation toward hasty moral judgments.