Floor and Secularism

How did gender equality come to be associated with secularism in political discourse? Referring to a body of works written by second-wave feminists, historians of religion and colonialism, Joan Wallach Scott argues in her book that the separation of church and state originally did not imply women's emancipation. Early Western theories of nationalism entrenched gender differentiation, embedding the division between the female — domestic — sphere and the male — public sphere of politics and economics into the very foundation of social order. When debates about Islam arose in the late 20th century, gender equality came to be seen as a fundamental characteristic of secularism. This maneuver was used to justify racial and religious superiority of the West, as well as to distract from issues related to gender inequality, which are equally faced by both Western and non-Western, Christian and non-Christian countries, despite the differences in their approaches to overcoming them. Joan Wallach Scott is a historian, emerita professor at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, New Jersey.