Frames of Exception: Women's Activism in Religious-Political Movements

Most contemporary religious-political movements share a restrictive worldview regarding women's role in society and all of these movements have female members. Intuitively, we would expect patterns of women's activism in all of these movements to reflect the movement's gender ideology. We would expect women to play traditionally feminine roles such as embodying religious virtue through dress and modest behavior, opting for motherhood and childrearing, and carrying out piety work, charity, education and other social services for the religious community. However, women attain different levels of visibility, voice and leadership and perform different tasks within different movements: In some movements women activists work strictly in proselytizing and charity services and they operate mainly within segregated women's spheres; in others women are involved in mixed-sex, explicitly public political activity such as mobilization for public protest, demonstrations and physical confrontations; and in yet other movements women even run for office as representatives of the movement.;What explains this variation, given that these movements' gender ideology is almost identical? This dissertation suggests that other components of a movement's ideology, which are unrelated to the subject of women, provide enabling conditions for expanded female political activism in the movements. Some religious-political movements have a strictly proselytizing agenda, others include additional ideological commitments, usually nationalist or communalist. I argue that religious movements with a nationalist or communalist agenda provide their female activists with unique discursive tools. These help activists construct motivational and prognostic frames which act to suspend some restrictive aspects of the movement's gender ideology. This framing process rests on the notion of "unusual" and "exceptional" times of an existential threat to the nation or community from a menacing Other. Due to the crisis situation, the nation/community fmds itself in the face of a constructed external threat. This allows women activists to argue for the temporary suspension of the movements' commitment to a sex-based division of labor, to the segregation of the sexes and to strict female modesty. Women activists in purely proselytizing movements lack these discursive tools and thus their forms of activism remain within the traditional, sex-segregating framework of their movements' gender ideology.;To test this theory and to explore the mechanism linking a nationalist ideology to greater representation of women in explicitly political public sphere work, I selected three religious-political movements that display variation on the nationalist/communalist vs. proselytizing ideological axis. The movements are: the Jewish Settlers in the West Bank; the Ultra Orthodox (Haredi) Sephardic Jewish Shas and the Islamic Movement in Israel. The Settler movement is classified as "nationalist," the Islamic Movement is classified as "hybrid nationalist- proselytizing" and Shas is classified as "proselytizing." An in-depth ethnographic study of women's activism in each of these movements exposes the mechanisms that make a nationalist discourse a necessary enabling condition for women activists' transgression of their movements' gender ideology. In the study, I show how women use the nationalist ideological component of the movement's dogma to frame certain actions by women as acceptable and required, even though they appear to violate the movement's gender ideology. In the absence of a dominant nationalist discourse in strictly proselytizing movements, this framing does not happen.;For the purpose of this research I reviewed official publications, speeches, campaign platforms and interviews by movements' leaders to justify the classification of movements into the nationalist/proselytizing categories. I also reviewed these sources to determine the official gender ideology of each movement and to justify the claim that they all share a commitment to a divinely sanctioned sex-based division of labor between the private and public spheres. Next, I conducted participant observations, structured and unstructured interviews with women activists in each movement. The interviews and participant observations served to evaluate forms of women's participation and how different types of activism are rationalized and enabled in the activists' discourse and actions. Finally, I collected data from the Israeli Elections Commission, the Israeli Statistics Bureaus and from the movements themselves regarding levels of women's formal representation in national parties and local councils (both in general as well as those affiliated with the three movements).;Beyond the stated purpose of this dissertation, the study also offers some thoughts on the ethics of engagement with activists in movements whom many would term "fundamentalist." It is my hope that this study will contribute to a more informed and meaningful engagement by scholars, policymakers and activists committed to religious pluralism and gender equality with the main contemporary challengers of these commitments.