‘Gender & Religion’ is a book that should be on every college’s women’s studies reading list. This well-researched tome details the major religions–Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity–and the part they’ve played in suppressing women’s equality. The book is not an easy read. ‘It’s written like a text,’ said Palisadian author Barbara Crandall, a UCLA professor at the School of Medicine in the prenatal genetics program. Her interest in the subject stems to when she was one of the few women in medical school in London in the late 1940s. ‘Now it’s more equal,’ she said, ‘but why was it so selective then?’ Crandall’s father was in the British Colonial Service and she attended boarding school in England. Crandall was educated at the University of London Medical School and while on a general surgery fellowship at the University of Illinois in 1951, met her future husband, Paul Crandall. He followed her back to England, where they were married later that same year. They moved to Los Angeles in 1954 after two years in Germany. After staying home with her small children (they have four) she wanted to go back to surgery, but at the time there were no women in that residency program at UCLA–women were not admitted until sometime in the 1960s. Instead of surgery, Crandall received a fellowship in genetics, which furthered her interest in gender and religion because of her patients’ varied religious backgrounds. She started working on her book part-time seven years ago. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday she saw patients, but on Tuesday and Thursday, after writing up medical cases, she devoted her time to research at the UCLA library. She wrote evenings and weekends. ‘Nobody in my family believed I’d finish it,’ she said. ‘But the more I got into it, the more passionate I got about the subject.’ Her research uncovered that there is evidence dating back to 8000 B.C. and earlier than that that goddess worship existed in Europe and the Near East. ‘There is no evidence of a father figure in any of the Paleolithic periods,’ she said. Crandall maintains there is a long history of sexual equality and in some cases; women were even viewed as superior beings. Crandall notes that as all religions developed, they incorporated male dominance into their beliefs, but that women were treated differently in the early periods of that development. ‘During the early history of certain religions, women had a fuller role and then it was lost,’ Crandall said. She cites the example that in Islam, after the prophet came he improved a few things for women. Morally, women were judged the equal of men and subject to the same religious laws. Laws of inheritance were changed so that women could inherit from their family. ‘It was better for a time, then many things they had gained were lost and they were subjugated, which has continued into modern cultures,’ Crandall said. ‘Religion is believed to be sacrosanct and immune to change.’ One way to change the subservient treatment of women is to encourage passing legislation that guarantees women’s rights, Crandall suggests. Even though women have made great strides in the United States, in many other countries women have been kept in a subservient state. She warns, ‘Women will always be threatened by fundamentalist movements that want to remake or return to a patriarchal society.’ Crandall will discuss ‘Gender & Religion’ at Village Books, 1049 Swarthmore, March 29, 7:30 p.m. Contact: (310) 454-4063.
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