Introduction
Women's social status had evolved a great deal over the 20th century. A range of feminist movements first involved in the fight for equal rights went on to seek emancipation through birth control and the shedding of traditional roles. Concurrent medical advances (notably in terms of contraception and the reduction of maternal and neonatal mortality) came to ease women's access to paid employment. This brought about far-reaching changes both in Western lifestyles and legislations, wherein gender equality is henceforth enshrined. In this context, the male-centred value system reflected in Catholic theology lost much of its cogency.
Whereupon the Catholic Magisterium undertook the development of a theological anthropology specifically devised around womanhood. Relying on the traditional exegesis of Genesis (Gen 1 and 2), its deductive thinking nonetheless steered clear of some Pauline interpretations deemed too misogynistic. This anthropology owes much to Jean-Paul II[1] . It establishes the fundamental equality between man and woman “in dignity” – the requisite qualifier that makes possible the development of an anthropology of gender complementarity wherein women inherit a specific vocation as virgins, wives and mothers. The affirmation of this gender difference is restrictive in that it imposes upon women one single identity model drawn from their traditional roles.
However Catholic thought is anything but monolithic. This authorised theology of womanhood is confronted with feminist theologies, evolved in the second half of the 20th century with the express intent to re-found the place of women in Christianity. This purpose was not urged upon them by the difficulty to carve out a space in the power structures and institutions alone but also by female theologians' awareness of a relation to the sacred framed by an exclusively masculine experience of a history where women's contribution and experience were subordinated to the vision of a male Magisterium. What is at stake is the mastery of a terrain less well defended than priesthood, namely the access to Scriptural Interpretation.
“Feminist studies” should be understood as studies that postulate that, in the field of religious studies as in others, traditional scholarship is, in contents and methodology, at best incomplete, at worst structurally biased given that the institutions that shaped and transmitted it were male-dominated.
