At Harvard Divinity’s Women’s Studies in Religion Program, Scholars Produce Generations of Knowledge

On the periphery of the Harvard campus lies the Carriage House, a place that pulses with rigorous scholarship and robust personal and academic growth. It is home of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP) at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), and it is a space where stories are exhumed and illuminated by some of the best and brightest scholars of today.

The WSRP was founded in 1973 in response to the changing demographics of HDS caused by the rising women’s movement. Women were admitted as students in 1955 but made up a third of the student body by the 1970s. The WSRP was established not only as a place of diversifying representation, but as a bedrock for a new area of study: that of women and religion.

The women who entered the program came with a deep consciousness around gender disparities within their religious communities, namely the exclusion of women from ordination in many denominations. Despite these barriers, they saw the study of religion as necessary for the advancement of women—a critical piece of the puzzle in changing gender rules.

According to Ann Braude, director of the WSRP and Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at HDS, the women saw “that religion and gender were woven into social structures and intellectual concepts, and understood that the exclusion of women from leadership in society and in religions was mutually reinforcing.”

In the last 50 years, the WSRP has flourished. Many of the leading books on women and religion have been produced by those who have walked through the doors of the Carriage House. Courses on the study of women and religion are taught at universities around the globe.

Since its inception, the WSRP has hosted over 200 scholars, and the current six—Kinitra D. Brooks, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Jordan R. Katz, Xhercis Méndez, Rahina Muazu, and Tulasi Srinivas—are part of the esteemed and growing lineage of scholars who have produced critical works during their year in Cambridge.

The bar is set extremely high for these scholars, who are chosen based on meticulous criteria, including the merit of their book proposals and their unique expertise as scholars. Despite the vast international and multireligious breadth of their work, WSRP research associates are inspired by a “sense of a change that needs to happen,” and their common focus on religion and gender, according to Braude.

During the year, research associates share insights of their burgeoning works to the community through the teaching of a semester-long course to HDS students and in offering a public lecture. They also receive funding for the year and have a space to research and write.

“Everybody in this house is working on a book,” said Braude. “They all are in that same process, and it's a struggle. Scholarship is very lonely. You sit alone at your desk, you sit in the archives. You pore over documents. You ponder them. The WSRP provides a community who is also committed to your book. The scholars learn from each other's struggles and accomplishments as writers. They share their techniques, their challenges.”

There are also sacrifices many of the scholars must make to be here and additional hardships some may face. One such challenge occurs when research associates come to Harvard from conflict zones.

“They just collapse, because they have the safety to let their guard down,” Braude explained. “That can be very revealing of just how much distress they're in and how difficult their situation is. They can finally let themselves feel all their problems here in a way that they can't when they are at home. This in itself is a powerful experience.”

The current WSRP research associates carry the legacy of those women scholars who are striving toward something more—a cause greater than themselves—despite the sacrifice and risks.

Rahina Muazu, Visiting Lecturer on Women's Studies and Islam and WSRP Research Associate 2022–23, said in an interview with HDS earlier this year that her scholarship can sometimes be difficult and even dangerous, but that doesn't stop her from continuing her work.

"Because of my childhood, my life experiences, I am so passionate about women's education, young girls' education. I am so motivated to make change. It's part of me. This scholarship is what I was called to do, even if it's gotten me into a lot of trouble," said Muazu.

Ann Braude is the heart of this scholarly flurry and depth. Humble and intensely focused on the associates, students, and her own scholarship, Braude has been on the HDS faculty and served as the WSRP director since 1998.

Braude is an expert in the religious history of American women, Native American studies, and Jewish studies. Most recently, however, Braude has delved into the scholarly field of art or, more specifically, “spiritual paths to modern art.”

Inspired by the realization that the modern artist was usually perceived as “a kind of heroic male expressing his individuality,” Braude works to dispel such notions, focusing on women artists involved with spirituality “who repurpose the figure, who expand the boundaries of the self in what they depict in ways that are spiritually inspired, that are about connecting with the infinite, not about self-expression in the way that we often think of the male body.” (Read more about Braude's involvement in commissioning a permanent piece of art to the HDS campus by artist and Mashpee Wampanoag tribal member Ramona Peters.)

Though not all artists, of course, the scholars of the WSRP are creating their own paths of knowledge. And the need for such scholarship remains an urgent motivation.

Though almost a half-century later, the issues of equality that women first brought to the Divinity School, such as opportunity within one’s denomination and the leadership positions available, are far from resolved. Many of the largest religious groups in the country still exclude women from the highest leadership roles.

Amongst the frustrations of building a “new” and lasting body of scholarship centering women’s stories is the fact that many of the female predecessors working decades and even centuries prior to the founding of the WSRP have consistently been ignored, forgotten, or erased.
 

“Women have been viewing the Bible as a pathway to women's equality for centuries,” Braude said. “But it has not made its way into the canon, it has not made its way into the structures of religious organizations. Men have thousands of years of religious scholarship, performed exclusively by men, for men, from a male point of view. Men were the only ones who had access to education and access to the languages, access to the technical and intellectual and scholastic skills. There were always women with stories. There were always women intellectuals. There were always women asking questions. But there wasn't an institutionalized way to build.”

Such a lack of permanence regarding women’s rights and women’s issues—scholarly, religious, political, and beyond—underscores the importance of the WSRP and its research associates. Roe v. Wade being overturned, for example, illustrates how any progress made can easily be revoked.

Thus, according to Braude, “the need for scholarship, the need for exploration of intersections of religion and gender, continues very strongly. When one group thinks they are done with it, another group picks it up. So there's always somebody for whom it's urgent.”

With Harvard and HDS as a platform, the WSRP serves as a model for what such a successful program of study can look like. The individual work of the research associates, and the collective body of work they are contributing to, inherently demands that the world shift its gaze to the stories of women and religion that were so often overlooked.

The Carriage House, expertly helmed by Tracy Wall, the WSRP coordinator, is indeed a home—a “creative fringe”—for the scholars that mine stories out of necessity, the community they share, and the trailblazing scholarship that will surely change the lives of many for the better.

—by Madeline Bugeau-Heartt