What Your Country Can Do for You: A Proposed Typology of Religious Feminist Strategies

Religious feminists of many faiths are politically and socially active. While religious feminism has begun to attract scholarly attention, the political interaction of religious feminism with the state has largely gone unnoticed. Consequently, there is a lack of scholarly tools with which to understand this relationship. In this context, the paper asks: What do religious feminists expect from the state? Do they expect it to interevene on their behalf or rather prefer it remove itself from the equation? Are there strategies they are more likely to employ? While current scholarship does not supply concepts and terms, it is possible to borrow terms from other disciplines in order to classify strategies used by religious feminists in their interactions with the state. Using the Israeli case, this paper proposes a typology of stratgies used by religious feminists vis-à-vis the religious establishment and where expectations from the state fit into this dynamic.