Sexuality and Secularization: Marianne Weber (1870-1954) and the Origins of Religious Studies

FAIN: FT-279045-21

Lori Kay Pearson
Carleton College (Northfield, MN 55057-4001)

Writing a chapter of a book on Marianne Weber’s (1870-1954) role in the formation of religious studies as an academic discipline.

My book uses the work of Marianne Weber (wife of Max Weber) to explore how debates about women’s rights informed early 20th-century theories of religion. Around 1900, Marianne Weber wrote about sexual ethics and family law, and participated in analyses of Western modernity among scholars in and beyond Max Weber’s circle. The works these thinkers produced became methodological cornerstones of numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. I argue that gender was constitutive for their definitions of religion, modernity, and secularization in ways that have gone unnoticed: these definitions were marked not simply by liberal Protestant ideals of individualism and autonomy, but also by convictions about the value of dependence, relationality, and submission for modern life. With summer support I would draft a final chapter, spelling out the implications of my argument for current scholarship on the place of gender in definitions of religion and in ideologies of secularism.