Dismantling homo religiosus: Rita M. Gross
To sum up, the dangerous intellectual short-circuit was caused by the correspondence between androcentric objects of study (i.e. the cultures and civilizations studied) and the androcentric subjects who studied them (i.e.
the scholars who investigated those cultures and civilizations). With regard to the HoR, the field was obsessed with the religiosity of men because the majority of scholars involved were chauvinistic males writing in a chauvinistically androcentric context (Kinsley 2002; Gross 2005; Juschka 2005; Mikaelson 2005; Korte 2011). This most despicable sexist viewpoint was widespread in academic historiography. In 2009, Roman historian Amy Richlin recalled that ‘a noted Roman historian, when approached in the early 1970s by a group of women students requesting a course in women’s history, is said to have replied, “Why not dogs’ history?”’ (Richlin 2009: 146). Rita M. Gross (1943-2015) remarked that in the early 1970sthe ‘women and religion’ movement existed mainly in the frustrations of some graduate students and a few young professors of religious studies. No institutional format existed at that time and neither the American Academy of Religion nor the International Association for the History of Religions paid much attention to the topic of women and religion. If someone brought up the idea of specifically focusing on women and religion, the response was a combination of indifference, hilarity and hostility.
Gross 1980: 579
When Gross was about to work on her PhD and she approached her mentors to talk about her intention to tackle such issues, her proposal ‘upset’ them, while one unnamed professor ‘actually told [her] that an intelligent person like [herself] should realize that the generic masculine “covered and included the feminine”, making it unnecessary to say anything about women specifically’ (Gross 2009: 4-5).
Thanks to young scholars like Richlin and Gross herself, things were about to change drastically. As far as the HoR was concerned, in 1977 Gross denounced this blatant sexist bias by attacking the hard core that supported the old HoR, i.e. homo religiosus as such, disentangling the fallacious scholarship behind it. In her article, entitled Androcentrism and Androgyny in the Methodology of History of Religions, Gross wrote thathomo religiosus as constructed by the history of religions does not include women as religious subjects, as constructors of religious symbol systems and as participants in a religious universe of discourse. History of religions really only deals with women and feminine imagery as they are thought about by the males being investigated, whether specific males in a specific religious situation or the abstract model h omo religiosus are the subject of inquiry. Since the discipline of history of religions is basically concerned with discovering and understanding humans as religious beings, the androcentric limitations of the construct homo religiosus, religious humankind, constitute a very severe liability indeed.
Gross 1977: 10
Those words, in the late-1970s, marked the very beginning of a revolution in the field. While Gross’ specific target was disciplinary sexism, her article was just one of many contributions that in the 1970s started to raise all sorts of legitimate questions about the methodology and epistemology of the classical HoR. All those papers, one way or another, converged on what was their common target: the Eliadean research programme. As noted previously, Eliade’s works and teaching were instrumental in the birth of new and critically informed ways of doing research in the field - as a negative example not to follow. Gross attended Eliade’s 1967 class at the University of Chicago about ‘Primitive Religions’, based on the previously recalled series of articles on Australian religions (see previous chapter; Gross and Ruether 2016: 41-4).
In the wake of Eliade’s interest in Australian religions, and disinterest towards women’s religious involvement, Gross produced the first ever PhD dissertation in women’s studies in religion, expanding a term paper on The Role of Women in Aboriginal Australia (1975). Her mentors judged such choice as something ‘redundant and unnecessary’ because of the ‘high level of sexual segregation’ of Australian religions, and thus tried to discourage her from doing so (Gross 2009: 5). Eliade showed some interest in the literary data collected by Gross but he was resolutely unwilling to concede that the methodology of the discipline was in need of a thorough revision. The very subject was deemed unapproachable and labelled as not rigorously academic. As Gross recalled later, ‘the Divinity School faculty was [...] fighting about the appropriateness of studying women and religion' (Gross and Ruether 2016: 43).Eventually, in 1974, after a 6-year-long ordeal, the powers that be at the University conferred the degree on her, but only after having bullied her and discredited her work. In the same year, Gross, unflinching in her resolve, headed a recently established section of the American Academy of Religion called ‘Women and Religion'; 6 years later, she co-edited with Nancy Auer Falk, another former student who attended Eliade's class on ‘Primitive Religions', a trail-blazing volume on women and religion from a global, cross-cultural and comparative perspective (Falk and Gross 1980) and, finally, she became Professor of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin (Eau Claire; Gross 1994; Love 2006: 190; cf. Pernet 2012: 12-13; for a fuller account of Gross' work, cf. Gross 2009). Gross was just one among many young scholars, students and colleagues of Eliade who started questioning the works of the Chicago Professor. They were dissatisfied by his teaching and disappointed by the phenomenological approach. Although most of them were not eager to abandon the HoR, and even less interested in demolishing their own field, their studies represented the first steps towards the creation of the new field of Religious Studies (henceforth, RS). As usual, a caveat: the following choice of scholars, topics, and works represents a personal and minimum selection for the sake of simplification.