Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Gender identity (Alone against Secularisation? Gender identity in Anglican and Catholic women (England-Spain, 1960-2015))
Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2021-08-31
This project’s overall objective has been to carry out a comparative study of the construction of the self in both Anglican and Catholic women from the 1960s onwards. Following a gender perspective, it has analysed how women belonging to these Churches have reacted to the recent transformations experienced by English and Spanish societies. In particular, this project has focused on two of these changes. The first of these is the accelerated secularisation of both societies, a process that started in the late eighteenth century and was consolidated during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. From that point onwards, established Churches, such as the Church of England and the Catholic Church in Spain, lost a great deal of their former social support and cultural influence. The second aspect is the emergence of second-wave feminism during the 1960s and 1970s, which broadened the feminist agenda to a wide range of issues, such as sexuality, the family and reproductive rights. By relying on oral history methods, especially useful for analysing the complex process of identity construction, this research project shed light on how these women dealt with those social and cultural transformations to shape a particular gendered and religious identity. Three main questions have been addressed by this project:
Why and how have these women managed to preserve a strong religious identity within a context of intense secularisation?
How have the different evolutions of Catholicism and Anglicanism from the 1960s onwards affected female believers?
How have interviewees managed to reformulate the role of religion in their lives alongside new feminist arguments?
Why and how have these women managed to preserve a strong religious identity within a context of intense secularisation?
How have the different evolutions of Catholicism and Anglicanism from the 1960s onwards affected female believers?
How have interviewees managed to reformulate the role of religion in their lives alongside new feminist arguments?
At the beginning of the project activity, in September 2019, Dr Mínguez joined the University of Leeds and started to work in collaboration with his supervisor, Dr Alonso. Dr Mínguez dedicated the early months of the research to shaping the theoretical and conceptual background of the research. He also participated in two conferences celebrated in Spain (Granada and Valencia), as an attendee and contributor respectively. Dr Mínguez took advantage of his stay in Spain to visit archives and libraries, such as the Instituto de Teología y Pastoral in Bilbao. In early 2020, Dr Mínguez started fieldwork in England, interviewing a total of 11 Anglican and Catholic women. In March 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic prevented Dr Mínguez from visiting the Women’s Library of the London School of Economics, the Lambeth Palace Library and the Church of England Record Centre, as had been planned. Instead, he moved to Spain and continue the fieldwork, interviewing (face-to-face or online) Anglican and Catholic women from England and Spain, conducting and transcribing a total of 47 interviews. Dr Mínguez also disseminated the partial results of his research in in three seminars (one at the University of the Basque Country and two at the University of Leeds, at the Centre for the History of Ibero-America and the Centre for Religion and Public Life respectively) and in two conference papers in Cádiz (Spain) and Leiden (the Netherlands). With regard to publications, Dr Mínguez between September 2019 and August 2021 published a total of six articles in peer-reviewed journals and two more are due in December 2021 in the Journal of Religious History and Ayer. Despite the completion of the research activity, in September 2021 Dr Mínguez chaired a workshop on Religion and Gender at the XV Conference of the Spanish Modern History Association and an end-of-project symposium that included the participation of prestigious scholars. Finally, in December 2021 a special issue on Religion and Gender in Modern Spain, edited by Dr Mínguez, will come out in the Journal of Religious History.
This research project has involved relevant progress in the state of the art for several reasons. First, it has demonstrated the necessity of connecting religion with other important historical categories such as gender and nation. Second, it has increased our knowledge about religious discourse and Catholic women’s agency in 19th-century Spain. Third, the comparative study of Anglican women in England and Catholic women in Spain during the last half-century has broadened our vision of the secularisation process. Finally, this project has challenged the biased views of feminism as incompatible with religion. Apart from the partial dissemination of the results via journal articles, conference papers and seminars, the methodological approach through oral history has a potential impact on society because it contributes to preserving collective memory. The future publication of a book based on the testimonies of the women interviewed in this project and the subsequent deposit of them in oral archives are in line with this aim.