Women and Religion

The following is a selected list of resources for starting research on women and religion. For further assistance, contact Paul Frantz, Reference Librarian, at pfrantz@uoregon.edu.

Starting Your Research

Use these general reference sources to get an overview of topics related to women and religion. These resources can also help you find a specific topic to focus on and may lead you to other useful materials for your research.

• Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion (Knight Reference BL 458 .E53 1999) is a comprehensive, well-indexed resource on this subject.
• Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd edition) is an online resource covering world religions. It includes articles on several different aspects of women and religion. The first edition is available in print: Knight BL 31 .E46 1986.
• Encyclopedias on specific religions include:
  • New Catholic Encyclopedia (Knight Reference BX 841 .N44)
  • Encyclopedia of Buddhism (Knight Reference BQ 128 .E62 2004)
  • Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures (Knight Reference HQ 1170 .E53 2003, 2 volumes)
  • Encyclopedia of Judaism (Knight Reference BM 50 .E63 1999)
• Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women (Knight Reference HQ 1115 .R69 2000) offers diverse articles, including several on religious issues.

Finding Articles

To look for articles in academic journals or magazines, start with a periodical index. An index will allow you to find articles by subject, by a few keywords which describe your topic, or by author.

• ATLA Religion indexes approximately 600 religious studies periodicals and multi-author books, with coverage back to 1949. The full text of about 60 religious journals is included in the database.
• Arts and Humanities Search provides indexing to about 1500 periodicals in the humanities. Its "Citation Index" allows researchers to see which journal articles have been cited by subsequent writers.
• Academic Search Premier provides indexing and abstracting of 4500 core journals in a variety of disciplines and the fulltext for over 3600 journals.
• You may also wish to browse through issues of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, an interdisciplinary journal of feminist scholarship on religions.

Finding Books

UO WorldCat offers a streamlined interface for search results that combine, into a single merged list, the collections of the UO Libraries, Summit libraries, and hundreds of other libraries worldwide. When searching in UO WorldCat, entries for items owned by the UO Libraries appear at the top of the list and include information about location and availability.

The following subject headings may help you find materials on your topic:

• Christian women
• Feminism--Religious aspects
• Feminist spirituality
• Feminist theology
• Goddess religion
• Jewish women
• Muslim women
• Sexism in religion
• Women--Biblical teaching
• Women--Religious aspects
• Women and religion
• Women in public worship

Finding Dissertations

• Dissertation Abstracts provides a summary of dissertations from 1861 to the present in all subjects, including many on the topic of women and religion.

Web Resources

• Women and Theology is a comprehensive listing of websites on feminist issues in the major religious traditions.
• The Religious Studies Department at the University of Oregon..