Book ReviewThe Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003. By Judith  Plaskow. Edited with, Donna  Berman. Boston: Beacon, 2005.Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. By Caroline  Ford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent. By Rebecca J.  Lester. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.Sexing the Church: Gender, Power, and Ethics in Contemporary Catholicism. By Aline H.  Kalbian. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.Women with a Mission: Religion, Gender, and the Politics of Women Clergy. By Laura R.  Olson, Sue E. S.  Crawford, and Melissa M.  Deckman. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

During the second half of the twentieth century, a seismic shift in outlook, norms, behaviours, and laws transformed Western societies, particularly in relation to sexuality and gender relations. These changes were characterized and facilitated by escalating rejection of dominant sources of moral authority, including organized religion. This chapter considers the Church of Scotland’s response to the ‘permissive society’. It attempted to grapple theologically with questions concerning marriage and divorce, homosexuality, and women’s ordination, confronted unavoidably with profound questions concerning gender, power, and sexuality. These debates generated controversy and division as the moral consensus fractured. Fault lines opened up between conservatives who defended the validity of Christian moral certainties, and others who embraced more liberal and contextual interpretations of Scripture and tradition. Previously silenced or subordinated voices emerged, challenging but failing to provoke radical institutional change at a time of rapid declension in the status and cultural influence of the national Church.

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Douglas Northrop. Veiled Empire: Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia. Cornell University Press 2004. xvii+1392 pp. ISBN 0801439442.

Comparative Studies in Society and History ◽

10.1017/s001041750522039x ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 47 (4) ◽

pp. 894-895

Author(s):

Marianne Kamp

Keyword(s):

Soviet Union ◽

Central Asia ◽

Communist Party ◽

Cultural Practices ◽

Cornell University ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Colonial Empire ◽

Gender Power ◽

And Gender ◽

Soviet Central Asia

Central to Douglas Northrop's archivally based study of the Soviet attempt to unveil Uzbek women is the argument that the Soviet Union was a colonial empire, one where Bolsheviks tried to transform daily cultural practices and gender relations against the wishes of most Uzbeks, who responded as colonial subjects by using weapons of the weak. Northrop's use of previously unavailable Communist Party documents allows an exploration of the Party's arguments for and against unveiling, and describes the Party's surprise at the vehemence and violence of anti-unveiling resistance in Uzbekistan. Starting with the 1927 Communist Party initiation of the Hujum—or campaign against veiling in Soviet Uzbekistan—this work's exclusive focus on the unveiling campaign allows Northrop to reveal that resistance to unveiling and other laws concerning “liberation” continued into the 1950s, and to examine the ways that intrusion into family life and cultural practices served the Party as a tool for defining loyalty during the Stalinist period. Northrop far exceeds Gregory Massell's The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (1974) in exploring Party arguments over policies toward Central Asia.

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