Perpetuating Stereotypes: A Study of Gender, Family, and Religious Life in Jewish Children's Books

Abstract

This paper examines award-winning Jewish children's literature as a medium to explore how religiosity gets constructed differently for men and women. We analyze three decades of winners of the Sydney Taylor Jewish Book Award, a prestigious annual award given by the Association of Jewish Libraries to an outstanding Jewish children's book. We demonstrate how these award-winning books produce and perpetuate gendered religious stereotypes that associate men with agency and women with communion. We also show how these books construct images of a "domestic Judaism" for women and a "public Judaism" for men and how women have been symbolically annihilated from the titles and central character roles in these books. Drawing on Cecilia Ridgeway's (2011) gender-framing perspective, we argue that the gender stereotypes evident in these books matter to society because they produce and enforce gender inequalities in religiousness. Keywords: gender, family, Judaism. INTRODUCTIONIn the June 2009 issue of JSSR, scholars engaged in a lively debate about the benefits and perils of recent research on gender, religion, and risk-aversion theory. Gender and religion scholar, Marie Cornwall (2009), then editor of the journal, authored a short response raising questions about risk preference approaches, taking them to task for reifying sex differences and proceeding without the insights of recent gender scholarship. Cornwall concluded her note by inviting scholars to pursue a more productive line of inquiry about gender and religion that focuses on the "gendering processes that constitute religious expression, experience, and religiosity differently for women and men " (2009:254). Answering her invitation, we explore the workings of one particular gendering process, the transmission of religious knowledge and ideas through Jewish children's books, as a way to refocus light on the social and cultural mechanisms that produce religious differences among men and women.Despite compelling evidence that the religious gender gap is not universal and depends largely upon the measures of religiosity used to demonstrate it as so (Cornwall 1989;Steggerda 1993;Sullins 2006), the majority of recent research on religion and gender has proceeded from the assumption that higher female religiousness is a commonly accepted fact (Collett and Lizardo 2009; Miller and Hoffman 1995;Stark 2002;Walter and Davie 1998 why women are (seemingly) more religious than men (see Sullins 2006 for overview). We worrylike Cornwall (2009)-that this current line of thinking both reifies cultural beliefs about men and women and reinforces researchers' own taken-for-granted assumptions about gender differences. In this article, we thus direct conversation about religion and gender in a new direction. Rather than asking why women are more religious than men (and assuming, a priori, that they are), we ask how religiosity, as a gendered construct, gets produced differently for men and women and why these differences matter to society. In our analysis of the content, pictures, and...

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