Joan Wallach Scott to Discuss Secularism and Gender Equality in Lecture at Institute for Advanced Study

Joan Wallach Scott (Photo by Vanessa Weatherall, UWM Photo Services, 2007)

Joan Wallach Scott, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, will present a public lecture, “Secularism and Gender Equality,” on Friday, May 4, at 5:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the Institute campus.

The question of gender equality has been the focus of much of the debate about the integration of Muslims in Western European nations. Muslim religious beliefs are said to countenance the subordination of women in violation of what are claimed to be the long-standing beliefs and practices of the West. In the rhetoric of the “clash of civilizations,” Muslims are placed on the side of religion and inequality, the West on the side of secularism and gender equality. In light of this, Scott will examine some historical questions about this presumed link between secularism and gender equality in Western Europe. Was gender equality a concern of those moving to separate church and state? What have been the historical links between processes of secularization and practices of gender equality? And what does this history tell us about the contemporary focus on gender equality in discussions of the place of Muslims in the nations of Western Europe?

Scott’s groundbreaking work has challenged the foundations of conventional historical practice, including the nature of historical evidence and historical experience and the role of narrative in the writing of history. Broadly, the object of her work is the question of difference in history: its uses, enunciations, implementations, justifications and transformations in the construction of social and political life.

In 2009, she received the Award for Scholarly Distinction of the American Historical Association, which noted, “Few historians have had a greater impact on the field of history, and through it, on the ways in which society understands and acts on its framing of fundamental issues like the nature of social relations between the sexes, the concepts of gender and experience, and the role of the historian in shaping our understanding of who we are and how a just society might be framed.”

Many of Scott’s books have focused on the troubled relationship between the particularity of gender and the universalizing force of democratic politics. They include Gender and the Politics of History (1988), Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996), Parité: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism (2005) and The Politics of the Veil (2007). A collection of her essays, The Fantasy of Feminist History, was published in the fall.

Scott studied at Brandeis University and the University of Wisconsin, where she earned her doctorate in 1969. Prior to joining the Faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1985, she served as Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and as Nancy Duke Lewis University Professor at Brown University from 1980–85. At Brown she was the founding director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Hans Sigrist Prize of the University of Bern, the Academic Freedom Award of the Middle East Studies Association and honorary degrees from SUNY Stony Brook, Brown University, the University of Bergen, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin. She was a Member in the Institute’s School of Social Science in 1978–79, and was named Harold F. Linder Professor in the School in 2000.

For further information about the lecture, which is free and open to the public, call (609) 734-8175, or visit the Public Events page on the Institute website, www.ias.edu.