Mothering on a tightrope: balancing religious commitment and feminism.

Halbertal, T.H. (2003).

Appropriately subversive: Modern mothers in traditional religions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hard cover, xi and 193 pp. $29.95.

ISBN 0-674-00886-3.

Tova Hartman Halbertal is Lecturer in Education at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the mother of three daughters, and a practicing Orthodox Jew.

This book movingly documents the struggles of mothers seeking to rear their daughters in religious traditions where gender roles limit their full participation. Ms. Halbertal interviewed mothers who identified themselves as Israeli Orthodox Jewish and American-Irish Roman Catholic, and who also considered themselves modern in their views on women's roles. All had adolescent daughters. Many of the women were educators in religious schools. These women lived, worked, and parented in religious contexts where religious leaders are exclusively male, where religious rituals segregate men and women (for Orthodox Jews), where religious beliefs often have pervasive implications for women's lives (e.g., the prohibition of birth control in Catholicism), and where religious-cultural gender roles are strong and fixed.

The interviews focused on the women's subjective experiences as socializers, and addressed the question, how do mothers, in their role as socializers of their daughters, "resist and yet reproduce the cultural proscriptions placed on women in general and their daughters in particular?" (p. 7). In other words, how do the women pass on their deeply held religious beliefs and traditions, while at the same time encouraging their daughters to know themselves without the self-silencing that often occurs under the pressures of socialization?

Hartman Halbertal's ethnographic qualitative analysis of these interviews is rich in detail, and the book-length treatment allows the reader to become immersed in the dramas of these women's inner lives as they tell of their experiences. The title, a quote from a participant, speaks both of their loyalty to their religious tradition, and to their unease in that context. Their narratives tell of advocacy to change the system for themselves and their daughters, while focusing in their parenting primarily on ensuring continuity of religious belief in their daughters. Many of them "abdicate" their role as religious socializer, by sending their daughters to schools that are more conservative than they themselves are comfortable with. While wanting their daughters to know of the internal tensions they live with, they are often afraid that their daughters will not developmentally be able to handle it, so often remain silent. Yet they desire to transmit a "stance of resistance within tradition, an ambivalent conformity that does not negate their daughters' individuality" (p. 58). As can be expected, they find this balancing act challenging and often frustrating.

The book is powerful precisely because Hartman Halbertal speaks as an insider. She remains committed to her religion, and lives with the tension described by her participants. As an insider, she understands that religious traditions are not simply outdated patriarchal structures that can be easily cast aside, but part of a woman's identity. One participant, when asked why she didn't stop struggling with the Church and become Episcopalian, responded, "because that is not who I am. I am a Catholic woman. This is who I am, and I will always be. It's the middle of me. So I can't change it, and there are no perfect places" (p. 157). As an insider, she also recognizes that all cultural structures, religious or secular, bring with them social expectations, that there are "no perfect places," and consequently, tensions can be endured and sometimes embraced.

Treading in the footsteps of these women will be, for religiously-committed women of all faiths, an articulation of their own internal experiences, a "putting to words" of ambivalences, like a good clinical interpretation. As the mother of young boys, in a community shaped by evangelical Christianity, I often recognized glimpses of my surroundings and internal tensions. I emerged disturbed by the reminders of patriarchy around me, but with an overtone of gratefulness that I live in a context with more choices, where I can be a minority feminist and still find a place within evangelicalism.

This book represents a new wave of research in psychology, that seeks to explore and illuminate the experiences of mothers from their own perspective, rather than readily pathologizing them through the voices of others. Hartman Halbertal does this exceptionally well and with honesty that does not shy away from pointing out unpleasant realities. There is a wide-open gap for similar books in an evangelical context, where books about mothering tend to be prescriptive and loaded with unrecognized cultural gender stereotypes.

I recommend this book to students and professors of qualitative research, as an exemplary piece of research. I recommend this to individuals interested in gender studies, for its contributions to an understanding of the interplay between faith and gender. And I recommend this book to all mothers and fathers concerned with passing on a faith that reflects deep respect for people of both genders.

Reviewed by M. ELIZABETH LEWIS HALL, Ph.D.