What Women Want
In conversations about women’s rights, religion and feminism are often cast as incompatible. But religious women tend to see it differently. In this episode, we’ll explore how religious women around the world are defining what liberation looks like on their own terms, and ask what we can all learn from their efforts, regardless of what we believe.
Episode 2 of the How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality podcast, hosted by PRX, titled "What Women Want" was published on March 29, 2026 and runs 42 minutes.
March 29, 2026 ·42m · How God Works: The Science Behind Spirituality
Summary
In conversations about women’s rights, religion and feminism are often cast as incompatible. But religious women tend to see it differently. In this episode, we’ll explore how religious women around the world are defining what liberation looks like on their own terms, and ask what we can all learn from their efforts, regardless of what we believe. We’ll talk to writer and lawyer Dania Suleman about how women of faith are defending their religious freedom in secular spaces while also challenging gender inequality within their own communities. And we’ll talk to Dr. Dianne Stewart about African heritage religions, where women have often held spiritual authority in ways that challenge familiar assumptions about gender and hierarchy. Dania Suleman is the author of A Different Cloth: Reimagining Faith and Feminism. Dr. Dianne Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, and the author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa. Learn more about her work, and her many other publications, at her website. Also mentioned this episode: Asma Lamrabet is the author of Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading. Learn more about her work on her website. Learn more about Hind Makki’s Side Entrance Project here. Chandra Talpade Mohanty is the author of the essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”
Episode Description
In conversations about women’s rights, religion and feminism are often cast as incompatible. But religious women tend to see it differently.
In this episode, we’ll explore how religious women around the world are defining what liberation looks like on their own terms, and ask what we can all learn from their efforts, regardless of what we believe. We’ll talk to writer and lawyer Dania Suleman about how women of faith are defending their religious freedom in secular spaces while also challenging gender inequality within their own communities. And we’ll talk to Dr. Dianne Stewart about African heritage religions, where women have often held spiritual authority in ways that challenge familiar assumptions about gender and hierarchy.
Dania Suleman is the author of A Different Cloth: Reimagining Faith and Feminism.
Dr. Dianne Stewart is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, and the author of Obeah, Orisa, and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa. Learn more about her work, and her many other publications, at her website.
Also mentioned this episode:
Asma Lamrabet is the author of Women in the Qur’an: An Emancipatory Reading. Learn more about her work on her website.
Learn more about Hind Makki’s Side Entrance Project here.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty is the author of the essay “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”
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