(part of the series 'Women and Gender in North American Religions')
Author: Susan Jean Palmer
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
First published 1994
ISBN 0-8156-0297-9

Susan Palmer, a lecturer in religion at Dawson College in Quebec, has begun this book with a thesis that I am very much interested in. She explains that whilst doing research of NRMs she observed the religious participants regulating (or at least feeling the need to explain) their sexuality in a way that is consonant with their new mystical orientation. Exploring this theme, and with research clearly set in the background of the post World War Two family life and the resulting dramatic changes it has brought to gender roles in society, this book promised to be an interesting read.

In her attempt to catalogue the varieties of approaches to sexuality and gender distinctions within these NRMs, Palmer has borrowed categories from Christian philosophy by breaking them into three areas:

(1)        Groups who regard each sex gender as being endowed with different spiritual qualities tend to emphasise marriage as a way of uniting these two incomplete halves of a whole being. And she found that these type of groups often have an androgynous godhead figure. She calls this type of group Sex Complementarity and includes within them the Unification Church, the Mormons, the Institute of Applied Metaphysics and the Messianic Community.

(2)        Shamanistic or gnostic-type groups generally see the body and its gender as a superficial layer of false identity which is obscuring the immortal and sexless soul. They advocate an inner distance from traditional sex roles. Palmer calls these Sex Unity groups and includes within them the Raelian Movement, the Insitute for the Development of the Harmonious Human Being, the Scientologists and Gold.

(3)        Sex Polarity groups view the sexes as 'spiritually distinct, separate and inessential or irrelevant to the other's salvation. Levels of salvation might be quite different for men and women because they are not considered spiritually equal. Usually, men are considered the superior sex, as in ISKCON and the 3HO, but Rajneesh, Dada Lekhraj and Mary Daly view women as superior to men. The notion of pollution is sometimes present and the sexes are segregated to avoid weakening each other's spiritual resolve. Often the sexes are permitted to engage in limited, highly controlled relationships as a necessary phase in their spiritual development, or to contribute children to the group.'

At the outset of her research for this book, Palmer asked what I consider a very useful question: 'What use are women and men to each other on the spiritual path? Are they viewed as impediments to each other's progress, co-dependents mutually assisting in the climb toward salvation or are they equal but independent companions?' I think that our society would have certainly benefited from the contribution such a study could offer to our still sometimes unclear area of gender roles within ISKCON.

However, I feel that the study's findings are seriously flawed by the next step in which the author proceeds to gather her evidence. She has admirably tried to gain a real sense of what the women living these lifestyles feel, and to present their own understanding of their experiences. She is aware of (and indeed, mentions) the fact that the media, fundamentalists and anticultists have a tendency to trivialise or satirise any practices they find incomprehensible to their own experience. Her way of gathering this evidence, therefore, was to pose the following questions to her querents: Which social / sexual problems did they feel they were attempting to resolve by moving into a religious commune? What did they hope to leave behind? What did they perceive as the primary emotional or sexual diseases in contemporary society which drove them to seek a spiritually based style of sexuality?

The questions in themselves are reasonable enough, and perhaps if given a wide enough sampling of the members of an individual NRM would be able to give valuable information on the sort of person who joins it and why such a radical approach to sexual roles is attractive to them. The problem here is that (at least in ISKCON's case) such a small sampling of members has been interviewed that the conclusions are virtually useless.

One of her general observations was that many of the women in NRMs had come from either broken or somewhat disillusioning relationships, and so appreciated the new religious environment as 'an honourable time out from their dilemmas'. She feels that both the 'mothers' in ISKCON and the 'sisters' in the Unification Church are 'responding to the devaluation of traditional women's roles, and to the confusion surrounding issues of gender, rather than rebelling against the narrowness and rigidity of family life ... '

With specific regard to women in ISKCON, Palmer concludes, 'Women joining the Krsna consciousness movement tend to be young - in their late teens to early twenties - and tend to be from middle- to upper-middle-class families. Judging from the interviews, they remember their family life as materially privileged but dysfunctional, and themselves as abused or neglected children. Many of them appear to be exchanging the uncontrolled, arbitrary patriarchy of their fathers' rule for what they consider a benevolent system of male protection based on the authority of an ancient lineage of guru succession. The ISKCON community, therefore, beckons to these women as a safe haven where masculine tyranny and passion has no place; where they will find protection and will not be sexually exploited.' I am not disputing that these may indeed be correct conclusions across the board in our society; however, it can not be demonstrated bearing in mind the limited scope of her interviewees.

Palmer obtained information collected in previous studies of devotees as well as Back to Godhead articles specifically dealing with this subject. This is quite fair of her to have done, and does give a bit of a wider scope to her assertions. However, the major flaw in this work lies in that the interviewees to whom she specifically put her questions were extremely few. Padyavali Dasi has contributed most of the material from which Palmer draws her conclusions. She has also quoted interview material from Parvati Dasi and Jadurani Dasi, although it should be noted that Padyavali's comments are reported at least seventy percent more than any other sources. To substantiate her claim that women join ISKCON seeking 'refuge from family conflicts, sexual problems, and career pressures' Palmer briefly recounts sad stories of flight from abusive/ dysfunctional family situations of five women in the Montreal temple. I take exception with this as being a valid cross-section of the women who join ISKCON, in that these women were all aged twenty-four or younger and also that they were all under the same roof as Padyavali Dasi. Within ISKCON it is well observed that different temples have different ambiences, and hence attract different types of people joining it. Had Palmer understood that, rather than accepting that Montreal was typical and absolutely representative of all ISKCON temples, she may well have ensured that her study contained a broader base of ISKCON devotees (at least in North America, as the series title is Women and Gender in North American Religions).

Aside from critiquing the base from which these conclusions are derived, there are several things in the book which do not present ISKCON in a very favourable light. It would be comfortable to dismiss them with a wave of our righteous hand, claiming once again misrepresentation or misunderstanding by an academic. However, the fact is she has represented at least one section of our ISKCON community, embarrassingly exposing the fact that at least in our assignations of gender roles within ISKCON many of us are quite confused.

For instance, Padyavali Prabhu is quoted as saying, ' ... a man's body is a finer instrument for developing Krsna consciousness and if he remains celibate he becomes very powerful. Within the semen is contained the spirit soul: all children come from the body of man. It takes three cups of blood to produce just one drop of semen and one drop is enough to dispel the thirty-two hundred diseases of the body, according to Vedic medicine. The semen is lifted by the life airs to the brain where it bathes the brain and creates intelligence. We have a saying: "Man has the power of discrimination; woman has the power of inspiration". Since a woman's body lacks this substance, you'll find that they all have a blind spot.' I find that shocking, and if it is truly ISKCON's institutional position on the distinction between the roles of men and women in our society, I must not be able to understand it due to my 'blind spot'.

Palmer spends quite a lot of time (understandably given the topic of her book) on the purpose of marriage in our society. Once again Padyavali's explanation here astounds me: 'If a man becomes too attached to his wife, or too interested in women, he is in danger of coming back in the body of a woman. Women are often men who were attached to women in their last life. It is the opposite for a woman. The more attached she is to her husband, the more devoted she is to him, the more likely she is to advance spiritually and be reborn as a man.' (emphasis mine)

In covering this topic Palmer has also interviewed two or three men regarding their views of marriage. These could almost be construed as parody material for a send-up we might do in a humorous pantomime, if it wasn't so typically representative of the assumptions in operation. She has correctly captured the embarrassing loss of spiritual status accredited to becoming a householder for men. One male devotee interviewed claimed to try to put off his wedding date 'as long as possible'.

However, for me, the most depressing part of this book was the explanation by a male devotee of why he was giving up twelve years of brahmacari life to marry: 'I was never interested in her until she let me know she was interested in me. Then I began to observe that my mind was agitated after I spoke to her. I could see it coming and was trying to figure out how to escape. I thought of disappearing and going to India, but I had responsibilities here. I had to serve our large Indian congregation and it would be a bad example for the young boys. So I tried to avoid her. Then the night the restaurant burned down, I was up all night trying to save the furniture. Everyone was running around and I was exhausted. She came over and talked to me and twisted my arm, and I was too weak to run away. I guess we really have been engaged for a long time - I just needed time to accept it. Anyway, women need men to protect them. It's not good for a women to live without a husband for too long. I've been in the movement for twelve years and I've seen what happens to Mothers who live in the ladies' ashram - they go a bit crazy! She's been in the movement ten years, she's a disciple of Srila Prabhupada, and there aren't so many of us around anymore. I don't know what I'm going to tell my initiating guru - he's in Toronto, and he has all these big plans for me.' Unfortunately, I fear that this rather typifies the macho chauvinistic attitude many of our men have towards marriage, where they can't even say that they want to marry someone. This poor man felt what is probably a quite typical denial, conveniently placing the blame on the woman for enticing him and then resignedly trying to rationalise his decision as being charitable to her; that he is going to make the supreme sacrifice of giving up his spiritual advancement in order to keep some poor women from going crazy because she's not having sex. Is it any wonder we've had so much heated discussion between the sexes about our respective roles?

Palmer collected her interviews between 1974 and 1976. Whilst she gives a parenthetical disclaimer that the views expressed by the men were more typical of an earlier ISKCON, 'before the communal structure declined', and explaining that a more positive value is awarded to marriage today, the book has been still published with the claim on the inside cover that the 'study will be of great interest to those seeking information about these new religious movements ... " I'm sure it will. It will stand as a reference tool to be quoted in many other books and essays.

At least three other women and I were given an opportunity to critique the manuscript before it went to press. It came to me at the time of the reunion at Bhaktivedanta Manor when there were many senior female Prabhupada disciples present. I was able to arrange for us to sit and read the manuscript with a tape recorder to register our objection that it did not represent us. We were assured by Ms Palmer that although she could not do the major rewrite we were suggesting, she would include our comments (or at least a note of them) somewhere in the book. I was subsequently disappointed to find no mention of them anywhere. Thus it stands as it is, with Padyavali Dasi's personal views presented as the de facto representation of the role of women in our society.

I would recommend this book to be read by anyone interested in what it is that women in ISKCON today are complaining about, as it these very attitudes that articulate women devotees are trying to address in order to ensure they are not passed on to the second and third generations. Let us at least use this text as an exercise in observing neti neti what shapes our gender role definitions. Perhaps in the future a more circumspect academic will do the study properly, giving us (and society) a more accurate analysis so that we may be able to sift through what we have taken from the parampara and what we have brought with us from our mother cultures.

This should be a lesson to any devotees working with sociologists studying our movement, to encourage them to use as broad a base of research subjects as possible, so that future books do not contain such a lop-sided representation on any aspect of our Society.

As a rather nice footnote, the only picture on the cover is a lovely devotee bride throwing grains into her wedding ceremony fire.

Sita Devi Dasi

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