published or not. The documents may come

To conclude, this is a very interesting book that attempts to fulfil two aims and doesn't quite succeed in doing so. The first two parts are excellent in describing the impact and prevalence of gendered based violence within the historical context of international law. Additionally, relevant extracts from international statutes are included in the appendices, which would make an excellent reference for students. In my opinion, the authors failed to successfully marry this critique of the practice of gendered violence with the moral theory of the Authenticity Project. To conclude, I felt that it might have been better to publish two books, allowing a more adequate exploration of the distinct parts of the book rather than bringing the two things together.

Emma Williamson University of Bristol

OCCUPIED AFGHAN WOMEN'S LIVES: MULTIPLE EXPERI-ENCES, MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESSES Elaheh Rostami Povey

Afghan Women: Identity and Invasion London: Zed Books, 2007, 159 pp., ISBN 978-1-84277-855-5 In Afghan Women, Povey provides us with a powerful account of women's struggle for survival and resistance during the Afghan wars, illustrated by life stories collected among various groups of women both within Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in Pakistan, Iran, the UK and the US. Women's voices emerge out of the narrative; voices that have hardly been heard since the invasion of Afghanistan; voices imprinted with a material realism in great contrast with western representations of Afghan women since 9/11. From a feminist postcolonial standpoint, Povey depicts Afghan women as politically conscious of the rules of global politics, having a clear vision of how women's status should be improved from within, taking into account culture and religion, but first of all the material conditions of Afghan society under western occupation.

Five years after the 'liberation' of Afghanistan, security conditions are worsening, attacks against girls' schools are multiplying, and threats against politically active women are increasing. Povey questions the extent to which the US and their allies were really interested in the plight of Afghan women. She shows how the condition of women has been used to develop a 'moral grammar of war' [START_REF] Weber | Not Without My Sister(s): Imagining a Moral America in Kandahar[END_REF] and to gain public support for military intervention. As the 'War on Terror' seems to have reached a point of no return, Povey warns western countries about the risk for Afghan women of getting caught in the middle of an international discursive struggle, at times portrayed as a clash of civilizations and at other times as simply a matter of human rights, and a nationalist discourse that defends with absolute certainty the terms of a contested terrain in which they themselves have had very little input in creating.

Povey talks about Afghan women's political agenda for defending women's rights. She explains how the international community has been deaf to Afghan women's views on gender relations. She speaks about an indigenous women's movement that has emerged out of Afghan women's solidarity networks developed during the various Afghan wars. If this is what I expected to find when I came back to Kabul early last year, the reality I faced was slightly more complex. Women who ran clandestine schools and underground businesses during the Taliban era are now running after funding to keep their activities going. The woman's question has been hijacked by the neoliberal agenda imposed by the West, as Povey demonstrates and this has deeply challenged women's capacities to define their own strategies. To be able to survive, women's organizations have to conform to a western approach to the promotion of women's rights. The Afghan Women's Network, for instance, has become more like an implementing agency, running workshops on Violence Against Women in different provinces of Afghanistan where insecurity has become such an issue that even talking about human rights appears totally meaningless. Its original vocation of supporting a network of women activists has almost totally disappeared due to competition for funding among women's civil society organizations (CSOs). One female employee of the Network explained to me how she deeply disliked going to the provinces in order to facilitate such workshops but felt compelled to do so in order to keep her job. She said: 'I was told that if I did not want to do this job, I could resign.' Because of the current economic situation, the membership of women's CSOs is therefore almost always directly related to the funding available to employ women rather than indicating a commitment to women's cause. Women in CSOs could be working for the UN one day and a private sector firm the next. CSOs are for the most part absent in public debates on matters of importance to communities, especially the women within them. From what I have observed, there is no unified women's movement with a clear and well-defined agenda. Instead, there are a variety of women's organizations competing against each other and using the jargon of women's rights in order to attract funding. This does not mean that women who work within these organizations have no substance -they need to have some to survive in such an environment -or no political views on gender. But their room to manoeuvre and to propose alternatives is extremely narrow. Not only, as Povey argues, have 'women's rights issues become depoliticized and . . . hijacked by government and international financial institutions' (p. 138) but this phenomenon has also modified the original nature of women's networks and the profiles of women who work within them.

Povey suggests that Afghan women have developed personal and creative strategies to resist oppressive gender norms. She explains how women's acquaintance with other women's movements in Iran and in Pakistan has, in some cases, influenced them in the development of political consciousness. With Abu [START_REF] Abu-Lughod | The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women[END_REF], I think we need to be careful not to romanticize discourses of resistance. Many of the women I talked to did not see an immediate reason for opposing traditional gender norms and preferred to comply rather than resist in order to maintain the stability of social relations. In addition, very few Afghan women who had formerly been in exile in Iran had had the opportunity to be introduced to the Iranian women's movement during those years. Instead, because of racism and discriminatory laws applying to Afghan refugees in these countries, most exiled Afghan women socialized inside their own community and so could not be influenced by the women's movements in Iran and Pakistan.

My fieldwork in the Women's National Dormitory located on Kabul University campus serves to contradict Povey's notion that Afghan women are routinely resisting oppressive gender norms. There, I observed how young women recently returned to Afghanistan after long years of exile, despite their living far away from their families, were conforming with, and so reinforcing, these oppressive norms in order to fit into Afghan society. For example, Masoma, a 21-year-old woman who studies physical education at the University of Kabul, explained the hard time she had during the first months of her return: 'When I was in Iran, people called me "Afghani! Afghani!" When I arrived in Afghanistan, because of my accent, people called me "Irani". So I changed the way I dressed and I tried to get rid of my accent and now people call me "Hazara" 1 but I feel Afghan. I am Afghan.' This example illustrates how young women are not ready to bargain their freedom and instead conform to social norms. They constantly try to lose their Iranian accents, wear longer veils and try to adopt a low profile in order not to be pointed out as 'foreigners'.

Young women's studying in the capital city depends on their capacity to maintain their reputation. Walking the long corridors of the dormitory during the examination period, I saw them seated on the floor, rocking their upper body forward and backward above their books, as if reciting the Q'uran. Girls feel they have to work harder than boys in order to keep their families' trust and to be able to continue their studies. Most of them do not dare reveal to classmates that they stay in the dormitory for fear of gossip. Exchange of gifts and small services as well as invitations for tea are part of the everyday life rituals they perform in order to gain each other's respect and avoid the spreading of negative rumours. Even in the absence of their relatives, they feel responsible for maintaining their family's honour. The experience of migration does not, therefore, necessarily lead to transformation in gender roles and identities.

Finally, the book argues that gender has remained a non-issue at governmental level. But contrary to Povey's analysis, I think it is reductive to say that women who work in Afghan institutions 'ignore the suffering of millions of women, men and children in Afghanistan and the region' (p. 139). Women who have managed to get into the parliament, for instance, are currently struggling to keep their place safe. Their participation in political life cannot be considered a guarantee of the promotion of gender-sensitive policies. These women tell themselves: 'First I make it for myself and later on I'll make it for other women.' They do talk about gender and some have ideas about how to challenge oppressive patriarchal norms in culturally appropriate terms, but they are in such fragile positions that their capacity to address these issues in public remains extremely limited. For some women, who participated in the Mujahedin resistance movement, their mere presence in politics is a sufficient reward and an acknowledgement of their efforts. Others who aspire to achieve more for women know that this depends on their capacity to get the backing of political parties. Prominent new female political figures have emerged, some of whom have crystallized major hopes for both Afghan men and women. But the challenge is huge and expectations are high.

In documenting the lives of Afghan women during war and under western occupation, Povey's work represents a precious contribution to academic knowledge. It has answered an urgent need for contextualizing the woman question in Muslim majority societies at a time of western imperial domination in this part of the world. As the author reflects, 'Saving Muslim women was and still is a typical imperial strategy' (p. 139). The cosmetic measures imposed by the international community have proved to be of little use in enforcing significant change for the majority of Afghan women. But as much as we, academics, would like to see women engaged in finding their own motives for resistance, we need to be careful not to project our own fantasies on them. The variety of Afghan women's experiences has engendered a multiplicity of identities, in which patterns of resistance can be found in practices that also appear, at first sight, as acts of compliance. Sex at the Margins is a very timely book in the context of current debates, dialogue and dominant discourses around the analytic intersections of the commercial sex industry and migration. This book is the first to grapple with the intersections of migrating to sell sex with a specific focus on the agencies and organizations including researchers involved in 'helping' the stereotypical subjects/objects of researchsex workers, poor women and migrants. Taking an ethnographic approach, Agustin tells the reader:

I did field work in order to gain information until now absent from most discussions of commercial sex, on the practices of social agents attempting to help people who sell sex . . . I wanted a theoretical space that would allow me to resist moralising as well as western cultures' claim that its values are best. (pp. 136-7)

The central thesis is that 'those declaring themselves to be helpers actively reproduce the marginalisation they condemn . . . social helpers consistently deny the

NOTE 1 .

 1 Hazara is the third largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, after the Pashtoon (also called Paxto or Patan) and the Tadjik. The Hazara community is from shiah confession and therefore represents a religious minority that has faced much discrimination throughout history.SEX, WORK AND MIGRATION: THE DYNAMICS AND REGIMES OF CARE AND CONTROLLaura Maria Agustin Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry London: ZedBooks, 2007, 224 pp., ISBN 9781-84277-8609


Claire Hancock

Spatialities of the Secular Geographies of the Veil in France and Turkey

This article analyses the debate about the Islamic headscarf in France and Turkey, with particular reference to the law passed in France in 2004. It aims to bring out the spatial dimension of the secular: first, by underlining how the issue of the veil collapses spatial scales, from the individual (female) body to global geopolitical tensions; second, by looking at the specific place granted to schools as the primary focus of the political rows; and third, by teasing out some of the implicit assumptions about the 'location', in both France and Turkey, of the threat to secularism. It concludes that in France, at least, the debate had less to do with religion as such than with the place, both physical and metaphorical, granted to the Other in French society.

using women's bodies as battlefields' (Human Rights Watch, 2004b: 3), to borrow the phrase from Turkish feminist Pinar Ilkkaracan.

In the light of discussions of the Islamic headscarf in English-language literature, which tend to treat veiling as a personal choice, an expression of faith or cultural belonging to be dealt with respectfully, Turkish and French legislation banning headscarves from public schools looks like an incursion of the state into a private sphere regarding the individual, family or 'community' only, or indeed a breach of 'human rights' (see Human Rights Watch, 2004a, 2004b). The European Commission on Human Rights, however, upheld the French law, much in the way it has consistently rejected appeals against the Turkish ban on headscarves in universities (ruling of June 2004). 1 The European legal framework therefore upholds what can be called a 'geography of the secular', by mapping out spaces and places where the practice of wearing the veil is prohibited.

In this article, I would like to look at the spatial dimension of the debates about the veil, and the ways in which they revolve around a geography of the secular, but also of the challenges to secularism. My general point is that spatially confining the veil issue, in discourse, to certain specific scales, places and spaces tends to overdetermine the debate, and conflate veiling with other political issues. I attempt to show how, by challenging these implicit spatial assignations, one can contribute to opening up the debate. By setting the French and Turkish cases side by side, I also aim to displace assumptions about the centrality of postcolonial tensions in France. I discuss primarily the debate that took place in France around the time the contentious law was passed, and use the situation in Turkey as a parallel to shed some light on it.

One aim is to rethink the classical division of space between public and private, the centrality of which many feminist geographers have questioned [START_REF] Mcewan | The West and Other Feminisms[END_REF], 2 and which proves overly simplistic to account for the spatialities of the secular. Beyond this questioning of the private/public divide, I propose to scrutinize the implicit spatial assumptions present in debates about the veil in three ways: first, by underlining how the issue of the veil collapses spatial scales, and how the political discourse it generates seems to move effortlessly from the individual (female) body to global geopolitical tensions, though it pauses at length on the intermediate scale of the national; second, by looking at the specific place granted to schools as the primary focus of the political rows in France, and to universities in Turkey; and third, by teasing out some of the implicit assumptions about the 'location', in both countries, of the threat to secularism.

THE SECULAR STATE AND ITS RELIGIOUS OTHER

The key word for French and Turkish attitudes to the veil is laïcité or laiklik respectively, the Turkish term deriving from the French: the principle whereby institutions should not in any way be influenced by any church or religion. Established in France by the law separating church and state in 1905, it was emulated by the Kemalist reformation of Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s because laiklik was seen to be a leading principle of modernity. Turkish secularism is different from the French brand (see Burdy and Marcou's introduction to CEMOTI, 1995): rather than an actual separation of church and state, it implies the subordination of the religious to the state, with imams becoming civil servants (Roy, 2005: 30, 95). I do not attempt here to give an account of the historical context in which these different forms of secularism evolved (for a discussion of this, see [START_REF] Çinar | Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Bodies, Places and Times[END_REF][START_REF] Göle | Musulmanes et modernes[END_REF][START_REF] Hommes | Laïcité, les 100 ans d'une idée neuve[END_REF], but merely outline what seem to me to be the major points concerning the place given to women in these evolutions, and discuss what seems to form the basis of some misapprehensions, in Anglophone countries, about laïcité or laiklik and their spatial implications.

As part of the Kemalist modernization process initiated by Mustafa Kemal in Turkey in the 1920s, the adoption of western attire was strongly encouraged and the wearing of headscarves by women discouraged, and indeed banned in certain spaces; in parallel, the visibility of women in public was seen as the hallmark of the new, modern Turkey [START_REF] Göle | The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere[END_REF]. As a result, a new dress code was established, beginning with a 1923 decree on dress; further laws in 1925 and 1934, updated in the early 1980s, stipulated that religious clothing should not be worn outside times of worship and established guidelines regarding the dress of students and state employees. The law has been enforced strictly since 1997 and wearing the headscarf in Turkey is therefore prohibited not only in public schools, but also in universities, courts of justice and official buildings generally.

In Turkey, the 'Islamization' of political life implies an active and symbolic part played by women, which both continues and subverts the traditional visibility of women in the public sphere in Turkey. Nilüfer Göle has shown that it is both the process of democratization of the regime and increased access to education for women that have rekindled the debate, since among those clamouring for the right to wear headscarves university students are foremost [START_REF] Göle | The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere[END_REF]. In this specific context, headscarves signify both a challenge to the legitimacy of the traditional, westernized elites, and a critique of the state's secularist universalism. As Alev Çinar aptly summarizes: 'The reveiling of the female body was promoted by the Islamists as a sign of liberation of women and of the nation from the oppression of the secular Westernizing state that denied the Turkish nation its own true culture and identity' (Çinar, 2005: 74).

In France, a deeply entrenched secularism pervades large sections of society: for instance, a survey (conducted by opinion poll company Pew, quoted in The Economist, 28 October 2004) indicated that only 11 percent of French people considered religion 'very important', while the equivalent figure in Germany was 21 percent, in Italy 27 percent -and as many as 59 percent in the US. The whole notion of laïcité revolves around the idea that religious beliefs, which anyone is free to hold privately, are not a legitimate part of public life: the division between private and public is therefore a central tenet of French laïcité, and the legitimacy of expressions of faith is not assessed per se but according to the type of space, or place in which they occur.

Olivier Roy, among others, has contrasted laïcité and secularization: while according to the latter, more common in Protestant countries, a society gradually frees itself from the sacred without formally forgoing it, the former results from the active eviction of the sacred, confined behind a legally defined boundary, mostly in Catholic countries (Roy, 2005: 30). This divergence within the West as to the importance of religion, as to its legitimacy as a reference in politics and as to the degree of 'sacralization' of the state itself (Roy, 2005: 123) probably accounts for some of the misunderstandings, or differences in assessment, between the French and Anglo-American intellectual universes. Thus, some of the arguments for 'toleration' put forth in Anglo-American journals patronize French intellectuals or politicians operating 'within their own cultural limits' (Galeotti, 1994: 676), as if Anglo-American views on these issues were not, themselves, constrained by any 'cultural limits'. Several scholars have more recently discussed the specific meanings of laïcité in French political thought and attempted to 'translate' French debates in order to make them understandable, or at least less easy to caricature and dismiss, from Anglophone points of view (see [START_REF] Kros | Secularity in a World "Torn by Difference": A Consideration of the French Headscarf Affair from South Africa[END_REF][START_REF] Laborde | On Republican Toleration[END_REF].

The Anglo-American view may be that French analysts tend to portray young Muslim women as 'passive victims of oppressive cultures' (Dwyer, 1999: 8) or 'under total control of their male relatives' or 'so immobilised by the significations of their clothing that the only statement they could possibly be making is a kind of inchoate plea for rescue' (Moruzzi, 1994: 662). Admittedly, colonizers focused on the veil as a symbol of Islamic backwardness and primitivism (Dwyer, 1999: 9), which made it 'an intense focus of symbolic struggle during the Algerian Revolution' (Moruzzi, 1994: 663; see also [START_REF] Shepard | La "Bataille du Voile" pendant la guerre d'Algérie[END_REF]. There are, therefore, distinct postcolonial overtones in the French debate. However, as I try to show, it may be more relevant to think of it more generally in terms of the difficulty of accepting, in national political cultures strongly influenced by universalism and dominated by centralizing states, the presence of the Other -be it the figure of women as Others in male-dominated societies, of people of rural origin as Others in urban societies, or the figure of the religious believer as Other to the rational, modern citizen of secular states. This is not to suggest, in any way, that the political contexts in France and Turkey are identical; however, from an Anglo-American perspective, conceptions of the state and its relation to citizens in both countries have many similarities, not least when it comes to the acceptance of difference, and in particular of the veil, which functions in both countries as what Claire Dwyer calls 'an overdetermined signifier of difference' [START_REF] Dwyer | Veiled Meanings: Young British Muslim Women and the Negotiation of Differences[END_REF].

AN ISSUE OF SCALE?

In Turkey, the türban 3 is said by Islamists to constitute a protection against the 'cultural aggression of the West' (CEMOTI, 1995: 23). In much the same way, a woman wearing a headscarf in France can be seen as expressing the resistance of a cultural and religious specificity in the context of a dominant, or hegemonic, culture. However, these interpretations take into account power relations on the global and national scales, but overlook the equally important power relations within the Muslim communities, and the fact that it is women, and practically exclusively women, 4 who are made to stand up to oppressive state measures or cultural oppression. In fact, what may have one meaning on one scale (i.e. veil as resistance to the state, or as identity-assertion against the West) works very differently indeed on other scales; and the closer one gets to the everyday lives and to the actual bodies of the young women wearing the veil, the less distinct such meanings become.

As Nilüfer Göle wrote, referring to Arlene MacLeod's idea of 'accommodating protest' in Egypt, 'a veiled woman may be delivering a political message to Western modernism, but simultaneously she is accommodating male domination based on her invisibility and her confinement to the space of mahrem' 5 (Göle, 2003: 158). Alev Çinar subscribes to the same idea when she writes that 'the new veiling has the effect of reproducing and naturalizing the power and authority of the male public gaze' (Çinar, 2005: 77). This raises the issue of female agency: when so many political issues, symbols and interpretations are projected onto a single item of feminine clothing, it seems impossible to ensure that it is indeed the intention of the wearer that is made manifest.

It is useful here to consider the body as a scale, following Linda McDowell, who defines scale as a 'boundary between different kinds of spaces' (McDowell, 1999: 40). The relevance of such a reading is demonstrated by Alev Çinar, who shows that in the Turkish context 'the body is metaphorically employed not only as a symbol of the nation and its boundaries, but also as a material space where the boundaries of the public and the private are drawn toward the construction of the national public subject' (Çinar, 2005: 53): the body of individual women is therefore obscured by the host of national symbols it is loaded with.

Bearing in mind this importance of scale, let us take a closer look at some spatial features of the French law, passed on 25 March 2004. Unlike the earlier ruling by the Conseil d'Etat, in 1989, that left decisions to exclude pupils from schools to the local level of each school, and the similar ruling in Britain, in 2007, 6 about the right for pupils or instructors to wear a full veil at school, this law was to apply at the national level, across all French territory (including overseas territories such as La Réunion, which have large Muslim minorities).

It has been argued that this law was out of scale with the actual problems, which arose in a very small number of schools, mostly located on the outskirts of Paris. Jean Baubérot, who was a member of the commission established to study the issue and make proposals to the French president (known as the Stasi Commission, after the name of its president 7 ), was the only member who refused to endorse the final report, for reasons he has repeatedly made clear (Baubérot, 2004a(Baubérot, , 2004b)). He has argued that passing a law seemed out of proportion with the actual extent of the problem, and has also suggested that the origin of the members of the commission, reflecting French centralism (19 out of 20 were Parisian, and only one from the provinces), may have influenced the outcome.

Furthermore, he has argued that the hypothetical need to uphold secularism throughout French territory was in fact used as an excuse, since a significant part of France, the Alsace-Moselle (the eastern area that was annexed by Germany between 1870 and 1919) retained a specific status, the Concordat, meaning the separation of church and state does not apply there. 8 Baubérot (2004b) has made the case that a laïcité that tolerates such a significant territorial exception isn't justified in disallowing the wearing of veils by a small number of public school pupils.

Baubérot was therefore the isolated dissenter in the Stasi Commission. Another member, Patrick Weil, an academic and specialist on immigration, has also written about his experience in the commission:

. . . our near-unanimous sentiment (there was one dissident among our group of 19) was that we had to understand and then address the issue at a national level rather than merely a local one.

The reason was plain: the wearing of a headscarf or the imposition of it on others is much more than an issue of individual freedom: it has become a France-wide strategy pursued by fundamentalist groups who use public schools as their battleground. (Weil, 2005: 47; emphasis in the original)

While making the point that a national scale was felt to be appropriate in response to a perceived 'France-wide strategy' on the part of fundamentalists, Weil also implies that public schools were chosen as the 'battleground' by these very enemies, a claim that deserves further scrutiny.

Tellingly, among other vociferous and influential voices heard both by the Stasi Commission and on French television, Weil mentions 'Iranian refugees' [START_REF] Weil | Lever le voile[END_REF], among whom the most popular was Chahdortt Djavann, who had published a best-selling essay against the veil [START_REF] Djavann | Bas les voiles! Paris[END_REF]. This is symptomatic of the way in which the French debate, while intensely national in the way it was framed or engineered, picked some international points of reference and could at times claim to resonate with worldwide geopolitical confrontations.

It appears therefore that the scale of the individual (female) bodies was completely bypassed in the debate, by the prompt shift to the local scale (discussed in more depth in the following sections), and the even swifter shift to the national and international scales. Arguably, this obscured crucial aspects of the debate, as much as it disregarded the effects on individual young women, who ended up being denied a public education for reasons unrelated to themselves and their choice of dress.

THE SPACES OF THE SCHOOL AND THE UNIVERSITY

Weil explains why schools were singled out, among many other possible sites to combat fundamentalism:

. . . if the headscarf had been banned (for example) on the basis of discrimination against women, it would have been necessary to do so not only in schools, but across the whole of society.

The ban concerns only public schools because there, those concerned are minors. There is no question of forbidding religious display in universities or elsewhere in the adult world. Adults have means of defence that children do not. (Weil, 2005: 48) Is it simply, then, because children are concerned that schools were so central to the French debate, and can that be the basis of the distinction between some public spaces that are key to the national identity, and others that are less so? Other aspects have to be taken into account, which tend to demonstrate that contrary to Weil's claim, it was not a choice of the 'fundamentalists' to single out the schools, but rather a result of some French cultural specificities.

The professional group most directly confronted with headscarf-wearing pupils, teachers in secondary schools, are intellectual heir to the tradition of hussards noirs de la République, the school masters sent out by the Republic to defend republican values against the encroachments of the clergy in the remotest areas of France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 9 There is therefore much to suggest that it was the religious stepping back into the classroom (and the potential subjection of the female in such a religious culture) and not the fact that the religion in question was Islam rather than Christianity that triggered reactions among teachers.

Beyond this, it is necessary to give some thought to the significance of the school (and the university, in Turkey) as spaces. In the context of the debate around the 2004 law, philosopher Etienne Balibar, who opposed it, has offered very perceptive elements to analyse the specificity of the space of the school, in the French republican context. He describes it as a 'place of transition between the space of "private" existence and "public" existence in "public" space, but situated in the public space itself' (Balibar, 2004: 20; emphasis in the original). School is a place which operates . . . a relativization of social belonging, of beliefs, of ideologies, in order to facilitate the entry of individuals into the sphere of 'politics', of citizenship, therefore it has to virtually detach individuals from their primary identities. . . . What is asked of the school is not that it be 'neutral', like the state, but that it operate a neutralization, that it constitute a surplus of neutrality between two 'spaces' that are not neutral, the so-called 'private', and the so-called 'public'. (Balibar, 2004: 20; emphasis in the original) Therefore, if we follow Balibar, the space of the school is a form of 'third space', neither private nor public, and on which higher demands can be placed than on private space, obviously, but also than on public space in general. Hence, its crucial place in the French debate.

In Turkey, the focal point of debates has tended to be women wearing headscarves to university or claiming the right to do so, who are perceived as making a political statement, and not just as conforming to private beliefs. One of the reasons for this is that there too it is a very specific sort of space that is concerned: access to higher education for women was one of the tenets of Kemalism. That the young women's claim has a spatial component is made clear by Nilüfer Göle's enlightening analysis: she notes that these young women are using the 'space of opportunities' opened to the female part of the population by Kemalism (Göle, 2003: 164); and she goes on to add that these 'young women cause unease and confusion, because they appropriate the religious signs of female confinement, whilst gaining public visibility. What creates the problem is the intrusion of Islamic references in spaces created and ruled by the liberal and secular values of modernity' (Göle, 2003: 170; emphasis added).

Therefore, it seems that in Turkey too, it is the construction of certain spaces as 'special', as playing an essential part with respect to values perceived as essential to the constitution of the national, that explains the focus of debates on institutions of higher education: here again the sense of 'spatial transgression' or intrusion of one sphere into another appears crucial.

We return here to the central question of the relation that citizens have with the state: Jean Baubérot contrasts the US view of the state with the French, as follows

In the USA, the emphasis is on the freedom of the individual vis-a-vis the state; in France, some tend to think that freedom -in the sense of liberation from prejudice and dogmatism -is obtained thanks to the state, the 'Republican state', and its leading institution, 'the Republican school'. (Baubérot, 2004a: 136) This is how a tension described as of worldwide geopolitical importance, as essential to France's political identity, seems to narrow down to and focus on the very local space of public schools; more specifically, it appeared from the coverage in the media that only a small number of schools were in fact concerned by the issue, and that most of these were located in the banlieues.

THE LOCATION OF THE ISSUE

The evidence from French banlieues tends to demonstrate that it is not the French state's encroachment on their freedom that young women find threatening, but the masculine control of their everyday behaviour [START_REF] Coutras | Les peurs urbaines et l'autre sexe[END_REF]. As has been pointed out by [START_REF] Tévanian | Le Voile médiatique. Un faux débat: 'l'affaire du foulard Islamique[END_REF], this evidence was given prominence in media coverage in the run-up to the discussion and the vote on the law. Young Muslim women's testimonies published in newspapers such as Libération at the time of the debate around the law often depict the wearing of the headscarf not as a free, personal choice, but as giving in to strong pressure, which may not originate within the family, but from an environment of misogynist, intolerant men, who will harass women not wearing the veil or behaving in other ways they disapprove of (going to cafes, smoking, befriending or going out with people from outside the community, etc.).

A political movement called 'Ni Putes Ni Soumises' ('Neither Whores nor Submissive') drew public attention to the difficult situation of women in the quartiers, the poor neighbourhoods of social housing with high proportions of people of foreign origin (for a discussion in English of the characteristics of French banlieues, see [START_REF] Dikeç | Badlands of the Republic? Revolts, the French State, and the Question of Banlieues[END_REF]. This movement, which began in 2001, is explicitly secular, republican and claims a mixité (a term used both to designate the coexistence of both sexes, and that of people of different cultural backgrounds) 'based on respect'; the statement of intent posted on its website depicts women in the quartiers as 'stifled by the machismo of the men of our neighbourhoods, who use a so-called "tradition" to deny us our most elementary rights' (for an indepth discussion of the movement, see [START_REF] Guénif-Souilamas | Ni pute ni soumise ou très pute, très voilée. Laïcité d'en haut et féminisme d'en bas[END_REF].

The leader of the movement, Fadela Amara, 10 was among the 'witnesses' heard by the Stasi Commission and was among the most vocal exponents of the idea that the issue of the veil, and of female oppression, is deeply embedded in specific parts of French cities, the banlieues (known also as the cités or quartiers):

In this account, which became hugely influential in 2003-4, the banlieues, where many people of foreign origin have become entrapped by economic difficulties over the years, are pointed to as the location of the problem, the site from which the threat to laïcité emerges. This was, however, a recent dimension to the debate, since, as shown by Deltombe, during the first 'headscarf affair', in Creil in 1989, there had been no reference to the banlieue whatsoever (Deltombe, 2005: 151). 11 The banlieues have become, in French political discourse, shorthand for the presence of a stigmatized Other in the national body, or of 'barbarians at our doorstep'. In much the same way, there is in Turkey an implicit association between the wearing of the headscarf, the inroads of Islamist parties into municipal and national politics and the massive rural immigration that has settled in the gecekondu (informal settlements) on the outskirts of large Turkish cities. These settlements are often described as hotbeds of Islamist movements and the location of the threat to secularism (see, for instance, the interview with R. Çakir, 'La Ville, piège ou tremplin pour les Islamistes turcs [START_REF] Cemoti | Cahiers d'Etudes sur la Méditerranée Orientale et le Monde Turco-Iranien)[END_REF]. This resonates with the remarks of Nilüfer Göle, who analyses the tension as 'geographical': 'The türban transfers the Islamic fact from "periphery" to "centre". Geographically, it moves to the cities, becomes an urban phenomenon, and culturally, it enters the field where the central values and symbols of society are elaborated' (Göle, 2003: 100). She further expands on this common notion that with the reveiling of women, 'popular culture has started to infiltrate elite tradition. And indeed this is the reality underlying common complaints in Turkey, such as "cities have become villages" ' (Göle, 2003: 155).

Studies have brought evidence of the ambiguous effect of headscarf wearing in Turkish cities: on the one hand, it facilitates women's mobility in urban space, enables them to enter the public sphere while conforming to their personal beliefs [START_REF] Ilyasoglu | Islamist Women in Turkey: Their Identity and Self-Image[END_REF]. On the other hand, however, it may cause women to be treated condescendingly, because headscarf wearing is also associated with poor education and rural origin [START_REF] Secor | The Veil and Urban Space in Istanbul: Women's Dress, Mobility and Islamic Knowledge[END_REF]. Therefore, there are also ways in which wearing a headscarf in Turkish cities can function as a sign of Otherness, underlining not just a gender divide, but a social one, and maybe a generational one, too. 12 The issue is no less complex than in France, since many Islamist party activists in large Turkish cities are women, for whom this political activism becomes a form of entry into public life [START_REF] Secor | Toward a Feminist Counter-Geopolitics: Gender, Space and Islamist Politics in Istanbul[END_REF]. This resonates with Sarah Bracke's plea for a wider recognition of feminine forms of agency in fundamentalist religious movements [START_REF] Bracke | Author(iz)ing Agency. Feminist Scholars Making Sense of Women's Involvement in Religious "Fundamentalist" Movements[END_REF]. However, Alev Çinar, writing about the specific Turkish context, argues that Just as the public visibility of 'modern women' in the early years of the republic had served to vest the state with political agency and to deny agency to women themselves, the headscarf had the exact same effect for the women wearing it. It served to vest the Islamist leadership with political agency at the cost of agency for the wearers of the headscarf. (Çinar, 2005: 87) It seems that the very intensity of debates in France and Turkey about the wearing of the veil may have deprived women of what Claire Dwyer analysed in Britain as the possibility of manipulating and challenging the meaning of dress, and left them mostly with the 'difficulties involved in subverting dominant discourses' (Dwyer, 1999: 21).

CONCLUSION

I would like to suggest that a key to understanding French attitudes around this debate is universalism: there is a strong resistance to the idea that differences in the national body deserve recognition, 13 and a sense that entrenching these differences in political life, in any way, is a form of 'differentialist racism'. One young woman, Nadia, interviewed by Libération in January 2004, as she watched the demonstrations against the law banning headscarves in French schools, commented: 'I came to see how we are obliged to become a caricature of ourselves' (Libération, 19 January 2004). Nadia opposed both the law and the wearing of headscarves. Her remark echoes the reflection by Etienne Balibar: 'individuals and collectivities that are prey to racism (its "objects") find themselves constrained to see themselves as a community' (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 18). The French obsession with communautarisation as anathema to French political principles (Roy, 2005: 62) is thus projected onto minority groups.

Polls taken in 2004, however, showed Muslim French people to be deeply divided over the law, with 53 percent of Muslim men opposed to it (42 percent in favour), 49 percent of Muslim women in favour (43 percent opposed in one poll, quoted in The Economist, 21 January 2004). The same polls showed overwhelming support for the law across French society as a whole, regardless of the political affiliation of respondents (69 percent were overall in favour of the law, 66 percent among supporters of the left, 75 percent among supporters of the right).

Despite the many French specificities at play in framing the debate, there is a sense in which foreign public opinion, for instance British, has edged closer to the French position, maybe as a result of the trauma of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Since the uproarious indignation at the French law that was expressed in such forums as the European Social Forum in London in 2004, Britain has experienced its own debate about Islamic veils, triggered by Jack Straw's comments in October 2006 and inflamed by the Daily Express's strident calls to 'ban the veil' in the following weeks.

In retrospect, it seems clear that the French debate was tremendously one-sided and that French 'public opinion' was strongly influenced by a campaign in the media, as has been documented by [START_REF] Tévanian | Le Voile médiatique. Un faux débat: 'l'affaire du foulard Islamique[END_REF]. It also appears, in retrospect, that the hearings of the Stasi Commission, that were supposed to represent all sides of the argument, were probably partial.

Furthermore, the case has been put convicingly that the whole 'headscarf affair' was in fact little more than a diversion, staged to distract French public opinion from two real problems in French society: a persistent misogyny, that the rhetoric of Muslim oppression of women conveniently projected onto a minority group, while implicitly exonerating French society at large; and a persistent failure to integrate people of immigrant origin, which a focus on the headscarf no less conveniently allows to be blamed on the very victims [START_REF] Terray | L'Hystérie politique[END_REF]. On the basis of this acute analysis, the question hardly appears to concern religion or secularism, and seems to revolve more around the domination of French political debate and media by white males. In much the same way, the confrontation in Turkey between Islamists and secularists seems to be steeped in questions of acceptance of 'Anatolian peasants' as a legitimate part of Turkey's political and urban elite.

A spatial reading of the French debate, and a brief overview of the Turkish one, allows a displacement of the 'headscarf ban' from the framework of religion to that of politics: as seen through various scales, through a focus on the space of the school or the university and through the underlying assumptions about the 'location' of the issue, it tells us more about the way states and societies deal with the Other, and the place they grant the Other, than about any spiritual matter.

NOTES

The author wishes to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their encouragements and very helpful suggestions to improve this article. Thanks also to Béatrice Collignon and Jean-François Staszak for their support and help with an earlier draft, and to Mustafa, Elif and Félix for their assistance with the revisions.

1. See Editorial, this issue, for the February 2008 ruling of the Turkish parliament which lifts the ban on headscarves being worn in universities. 2. In the case of Turkey, the relevance of the private/public divide cannot be taken for granted, since, as Nilüfer Göle has shown, the notion of 'private' in its European sense has no equivalent in Turkish (Göle, 2003: 171).

The first term of the mahrem/namahrem duality, often rendered as private/public, refers to the sphere of intimacy, that of female sexuality, and therefore carries connotations of the forbidden absent from 'private' (Göle, 2003: 103). 3. In this article, I use the terms 'veil' and 'headscarf' indiscriminately, not only because in the French context voile and foulard are used synonymously, but also following Alev Çinar's authoritative discussion of veiling and unveiling in Turkey (Çinar, 2005). See her Chapter 2 for a full discussion of different styles of veiling, Islamic fashion and couture.

4. In the case of Turkey, the equally symbolic wearing of beards or facial hair by civil servants, for example, is also frowned upon. However, I subscribe to Nilüfer Göle's interpretation whereby women were symbolically central both to the Kemalist revolution (Göle, 2003: 178) and to its present contestation by Islamist movements (Göle, 2003: 183). 5. See note 2. 6. I refer here to Education Secretary Alan Johnson's decision ('Minister Gives Schools the Right to Ban Muslim Veil', The Guardian, 20 March 2007). 7. For a full discussion of the context and work of the Stasi Commission in English, see [START_REF] Kros | Secularity in a World "Torn by Difference": A Consideration of the French Headscarf Affair from South Africa[END_REF] and Thomas (2006). 8. Religious education exists in primary schools and collèges, and clergymen (of the three religions recognized at the time of the Concordat, Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism) are paid by the French state. 9. Olivier Roy describes French laïcité as a 'combat laïcité', based on anti-clericalism and verbal violence, and also believes that 'most professors who refuse veiled pupils would show just as much intransigence if confronted by seminarists wearing religious garb' (Roy, 2005: 56). 10. Fadela Amara became a junior minister in the 2007 Fillon government, responsible for politique de la ville, or urban policy. 11. By 1995, the banlieue setting is completely taken for granted: see, for instance, Françoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokavar's (1995) account, the foreword of which begins with a stereotyped and bleak depiction of the quartiers, despite the fact that the interviewees in their book report on practices in a number of environments both urban and suburban. 12. Nilüfer Göle's fieldwork with young university students claiming the right to wear the veil confirms that a large majority have modest social backgrounds and are of rural origin. However, they are representative of their family's social ascension, and their choice to wear the veil, frequently regarded negatively by their own family, often has to do with their arrival in major cities (Göle, 2003: 95). 13. There is, for instance, a strong movement against the inclusion of 'ethnic' or 'racial' data in the national census, led by a large number of academics and intellectuals: see Libération, 23 February and 7 March 2007. The French census only includes data about nationality.

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 15(3)

I think that in order to win this battle in the cités -because this is happening in the cités -I sincerely believe that we cannot consider the issue of the veil or the debate about laïcité without taking into account the decline of the ghettos, not to mention all the parameters of the situation in the quartiers.[START_REF] Amara | Testimony at the Stasi Commission[END_REF]


Abby Day
email: a.day@sussex.ac.uk

O F Sussex

A Gendered Response to a 'Fallen World'

Keywords:

Two cases from the UK are discussed to explore why, in the author's terms, women wilfully disempower themselves in religion and spiritual contexts. A case study of a women's prayer group shows how they resist acknowledging their own power or the idea that they are engaging in informal ritual equally important to their male counterparts. Second, qualitative data from a large study of people's beliefs are used to show how women willingly submit to a higher male power through a process of self-denigration. It is argued that the women are making rational, strategic choices in an increasingly secular and patriarchal world.

COMPARATIVE CASE STUDIES

Baptist Women's Prayer Group

The women who allowed me to observe their prayer group had been meeting every Wednesday morning for more than 10 years, which prompted me to refer to them as 'the Wednesday Women'. 1 I gained access to the group through asking an acquaintance who attended if I could approach the group and seek members' permission to study them for my MA dissertation. With little academic training in religion or research, I was unsure how to begin my research, but was advised by my supervisor to observe the group for a time and see what came up. I was further encouraged by reading Skeggs's (1997: 22) comment:

I knew little about methodology and began the research by just hanging around and talking to the women as much as possible.

When the group first began meeting about 10 years before, they were full-time carers of their preschool children. They now worked part-time as, predominantly, nurses, caring assistants and office workers.

At my first meeting, I was struck by their apologies for what seemed to me to be fairly innocuous social conversation. My main contact, Jane, said that they usually sat together in the living room drinking their tea or coffee and 'chatting' until suddenly someone would notice the time and say, 'oh dear, we really should spend less time chatting! And that's what happens every week!' That the women denigrated their 'chatting' puzzled me, and it was a question to which I returned several times in interviews and later when interpreting my data.

I identified that in their 'chatting' they reviewed what had happened to the people for whom they had prayed at previous meetings. Their prayers were usually for people they knew, such as a daughter who was lonely during a period overseas, or a friend with back pain, a relative with cancer or a husband who was unemployed. When they reviewed progress during their meetings, during their so-called 'chatting', I was struck by how few prayers had been answered: the daughter remained friendless, the back pain continued, the relative died from cancer, the husband was still jobless. The focus of my study then became an analysis of how they continued their faith when confronted by the disappointment of unanswered prayer. How people reconcile bad events, or at least disappointment, in a world supposedly ruled by a good, all-powerful God, is a complex but necessary process for religious believers: the consequences of admitting that God had withdrawn His love and protection would be a chaotic disruption of the known cosmos, not only for the individual but for others sharing that worldview. By reconciling the apparent discontinuity between perfect love and terrible events, the believers restore order to their worldview. How they do this is known in theological circles as 'theodicy', a term proposed by the 18th-century rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, using two ancient Greek words, a divine being or god (theos) and justice (dike).

Theodicy may help people resolve, if only temporarily, the apparent contradictions between suffering and God's all-powerful love. Berger (1967: 53) argued that the purpose of theodicy is not to bring happiness to the suffering individual but rather to confer meaning onto circumstances which might otherwise appear chaotic. I observed how the Wednesday Women created theodicy as they 'chatted' about events, what they might mean and how the outcome was to be understood as an answer from God, even if it was not the answer or result they had originally wanted. The 'chatting' therefore, I concluded, operated as an essential mechanism in what I theorized was a 'ritual of theodicy' [START_REF] Day | Doing Theodicy: An Empirical Study of a Women's Prayer Group[END_REF]. My theory [START_REF] Day | The Sociological Function of Prayer: An Empirical Study of a Women's Prayer Group[END_REF][START_REF] Day | Doing Theodicy: An Empirical Study of a Women's Prayer Group[END_REF] drew mainly on anthropological literature relating to symbolism, ritual and power. (See, for example, [START_REF] Austin | How to Do Things With Words[END_REF][START_REF] Bell | Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice[END_REF][START_REF] Bell | Ritual, Perspectives and Dimensions[END_REF][START_REF] Bell | Acting Ritually[END_REF][START_REF] Geertz | The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays[END_REF] What the women had dismissed as 'chatting', I interpreted as important spiritual labour.

When I discussed my conclusions with the women, they disagreed that their 'chat' helped them reconcile any potential disappointment between actual events and their view of God. Any peace or understanding they gained, they said, was exclusively a gift from God, not their own labour. They wilfully rejected their own power or influence in restoring their worldview.

Some of their reaction may be explained in reference to the theology of the Baptist tradition. Weber, for example, concluded that Baptists believe that God speaks to them through their consciences, with revelation coming through the Holy Spirit that is active in their lives (Weber, 1992: 144-54).

A rejection of rules, priestly teachers and the Bible as sole authority characterizes the Baptist sect, Weber argued. While that might, indeed, be part of the teaching within the Baptist church, I observed what appeared to be a contradiction: while the women seemed to dismiss their own spiritual labour, they respected the spiritual labour of men. For example, on several occasions Jane would refer to her husband leading the prayers at home and recounted how she often asked him for encouragement or insight, which he had done by providing her with a quote from scripture. Her husband also leads a men's group called 'Maximising Manhood', based on an American model, which 'shows men how to be a leader in their own homes', she told me. I noted that Jane deferred to her husband as spiritual leader in their lives.

Several sociologists of religion also minimize the power of women's spiritual labour. In Wuthnow's (1994: 358) study of small groups, including church-based groups dominated by women, he concluded that a certain type of wisdom was missing because members did not pay sufficient attention to theological arguments:

In simplest terms, the sacred comes to be associated with small insights that seem intuitively correct to the small group rather than wisdom accrued over the centuries in hermitages, seminaries, universities, congregations and church councils. This, I suggest, is a gendered perception of wisdom, as men, not women, have traditionally inhabited hermitages and seminaries, and dominated the universities, congregations and church councils. Wuthnow seems to be implying that women who discuss and pray about everyday problems are not doing serious work, whereas men who inhabit male institutions, spend time in contemplation and discuss centuries-old theological ideas constructed by other men, are doing serious work.

His orientation reflects other male-constructed theories and definitions in anthropology and sociology that tend to focus on milieus inhabited by men and thus tend to universalize and marginalize women through ignoring anything specific about women's experience and constructs [START_REF] Bowie | The Anthropology of Religion[END_REF]. Woodhead (2000: 67-84) argues that this 'gender-blindness' is a feature of the sociological study of religion. She described Weber's idea of the iron cage and Durkheim's concept of anomie as particularly oriented to men because both assume participation in the public realm, a realm from which women were traditionally excluded. I also found it difficult to apply to women Weber's theories on why different groups of people were attracted to different kinds of religions and what their roles may be within those institutions [START_REF] Weber | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism[END_REF][START_REF] Weber | The Sociology of Religion[END_REF]).

Weber's analysis of affinities for a particular type of religion is based on what were at his time of writing men's economic conditions and occupations: the warrior, the peasant, the artisan, the missionary, the tent-maker, the prince, the capitalist and so on (Weber, 1993: 95-117). He did not suggest female equivalents to help explain the experience of nurses, teachers, low-paid or unpaid domestic labourers such as wives and mothers.

While I was aware, in my own pursuits in religious studies, of how theorists often negated or denigrated women's labour, both material and spiritual, I was unprepared for how the women I observed appeared to do it as well. I have already mentioned that they dismissed the power of their 'chatting' as unimportant, but I also observed how they often created theodicy by blaming women for the problems they observed.

At one meeting, for example, when we were discussing why they thought bad things often happened when a good God was supposedly in charge, Pat answered simply: 'we live in a fallen world; we wait to go with the Lord'. The 'fallen world', in a religious context, refers to the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from the perfect Garden of Eden by God, as a consequence of Eve eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

Helen later commented that 'we' were not blameless for the problems and suffering 'we' have in this world: 'I think we bring it on ourselves within our personal lives, within society', she said. One of their most animated discussions occurred when Pat, a nurse, expressed her worry that she may be required to dispense the 'morning-after pill'. This would be, she explained, tantamount to assisting an abortion.

While they were discussing how to pray to God to discourage teenagers from having sex, Jane exclaimed: 'It's not just teenage pregnancy! It's litter and it's having dinner in front of the TV!' They then discussed 'parents' not being as involved as they should be with their children. In their discussion, and in the other case study that follows, I listened to how 'parent' and 'people' were being used and suggest they are most often codes for 'mothers' and 'women' as they tend to relate to a strictly domestic sphere. The conflation of teenage pregnancy, litter, dinner in front of the TV and absent parents conjured an image of not just a fallen society, but a fallen family where a woman is not doing her job as a responsible wife and mother. The Wednesday Women's roles as full-time mothers when their children were young, and then as part-time workers, may have reinforced their sense of responsibility for the success, or failure, of the domestic realm -and their perceived culpability for the fall of the world.

Given that they were involved in a Baptist church, part of a conservative branch of Christianity, the issue of their 'traditional' responsibilities may also have been heightened.

For a woman who belongs to a conservative religion, maintaining an ascribed feminine role can be a powerful act of agency and resistance to a secularizing world. Woodhead (2001: 336-60), in a post-Weberian approach to understanding religious affinities, argued that an important part of women's attraction to some religions lies in the availability and nature of spaces that enable them to articulate their desires. This, she suggests, is a function of the nature and extent of social differentiation. Conservative brands of religion such as the Baptist form of Christianity, as I observed with the Wednesday Women, respond to modernity within society by increasing differentiation. This results in an increase of the importance for women of domestic, private social space. It may also result in further difficulties for women to leave those spaces. Despite apparent progress in the feminist agendas relating to reproduction and employment, women attending the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing noted that conservative religious alliances are resisting that progress (Bracke, 2003: 345). Following West and Zimmerman (1987: 145), I suggest my data illustrate how social differentiation assigns everyday personal matters and emotional labour to women. Viewed through a lens of differentiation, the Wednesday Women's act of what I term wilful disempowerment seems a rational strategy to preserve their religious tradition and their place within an increasingly secular world. The motif of 'the fallen world' to which the Wednesday Women referred resonated in my fieldwork within the wider culture outside their religious domain, and it is to that wider culture I now turn.

A Yorkshire Ethnography

My doctoral research between 2002 and 2006 was provoked by a finding in the UK 2001 census where 71.6 percent of respondents identified themselves as Christian. While this might present an enduringly religious picture, there were anomalies: fewer than 7 percent of the population is in church on an average Sunday, and the number is decreasing each year; all other forms of participation in traditional Christian rites -from baptisms to confirmations, weddings and funerals -are decreasing [START_REF] Brierley | Religious Trends[END_REF]. Many scholars in the sociology of religion explain this as 'believing without belonging', arguing that religion -at least Christianity -is simply changing and retreating from the public sphere and losing its broad social significance, rather than disappearing [START_REF] Davie | Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging[END_REF][START_REF] Heelas | The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality[END_REF][START_REF] Wilson | Feminism and the Sociology of Religion: From Gender-Blindness to Gendered Difference[END_REF]. Some scholars disagree and say that both practice and belief are declining [START_REF] Bruce | Religion in Modern Britain[END_REF][START_REF] Bruce | God is Dead: Secularization in the West[END_REF][START_REF] Voas | Religion in Britain: Neither Believing nor Belonging[END_REF]. My challenge in my doctoral research was to answer the question 'what do people believe in nowadays?' through an inductive, qualitative approach where subjective meanings could be derived from the field rather than being imposed at the outset by asking overtly religious questions.

Instead, I asked open questions to probe informants' beliefs and practices related to morality, meaning and transcendence: how they knew rights from wrongs; what or who was most important to them; what made them happy, sad, or afraid; how much control they felt they had over their lives; what they thought happened after death; how they thought life began and what the meaning of life might be [START_REF] Day | Believing in Belonging in Contemporary Britain: A Case Study from Yorkshire[END_REF]. My 14 months of fieldwork involved more than 200 people aged between 14 and 83, evenly split by gender and cutting across socioeconomic groups.

Census data were used to confirm that the population of the Yorkshire region I studied generally conformed to national averages, particularly related to age, gender, ethnicity and social class. I used a snowballing method, where I chose certain people as 'gatekeepers' and relied on them to introduce me to others. In order to minimize researcher-imposed bias, I presented the research issue as sociological rather than specifically religious. My main analysis relies on 68 semi-structured interviews, one-toone recorded and transcribed verbatim. Informants typically responded to my questions through examples, often lengthy and impassioned accounts and complex elaborations, which I termed 'belief narratives'. At the end of each interview, I asked people to tell me what they had said in answer to the 2001 census question 'what is your religion?' and why they had answered as they did. Like the census, my study found that most people said 'Christian'. To my initial surprise, that category was mostly composed of people who appeared 'secular', in that they had already told me during the interview that they did not engage with institutionalized religion, and were either agnostics or atheists. A minority were the 'faithful', who engaged with their faith in their everyday lives, believed in God and Jesus, respected religion (even if they did not attend church regularly) and prayed regularly. Through analysing their interviews using five dimensions of content, sources, practices, salience and function, I concluded that many people claim affiliation to Christianity as an expression of their desire to belong to people like themselves, particularly for ethnic, family or social identity reasons. It was that insight and similar examples from my research that led me to my thesis: 'believing in belonging'. Eventually, I dropped the terms secular and religious in favour of 'anthropocentric' and 'theocentric'. More detail about those findings can be found in my other work [START_REF] Day | Believing in Belonging in Contemporary Britain: A Case Study from Yorkshire[END_REF][START_REF] Voas | Secularity in Great Britain[END_REF].

Returning here to my specific focus on women, I found in my study that twice as many women as men were 'faithful Christians' or broadly theocentric, expressing beliefs in God, spirits, higher powers or other noninstitutional spiritualities. This corresponds to wider patterns in the UK, where women outnumber men on all indices of religiosity and spirituality, including church attendance, belief and commitment (see, for example, [START_REF] Brierley | Religious Trends[END_REF][START_REF] Heelas | The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion is Giving Way to Spirituality[END_REF][START_REF] Walter | The Religiosity of Women in the Modern West[END_REF]. Although I did not ask people about uncanny or supernatural experiences, experience of the supernatural was very common: a third of informants reported something of this sort, irrespective of age and social class. Reports varied from feeling the presence of God or deceased relatives, to seeing ghosts or hearing inexplicable sounds. It made little difference, however, whether the respondent was 'secular' or 'religious' and most did not describe such experiences in religious terms. This finding accords with one of the largest, ongoing studies of supernatural experience, which finds most people who experience 'something outside themselves' explicitly disassociate those experiences from named deities or religion [START_REF] Hardy | The Spiritual Nature of Man: A Study of Religious Experience[END_REF][START_REF] Hay | Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Experience[END_REF].

Significantly, in my study more women than men reported supernatural experiences (39 percent vs 25 percent) and discussed those experiences differently. I now turn to exploring in more detail the gender component of supernatural experience.

THE GENDERED SUPERNATURAL

Evidence from my study and my inference from larger studies mentioned in the previous section point to gender, not religiosity, being a predictor of supernatural experience. I focus now on a difference I noted between women and men who discussed their supernatural experiences, which recalled a theme I had noted in my earlier case study about the Wednesday Women. Female informants discussed the nature of the supernatural as relational, conferring a strong sense of protection and belonging, in contrast with the less emotive and more transient experiences of men. Further, women stressed the importance of submitting to a higher power in ways men did not, again recalling the way the Wednesday Women refused to accord themselves the power of creating 'theodicy'. I called this selfconscious act 'wilful disempowerment'.

A clue to understanding why some women I observed might wilfully disempower themselves in relation to a supernatural power may lie, I explore, in a common feature of some women's belief narratives of a 'fall'. It seemed to be following a crisis or disappointment that led several women to conclude -irrespective of age or social class -that it was better to let a higher power look after them. For example, Becca, 28, an education advisor, said she did not believe in God anymore, does not attend church and did not know how to classify herself anymore in terms of a religion. She recalled the ending of an important relationship, telling me, in bitter tones: I did have this wonderful life map of what I actually wanted, and it's the usual fairytale of getting married, settling down, and actually making a marriage that works. Nothing big. Just complete happiness for the rest of my life. And it didn't happen, and it doesn't matter how much I can picture it and see it, I don't think it will happen. It just didn't happen and so I've got quite cynical.

It was following the traumatic breakdown of that relationship that she decided, she told me, that relationships were out of her personal control. She said she now trusted in what she called the 'spirit guides' of her deceased grandmother and deceased brother who will guide her to meet the right partner and in general protect her. On one occasion, she said, she woke in the night thinking of her brother and felt very calm, as if 'someone was looking over me'. I note that the spirits were not impersonal entities for her, but the spirits of people with whom she felt she belonged.

A similar story about being protected by a deceased relative following a traumatic event was related to me by a student, Briony, 19. She, like Becca, said she thinks that she is destined to meet certain people, and feels protected by her deceased grandmother, 'sort of there, and sort of looking'. She first sensed the presence of her grandmother when she awoke in hospital after a suicide attempt. She says she likes to think her grandmother is watching over her, not so much controlling what happens to her but 'regulating in a sense' to ensure that not too much harm or disappointment comes her way.

A slightly different relationship with the supernatural was expressed by Rosemarie, a 49-year-old nurse separated from her husband and two children. She told me about her desire to relinquish her power over relationships by connecting 'with the feminine side, which is going with the flow'. That way, she told me, the 'ultimate man' her 'soul mate' will find her: I'm seeking the ultimate man, really. I'm seeking the, my soul mate. Sometimes I think I'm seeking it, but sometimes I think, I'm hoping it may find me. I'm hoping it may find me. This mate will not be, she said, an ordinary man but some kind of god that she described as a 'higher being' in a human man's form. Both Rosemarie and Becca spoke about how they thought there existed an entity or energy that gave the world meaning because it was in control. Rosemarie said: 'I believe in love, that there is love in the world, and there is nurturing. And hope. And that there is some plan in the universe, some reason to be here.' Rosemarie, Briony and Becca, women different by occupation and age, spoke in similar terms about how they had to give up power over their romantic dreams and direction in order to allow something more powerful than they to act for them. Like the Wednesday Women, they created a theodicy to sometimes reconcile disappointment and renew their relationship with a higher, benign being. The warmth with which they spoke of their spirit guides, or higher powers, suggested an emotional connection and a sense of belonging. Central to their idea of being protected, and even, I suggest, to their idea of their own disempowerment, was their longing for relatedness. Their descriptions contrasted sharply with how men described supernatural experiences.

Phil, 37, a manager in the public sector, practises what he says some might call paganism, but he describes as 'the old ways'. He believes in spirits and other supernatural entities, yet does not think they control his life. In contrast to the women I spoke with, who talked about destiny being out of their control, he described a human-caused 'more instantaneous fate. I believe you have some control over it.' He elaborated:

We always have this fundamental idea that we can control our destiny and our fate, therefore we want to do things in order to do that. And I believe I can do that. I don't believe that the next 30 years of my life is mapped out, but maybe the next few weeks might be mapped out from what I'm doing.

Phil also believes he has power over his personal relationships and can determine much of their outcomes, again, in marked contrast to the kinds of examples I heard from the women quoted earlier. He told me: I note his use of the possessive pronoun 'my' in referring to nature and magic, conveying a sense of ownership and perhaps domination over the other powers.

Several men I interviewed also had experiences with entities that might be described as supernatural. Unlike the women quoted earlier, they did not describe themselves as subordinate to supernatural powers and nor did they convey a sense of a continuing relationship with those powers, or a sense that they belonged with them. For example, Chris, 42, an atheist, told me he had seen a ghost, someone from 'another world'. He said he thought one day science would be able to explain such things. Patrick, 49, an atheist, said he had felt the presence of his dead mother, once, on the day of her funeral. He said he did 'not believe that there is any all-powerful force that is organizing human destiny. I think that is utterly ridiculous.'

My finding that supernatural experiences were common, although their interpretation varies by gender, contrasts sharply with some theories about secularization. Along with the 'loss of public significance', secularization theory is the theory that people lose their belief in the power of supernatural entities. Bruce (2002: 200) says he agrees with a definition of religion as including belief in the existence of 'supernatural entities with powers of action'. Shiner (1967: 208) cites G.J. Holyoake, who formed the Secular Society in the 19th-century US with a programme he called 'secularism', defined as a practical philosophy to 'interpret and organize life without recourse to the supernatural'. His reference to 'recourse' runs through later discussions about the secular, particularly with Berger conceptualizing secularization as when people regard their world 'without the benefit of religious interpretations' (Berger, 1967: 107-8).

My analysis does not support those theories. Those informants who volunteered information about supernatural experiences were often those least religious or spiritual. They were, however, mostly women. The key, therefore, to understanding supernatural experience is to look at gender, not religion. In doing so, I have argued that the supernatural experiences reported by women tend to be ones conferring feelings of belonging, reassurance and protection within contexts of disappointment. The mechanism used to effect supernatural protection, be that by God or deceased relatives, is women's submission. Women's wilful disempowerment therefore appears as a reasonable strategy to effect protection and security in what I will now describe as a fallen, and hostile, world.

I return to the discourse of the 'fallen world' begun earlier and examine how it appeared through the narratives of both my anthropocentric, non-religious informants and my theocentric informants. The argument I develop relies on a discourse that women are responsible for the 'fall' by exercising their personal independence and power, neglecting their families and other domestic responsibilities.

THE FALLEN IN A SECULAR WORLD

A motif of women producing a fallen world ran through many of my interviews. I was not surprised to find a discourse about fallen women among members of the more conservative types of Christianity, such as John, 51. A teacher and part-time pastor, John said: 'I almost weep for society' because it has lost its moral framework, mainly through allowing abortion and divorce to become easier.

In a similar fashion, Vera, 83, a church-attending Christian and housewife, expressed concern that children were not being brought up properly today through 'parental' neglect and lack of discipline.

I also, however, found similar views about women and the 'fallen family' among anthropocentric, 'nominalist' Christians -those who are agnostic, often averse to religion, but who would tick 'Christian' on the census. Barry, 48, a book-keeper, said society has changed 'beyond all recognition, really'. Barry described himself as 'an old-fashioned person' who knew he should behave with honour and loyalty. Those are values that 'seem to be disappearing from our world', he said. He said he had been brought up to:

. . . hold doors open for women. And all of that kind of thing seems to be disappearing a bit. And no one has time for anyone else anymore. It's a very selfish world that we live in.

I infer from him that it is women who do not allow him to open doors for them, and who are selfish. He also discussed children today not respecting authority. Both he and another anthropocentric Christian nominalist, George, 60, an accountant, presented in separate interviews similar images representing a former better world. That was when, they each said, there was always a local policeman in the village who knew all the children and would report to the children's father if any were misbehaving. The policeman would 'give a slap' to an offending child, and so would the father. Also, neighbours would see what children were doing and would also report on their behaviour. Nowadays, both said, the policemen are gone from the villages and people who live there do not know each other anymore and are often not home during the day.

The difference to which they are alluding, I suggest, is that women are no longer home during the day keeping their eyes on their and other people's children, because they are working. Katherine, 26, a secretary and anthropocentric nominalist Christian, said she thought raising children properly is very important, and she feels concerned that this is changing now. She explained that: 'I think perhaps, there seems to be a lot more people getting pregnant nowadays, at a younger age, who perhaps can't look after the children.'

Informants' strong views about the 'place' of women also arose among people who said they had no religion. Margaret, 74, said in our interview that she found the changing role of women, and the behaviour of young women, 'frightening'. The examples she gave were wives not cooking for their husbands, and young women swearing on the street. Nicola, 37, said people were a lot happier 30 or 40 years ago when women stayed at home to look after the children. But, it wasn't just women neglecting their children -it was TV:

TV has a lot to answer for I think, with a lot of crap shows on TV now. Well, we have Sky so loads of different channels and sometimes it's unbelievable what really goes on. I think drugs and money, TV, has a lot to do with it.

Hannah, a single, 35-year-old mother of four children, heavily pregnant with her fifth child, described her religious identity as a lapsed Catholic, and referred to herself in terms that seemed to be self-conscious about how other people might see her. When I asked her my first question, 'what do you believe in?' she said the question made her immediately think about values and morals, particularly 'family values'.

She said that although she had very strong ideas about morality, this might appear as 'a contradiction in terms'. She continued, 'Being a divorcée, I do have quite big family values'. I asked her why she thought that might be a contradiction and she said, 'Well, you kind of think, how can I have big family values when I'm a single parent?'

The foregoing illustrations demonstrate that the same motifs, almost to the word, run through the narratives of people as conventionally religious as those I interviewed in the women's prayer group, and among atheists. The fallen world is characterized by teenage pregnancy, abortion, misbehaving children and too much television-watching when selfish women go to work and neglect their families.

DISCUSSION

That women are responsible for society's moral health or downfall is a familiar argument, according to [START_REF] Brown | The Death of Christian Britain[END_REF]. This relates to a gendered, Christian discourse that located piety in femininity from about 1800 to 1960. He argued that the age of 'discursive Christianity' collapsed during the 1960s when women stopped subscribing to that discourse and 'the nature of femininity changed fundamentally' (Brown, 2001: 195). While I think Brown has a powerful argument about the nature of discursive Christianity, I am not convinced that the nature of femininity has changed fundamentally for all women. Women do still look after their husbands and children, even while working outside the home. [START_REF] Hochschild | The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home[END_REF] 'second shift' argument illustrates that women in dual-income households still perform the majority of domestic labour, as well as care duties for their immediate and extended families.

The fallen world motif has symbolic value for a range of people irrespective of their religious beliefs. I discovered that it resonates as strongly in the apparently 'secular' world as it does in a prayer group of religiously conservative women. Women who maintain their places within the domestic, 'feminine' sphere are revered, and women who leave that sphere and subordinate role risk hostility and blame for the downfall of their children, communities and other designated parts of the 'world'. This apparently 'natural' scheme of gender relations can be supported through what [START_REF] Walby | Theorizing Patriarchy[END_REF] describes as 'discursive patriarchy'.

In describing patriarchy as 'a system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women' (Walby, 1990: 20), Walby's analysis focuses on how patriarchy can be understood best through exploring structures of production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and cultural institutions, to which I add religion and the family.

Women, as fully conscious agents, are aware of the gendered normative roles and practices operating in contemporary UK society in general, not only in conservative wings of Christianity, but more widely, where men dominate, oppress and exploit women. [START_REF] Norris | Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide[END_REF] suggest that pockets of religiosity in different societies can be partly explained by conditions that promote and maintain 'existential insecurity'. Religious beliefs in those contexts provide some protection in this world and hope for the next. In my Yorkshire case study, I found tones of 'existential insecurity' resonating through narratives of relationship breakdown or other crises of vulnerability, where some women wilfully disempower themselves in exchange for supernatural protection. As such, their wilful disempowerment can be read as an example of a pragmatic form of belief. In his study of spiritual healing practices in Zambia, Kirsch identified that people switched their loyalty to healers depending on the perceived efficacy of the healer. Their ability to stop believing in one healer and start believing in another illustrated the flexible, malleable and agentdirected nature of belief. Kirsch (2004: 708) described these as 'wilful acts [that] were governed by pragmatism'.

CONCLUSION

In summary, I suggest that what I have read as 'wilful disempowerment' is a self-conscious act on the part of women who desire to maintain a worldview where a higher power is in control and in relationship with them. I have argued that the process of becoming wilfully disempowered involves experiencing a threat to their worldview and existential security through, for example, unanswered prayer or relationship breakdown. This break requires a repair or 'theodicy', effected by the women's affirmation that there is a higher power who will look after them and other matters on earth and submission to that power. I have, further, suggested that a way to read the 'fallen' world is to read it through a patriarchal lens where it is considered natural for women to sustain the family and society. This is particularly accentuated in the cultural institutions of religion and family.

Although it did not appear through this study that a range of other variables, such as age, social class, occupation or education, made a significant difference to how women described their religious or spiritual experiences, the study is small, and those differences might be magnified through future, larger studies. It was notable, however, that my two separate case studies both revealed what I have argued is a striking finding: supernatural experiences are common and unrelated to religious or spiritual beliefs. Further, I found gender was an explanatory and predictive variable: supernatural experiences occur more often with women than men, and are explained by women, not men, in terms of protection, belonging and their self-conscious submission, or wilful disempowerment, in relation to those entities. Further research might fruitfully follow a line of enquiry about belonging and the nature of the supernatural. NOTE 1.

I later discovered that Robert Wuthnow (1994) had coined the same term for a group of women he had studied.

  If things weren't going so good for me in a friendship or a relationship, then I would sit back and think, ok, what am I doing about that? As a psychological person, yeah, what are my mannerisms and my behaviour doing to encourage that, but also I would think, ok, what else can I do with my nature and my magic? What can I do to encourage that to change? I would tend to do both, really.

European Journal ofWomen's Studies 15(3)