Women and the New Age

• Heelas and Woodhead found that 80% of the participants in the holistic milieu in Kendal were female. This may be due to the fact that women are more often involved with 'nature' and natural processes (for example through childbirth) and a healing role.
• New Age movements often celebrate the 'natural' and involve cults of healing, which gives women a higher status and sense of self-worth. Similarly, Bruce (2011) argues that women's experience of child-rearing makes them less aggressive and goal-oriented, and more cooperative and caring - where men wish to achieve, women wish to feel. In Bruce's view, this fits the expressive emphasis of the New Age.
• Women may also be attracted to the New Age because it emphasises the importance of being 'authentic' rather than merely acting out roles - including gender roles. Women may be more attracted than men to this because they are more likely to perceive their roles as restrictive.
• The individual sphere Similarly, women in paid work may experience a role conflict: between their masculinised, instrumental role in the public sphere of work, and their traditional expressive feminine role in the private sphere of the family. Woodhead (2001) suggests that for these women, New Age beliefs are attractive because they appeal to a third sphere, which she calls the individual sphere.
• This sphere is concerned with individual autonomy and personal growth rather than role performance. New Age beliefs bypass the role conflict by creating a new source of identity for women based on their 'inner self' rather than these contradictory social roles, giving them a sense of wholeness.
• Similarly, Callum Brown (2009) argues that the New Age

  'self' religions - those that emphasise subjective experience rather than external authority - attract women recruits because they appeal to women's wish for autonomy. On the other hand, some women may be attracted to fundamentalism because of the certainties of a traditional gender role that it prescribes for them.
• Class differences Bruce (1996; 2011) points out that there are class differences in the types of religion that appeal to women. While New Age beliefs and practices emphasising personal autonomy, control and self-development appeal to some middle-class women, working-class women are more attracted to ideas that give them a passive role, such as belief in an all-powerful God or fatalistic ideas such as superstition, horoscopes and lucky charms.
• As Bruce notes, these differences fit with other class differences in areas such as education, where the middle-class belief in the ability of individuals to control their own destiny contrasts with fatalistic working-class attitudes.