In the United States, starting in the 1970s, neo-pagan spiritualities became an attractive option to women because of the perception that Christian and Jewish traditions were patriarchal, and particularly denied women authority and leadership positions. Feminists were also concerned that Christianity and Judaism were critical of women's sexuality. Embracing Goddess traditions, witchcraft, and other kinds of neo-pagan practices was a way to give women agency and power.

A theologian like Mary Daly is illustrative of these debates. In 1968, her book, The Church and the Second Sex, was an argument against sexism in the Catholic church and a plea for women’s inclusion. By 1973, in her book Beyond God the Father, Daly had rejected Christianity as a lost cause, and compared women asking for equality in the church to an African American asking to join the Ku Klux Klan. In 1978's Gyn/Ecology, she had begun to explore these new radical feminist women-centered spiritualities as an alternative to traditional religion.

Goddess Religion

Goddess religion was based on now-discredited nineteenth-century European ideas that ancient societies were matrilineal and controlled by women. In Elizabeth Gould Davis’s 1971 The First Sex, Davis argued women existed before men and that men were a flawed mutation of women. According to Davis, peaceful, vegetarian societies dominated by women controlled all of the Earth, and worshiped Goddesses. Eventually this golden age of women was ended by pastoral nomads like the ancient Hebrews, who used Judaism to subjugate women. Christianity, according to Davis, was a further effort to assert patriarchal control of women. Eventually she believed women would overthrow Christianity and bring back Goddess worship.

Merlin Stone’s 1976 When God was a Women had similar views. Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam subjugated women, destroying a peaceful Goddess religion. Stone was very invested in the creation of a contemporary Goddess movement.

Feminist Witchcraft and Wicca

In the 1970s, women like Zsuzsanna Budapest began to emphasis the role of women in the Wicca espoused by Gerald Gardener. Budapest believed she was heir to an ancient women’s witchcraft tradition that had been destroyed by Judaism. According to Budapest, feminist Wicca also was in harmony with nature.

One particularly important voice in the rise of feminist witchcraft has been Starhawk (born Miriam Simos). Starhawk was born to a Jewish family but was frustrated that as a woman she could not be ordained. Starhawk’s work notable avoided much of the antisemitism that was present in much of early feminist neo-paganism. Starhawk gravitated to witchcraft after taking an anthropology class.

Starhawk’s 1979 The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess integrated ecology, feminism and ritual together. Starhawk is usually associated with the Reclaiming Collective, though she also has been known to be active within the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (her work also appears in that denomination's service book).

Why Not Atheism?

One part of your question is why women opted to be neo-pagan, rather than becoming atheists. Some women may have left religion altogether to be solely active in the political side of the feminist movement, and simply no longer cared about religious issues. While there were a few women in the leadership of atheist organizations (most notably, Madelyn Murray O’Hair was president of American Atheists), atheist organizations were predominantly male.

Part of the reason for this may be that secular movements in the U.S. and Europe have tended to present themselves as hyper-rational and male-dominated. Freethinkers from the nineteenth century onward critiqued religion for being female-dominated and emphasized how irreligion restored male control. Joan Wallach Scott’s book, Sex and Secularism, is a useful history of how atheism and secularism were seen as particularly male-focused.

Conclusion

It would not be wrong to see feminist neo-paganism as an extension of second wave feminism within religious communities. Some women stayed in Jewish and Christian traditions, writing feminist theology and eventually securing the right to women’s ordination in mainline Protestant, and Jewish Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative traditions. A smaller portion of women left established traditions, believing that only in new, female dominated religious groups was change possible.

Neo-paganism offered women a way to have a feminist religious practice. As mainline Protestant and Jewish traditions became more open to women’s leadership, and to feminist theology, some of the attraction of feminist neo-paganism seems to have faded. From the 1970s through the 1990s however, Neo-pagan traditions offered an important alternative to more established traditions for many women.

Further Reading:

Bednarowski, Mary Farrell. The Religious Imagination of American Women. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1973.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978.

Ruether, Rosemary. Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006.

Scott, Joan Wallach. Sex and Secularism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. New York: Harper Collins, 1979.