Volume 2, Fall/Winter 1998
Essay

From the beginning one of the project’s goals has been to contribute to thinking about the teaching of women and religion in the 20^th-century, particularly on an undergraduate level. Our objective has been to come up with suggestions that would apply to a number of different teaching situations: we are interested, for instance, in how the project subject matter might be integrated into a larger course in American religious history; into an American women’s history curriculum; and finally, into the teaching of American history more generally.

We don’t pretend to have come up with "the answers," especially before we are sure precisely what interpretations and reinterpretations will emerge in the next year as the project nears its conclusion. Our fondest hope, of course, is that the projected volume of essays will be a valuable contribution to the kinds of courses we mention above. But since that essay collection won’t appear for a while, and courses await teaching and planning today, we thought we’d initiate a discussion of teaching material now. We invite readers’ comments and further suggestions, and would be delighted to give them an airing in our third and final newsletter.

Given that our subject is women and Protestantism in the twentieth-century and that we can’t presume to be well versed in, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, or other American faiths, we will focus here mostly (though not exclusively) on Protestant sources and will favor late nineteenth and twentieth-century readings rather than earlier ones.

Fortunately, it’s possible by now to cite a small but growing list of volumes dealing specifically with women and religion in the late nineteenth and twentieth-centuries that students can read with great profit: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920; Susan Yohn, A Contest of Faiths: Missionary Women and Pluralism in the American Southwest; Cynthia Grant Tucker, Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal women ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930; Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes; Patricia Hill, The World Their Household: The American Woman's Foreign Mission Movement and Cultural Transformation, 1870-1920; Jane Hunter, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China; Mark Chaves, Ordaining Women: Culture and Conflict in Religious Organizations; R. Marie Griffith, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission; Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present. Jody Shapiro Davie, Women in the Presence: Constructin Community and Seeking Spirituality in Mainline Protestantism and Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, are participant observer rather than historical studies by a folklorist and anthropologist respectively, but they give valuable pictures of late twentieth-century Presbyterianism and vodou. If we had to choose the one book that not only covers its subject well but also connects with sophistication to the discourses of other scholarly areas (women’s history and women’s studies, African American studies, cultural criticism) , we’d select Righteous Discontent. But we have found its very richness and complexity difficult for students. We suspect that if teachers had more leisure than they usually do to "cover" it--and even to devise a study guide for it--it would be more successful with students. We suspect similar difficulties of length, complexity, and unfamiliar context would hinder the use of most of these other books. T

he problem of too much reading could be addressed by more assignments of essay length, and here our candidate would be first and foremost Ann Braude’s "Women’s History Is American Religious History" (in Thomas Tweed’ s Retelling U.S. Religious History). Braude’s essay asks big historiographical questions about the role of women in American religion and is accessible to students because it poses a very basic, commonsense query: why, if women make up majorities in almost all religious denominations in America, shouldn’t religious history be, in large part, their history? If we take those majorities seriously, what would religious history begin to look like? Other, essay possibilities are Robert Orsi’s "‘He Keeps Me Going’: Women’ s Devotion to Saint Jude Thaddeus and the Dialectics of Gender in American Catholicism, 1929-19651" in Thomas Kselman, ed. Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to American and European Religion; Virginia Lieson Brereton’s "United and Slighted: Women as Subordinated Insiders" in William R. Hutchison, Between the Times; and Colleen McDannell’s introduction to Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. Though the Orsi is of course a Catholic source, it presents one of the most fruitful approaches in the literature for talking about women’s twentieth-century devotional lives.

So far we’ve been-discussing mostly texts whose central concern is women and Protestantism. There are also a few notable volumes whose main focus is not women-and-religion but which perforce deal with religion as an important part of their story; they thereby model how religion can be incorporated in an ostensibly secular setting: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945; Ruth Hutchinson Crocker, Social Work and Social Order: the Settlement the Settlement Movement in Two Industrial Cities 1889-1930; and Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939. In addition, Ruth Crocker’s forthcoming biography of Olivia Sage promises to join this group. Such texts might be particularly helpful in an American women’s history course. We find it fascinating but probably not surprising that the most promising bridge-building between the study of women in religion on the one hand and women’s history on the other hand is going on in studies of women’s turn of the century progressive reform efforts.

None of the above works was written with the primary goal of serving as a college text. What of the books specifically designed for a-student audience? We’re thinking of Mark Noll’s A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, Catherine Albanese’s American Religion and Religions, George Marsden’s Religion and American Culture, and Peter Williams’, America’s Religions: Traditions and Cultures. (Julia Mitchell Corbett’s Religion in America pays a good deal of attention to women, but her book is not primarily historical in approach.) Happily Noll, Albanese, Marsden, and Williams have contributed to the incorporation of women in American religious history in at least two ways. First, they have included chapters and sections specifically on women, and second, they have covered areas of American religious history that have hitherto been regarded as "marginal" but in which women have figured prominently, e.g., spiritualism, Christian Science, and pentecostalism. Still, as some of these writers would be the first to admit, women’s topics sometimes persist in coming across as "add ons." This problem of an integrated narrative will be hard to solve, we’re convinced, until we have a surer grasp of twentieth-century Protestant women’s themes.

What of the self-described women and religion texts? Because of their considerable substance, they are most likely to be used as graduate level texts. The most obvious would be Susan Lindley’s recent "You Have Stept Out of Your Place: A History of Women and Religion in America, which brings together the scholarship on women into a coherent narrative. Catherine Wessinger’s two volumes (Women on the Margins and Religious Institutions and Women’s Leadership) approach women’s history according to diverse religious traditions, both Protestant and otherwise. And Rosemary Ruether and Rosemary Keller’s In Their Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women's Religious Writing offers a documentary history, arranged according to traditions (Native American, mainline Protestant, evangelical Protestant, Judaism, Catholicis).

Finally, we shouldn’t overlook sources of other kinds, even though the pedagogy of their use has hardly been begun at all. There are hymns written by women and hymns whose words comment indirectly on gender. Literary works are a good.way to learn about women and religion, e.g., Pearl Buck’s The Exile, Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, or Mary McCarthy’ s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Films both, documentary and dramatic can aid students’ learning in ways words cannot do: "Household Saints," "Trip to Bountiful," "Born Again," "Elmer Gantry," "Battle for the Minds," and "Say Amen, Somebody." These sources have to be used carefully, of course, since they seldom reflect directly and simply the historical "reality."

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