Gender and Religion

     NO.1

To understand the system of race, class, and gender in America, we have to look at England’s role in their systems of class. David G. Hackett explains in his piece, “Gender and Religion in American Culture, 1870-1930,’’ from Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995, that, ‘‘During this time period, the emergence of a consumer-oriented corporate order undermined the coherence of the Victorian gender system; rising gender consciousness among black women turned the ideology of ‘women’s sphere’ into a disrupted terrain of racial and struggle class; while women’s devotional practices became a site of gender contestation within American Catholic culture. Each of these developments has given impetus to new studies. Historians of conservative evangelicalism have complicated the heretofore easy equation of ‘Protestantism’ with ‘women’s sphere’ by delineating the different understandings of women’s role within early twentieth-century Protestantism; Progress across racial lines has been initiated by several important literary and historical studies that reveal how the separate spheres ideology served the interests of the white middle class by camouflaging racial and economic differences.’’

 NO. 2

Since the early 1980’s, advances in the study of gender in American history have come primarily through an unmasking of the assumptions of earlier studies; Others have laid bare the earlier scholarship’s assumptions to universal gender definitions that do not take into account differences in women’s roles based on race, class, or region. Additionally, several historians have begun to explore the influence of gender relations on the lives of men. As a result, we are beginning to get a picture of gender in American history that goes beyond the ‘women’s sphere’ experience of white, middle-class, northeastern women. For the past twenty years of this apparent lifetime, the Protestant mainline has given way to a religious studies interest in outsiders’ social and cultural history. Concurrently, an older Protestant consensus narrative has become one of several stories that, together, seek to account for the American religious past. Further inquiries have questioned the usefulness of both liberal and evangelical labels in accounting for the deep racial, economic and theological divisions of the late nineteenth century among the more than 150 Protestant denominations, not to speak of the rapidly growing population of Catholics with their substantial differences of nationality, theology, and social class. As historians have started to study the deep diversities seriously in American culture, gender has emerged as an important analytic category for re-imagining America’s religious past.

NO. 3

    As recently as 1985, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese complained that historians of religion and gender have too often added ‘religion to an almost finished picture rather than exploring ways in which religion might refine and even radically revise the picture.’ Within the past decade, however, recent developments both within and without the field of American religious history have begun to coalesce and suggest the contours of promising new departures. Most of this new work focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.