‘Priestesses’,Playboy, and the Prehistory of Feminist Scholarship inChristianity and CrisisMagazine, 1945–1965

Abstract

This is a case study of how feminist discourse emerged in a key part of the U.S. Protestant academy. It analyzes howChristianity and Crisis, a leading Protestant journal of opinion, addressed gender and sexuality from the 1940s to the mid-1960s. It relates this discussion toC&C’s larger transformation from a voice of Cold War liberalism in the 1940s to a forum for feminism and various liberation theologies beginning in the 1960s. Before 1965 the main ways thatC&C’s all-male leadership addressed gender were masculinist rhetoric, mild support for women’s ordination; defense of the bourgeois family against perceived challenges, and controversies about sexual representation in the media. AlthoughC&C’s overt attention to gender and its sympathy with feminism were limited, its self-image was based on supporting underdogs against unjust forms of power. AsC&Cembraced ‘contextual’ approaches in the 1960s and debated sexual ethics, it began to conceptualize ‘contexts’ partly in terms of gender systems. All this was pre-feminist, but was in the background when feminism began to force itself onC&Cduring the late 1960s from inside and outside its core constituencies. It meant thatC&Cwas relatively well prepared (compared with most journals of its kind) to incorporate female personnel, define ‘contexts’ from the standpoint of previously neglected female underdogs, and begin rethinking gender and sexuality.