Protestant Women Research Articles

Women Activists: rewriting Greenham's history

The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp protest of the 1980s and 1990s has become synonymous with radical feminism. Given that many of the challenges raised and discourses employed were similar, it might appear as a relatively uncomplicated progression from Women's Liberation. From this perspective, the threat of nuclear war could be viewed as a stark indication of the persistence of male violence enabled by an unremittingly patriarchal world. The women's protest was therefore often described by those who took part as a direct challenge to the status quo, intended to bring about the cultural revolution required to overthrow it. This article examines two histories of the event published in the ‘post-feminist’ era of the mid 2000s. It will demonstrate how a shift in discourses since the end of the protest has enabled these emergent texts to challenge the previously dominant version of the Greenham peace camp. It will go on to suggest that this shift was necessary in order to communicate a new contemporary political message: a message that gains its authority by drawing on other ‘silent’ discourses from Greenham. It will compare this development to the post-suffrage period as observed by other historians. In so doing, it will once again reveal how closely the ‘present’ influences the reflections of the ‘past’, and how this affects the performances of participants in their autobiographical accounts.

Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America (Allison P. Coudert)

<i>Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America</i> (Allison P. Coudert)

Soldiers of Faith behind the Lines: religious women and community patriotism during the First World War in France

On the eve of World War I, considerable tensions existed among French Catholics, Protestants, and Jews and between Catholics and the French state. The crisis provoked by the First World War allowed these faith groups to prove their worth to France through adherence to the Union sacrée. The wartime activities of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women became important symbols of each faith community's solidarity with France. The war made women representatives of their communities' devotion to France. Religious communities' portrayal of their women's wartime work illuminates the divergent goals for the Union sacrée among different faith communities.

Southern Magnolias and Orange Lilies: Gender, Class, and School Integration at Central High and Holy Cross

Scholars have written volumes regarding pro-active American Southern and Northern Irish women in the American civil rights movement and Northern Ireland's troubles. This work generally examines the South’s white, upper-class integrationists and Northern Ireland's Catholic Republicans, while Southern working-class segregationists and Northern Ireland's Protestant Loyalists are ignored. These women and the reasons for invisibility in historical records are similar. Both cultures demanded feminine submission to their place, serving God and man, Dixie and Ulster; conservatism discouraged females from politics. This explores the unusual public stance of Southern workingclass segregationist women and Northern Ireland's working-class Protestant females during Little Rock's Central High School crisis of 1957 and Belfast's Holy Cross Primary School protest of 2001. Segregationists protested integrating black students, while Protestants railed at Catholic families who walked daughters to school via the exclusively Protestant Glenbryn Estate. In analyzing these events, I examine the gender history and traditions of each group. I survey the social environment that motivated these women's protests, and the justifications used to delve into the public arena while defending the status quo. I also examine how these choices altered political roles for both groups in the protests' aftermath. My analysis yields integral conclusions regarding the personal and political ideologies of Southern segregationist and Northern Irish Protestant females. This study explores the fears and anxieties that these females held toward what they regarded as black and Catholic encroachment in societies. My study belongs to a limited body of research that will hopefully begin to provide understanding of the perspectives and consequences of two distantly separated groups of women who have been quieted in the Central High and Holy Cross dramas.

Living in the American South and the Likelihood of Having a Tubal Sterilization

This research uses a nationally representative sample of 7,643 American women from the public- and restricted-use National Survey of Family Growth, Cycle 6 data files and logistic regressions to model for the first time the relationship between having a tubal sterilization and southern region of residence. This research finds a disparity in reproductive health for southern women; women living in the South face about 1.5 greater odds of being sterilized compared with women from other regions, all else being equal. When other potential main and moderating effects are included in the model, rural women are found to have twice greater odds as urban women and Protestant women have 1.5 times greater odds than Catholics of having a tubal sterilization, net of other effects.

“Daily Preparing for a Mansion in the Skies”: Ongoing Sanctification in Protestant Women's Devotional Writings

“Daily Preparing for a Mansion in the Skies”: Ongoing Sanctification in Protestant Women's Devotional Writings

Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900 by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton

Reviewed by: Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900 by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton Dan Horner Olson, Sherry and Patricia Thornton – Peopling the North American City: Montreal 1840–1900. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Pp. 544. Historical geographers Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton have been publishing innovative and insightful articles on demographic change in 19th and 20th century Montreal [End Page 251] for over twenty years. Peopling the North American City is their first monograph-length study of the city and it makes a vital contribution not only to the historiography of Montreal and Quebec, but also to the way that historians and geographers conceptualize the relationship between individuals, families, communities and urban space. Olson and Thornton’s study is based on a massive multi-generational sampling that, by mirroring the city’s ethnic composition, creates what the authors refer to as “a miniature Montreal”. The authors use this data set to make numerous inquiries into the economic, cultural, and demographic decisions that Montrealers made during this period. They explore the strategies people employed in their interactions with their families and their communities. By drawing comparisons both between different ethnic communities and across several generations, Olson and Thornton draw complex and nuanced conclusions about how people from a variety of class and ethnic backgrounds reacted to the transformations associated with migration, modernity, and industrialization. The strength of Peopling the North American City is found, ultimately, in the way that Olson and Thornton explore the results of their exhaustive demographic research without losing sight of vital social and cultural factors that might not be immediately visible in the quantitative results of their research. By viewing this time and place through a variety of different lenses, the reader is presented with a perspective that is sometimes messy and complex but, for these very reasons, is utterly captivated. Nineteenth-century Montreal was unique in that its diverse and rapidly growing population consisted of three distinct ethnic communities: British Protestants, Irish Catholics, and French Canadians. Olson and Thornton tease out the way that these three communities established patterns of strategic demographic decisions that were both logical and distinct. Decisions about when to marry and begin having children; about how long to nurse those children and how long to wait before having another; and about how to draw on the resources afforded by the extended kinship networks available to them all helped shape a distinct demographic character for these major ethnic communities. Why, the authors ask, did French Canadian couples marry at a young age? Why did British Protestant women marry older men? Why were families of Irish origin able to escape the numerous epidemic diseases that swept through this industrializing city with fewer casualties than their French Canadian neighbours? The authors do more than simply trace the major and minor demographic differences of these three communities. They push the reader to consider how these decisions were made, and what sort of strategic logic lay behind them. These strategies were shaped not only by the opportunities available to each community – be that in the form of material wealth or proximity to a large and deeply engaged kinship network – but also by the palpable sense of vulnerability that would have nagged at the inhabitants of nineteenth-century Montreal. Olson and Thornton argue that Montreal families at all points along the spectrum of class had to think like capitalists, meaning that in the midst of making crucial and intimate family decisions they needed to provide themselves with a degree of flexibility that would be sufficient for them to navigate the sorts of personal catastrophes that loomed over the residents of the nineteenth-century city. Widowhood, the authors note, was a particularly common experience during this period. Olson and Thornton note the significant portion of households that had been stitched together out of fragments of multiple families faced with the loss of a family [End Page 252] member to disease, workplace mishap, or any of the other misfortunes that threatened nineteenth century Montrealers. They demonstrate, through their careful demographic research, that the contours of the family as an institution were flexible enough to give Montrealers a variety of strategic options to...

Ora Et Non Labora? A Test of the Impact of Religion on Female Labor Supply

This paper examines the influence of religion on female participation to the labor market using data relative to women aged between 18 and 60 years in 47 European countries drawn from the European Values Study (EVS). We investigate the determinants of the probability of being employed rather than jobless in a LOGIT framework. The results show that women belonging to the Orthodox and, even more, Muslim denominations present a higher risk of non-employment than the agnostics, while being a Protestant increases the probability for a woman to be employed. Although its intensity is slightly weakening, the association between religious affiliation and female labor supply is robust to different sets of controls for individual and household heterogeneity as well as for welfare regimes and country specificities. Once disentangling religiously active and non-active women, we find that there are small differences between them in the case of the Orthodox and Muslim women, while active Catholic women tend to work less and non-active Protestant women tend to work more than average.

‘I'm glad I'm not a Saudi woman’: the First Gulf War and US encounters with Saudi gender relations

On 6 November 1990, nearly 50 Saudi women staged a protest against the ban on women operating motor vehicles in Saudi Arabia. Occurring in the midst of the First Gulf War, the women's protest was a political statement about the harsh restrictions placed on women in the Middle Eastern country which both reflected and influenced Saudi society’s encounter with their American allies during the war. When United States (US) military personnel flooded into Saudi Arabia during the war, they were shocked at the way American servicewomen were treated by their Saudi allies and the second-class status of Saudi women throughout the country. This article explores Americans' reactions to their encounter with Saudi gender relations during the war and argues that the poor treatment of women in Saudi Arabia—which Americans dubbed ‘gender apartheid’—caused many Americans to question the longstanding US alliance with the conservative Muslim country. In doing so, US journalists, military personnel, scholars and the general public began to demand that concern about women's rights should be integrated seriously into US foreign policy towards the Muslim world.

“One Language in Prayer”: Evangelicalism, Anti-Catholicism, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing

The author explores antebellum America's anti-Catholic imagination, how it informed the Beecher family, and how Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel The Minister's Wooing responded to that ethos. Rejecting her family's and her nation's anti-Catholicism, Stowe portrays an ideal, sympathetic community of Catholic and Protestant women in the New England home.

Kinetics of Healing: Protestant Women Pledging Baptism in Saydnaya Orthodox Monastery

Kinetics of Healing: Protestant Women Pledging Baptism in Saydnaya Orthodox Monastery

Defending Their Land, Protecting Their Men

Popular resistance has, following the recent uprisings in different Arab countries, received increased media and scholarly attention. Yet, the role that women and gender play in civil resistance movements remains understudied. In this article I analyse different forms, contexts and framings of Palestinian women's protest activism after 2000, arguing that their acts can potentially affect social and political change. Although so far unsuccessful in sustaining concrete material changes, women's embodied protest politics, by radically challenging conventional male-dominated political discourse and practice, might provide visionary outlines of a non-masculinist, non-militarist, yet proactive form of political culture in Palestine.

Las mujeres en el protestantismo rioplatense 1870-1930

En este artículo se plantea la necesidad de comprender las ideas que los protestantes tuvieron acerca de la mujer, los fundamentos de dichos conceptos y el espacio que les concedieron dentro del proyecto misionero. Por otro lado, nos interesa captar las miradas que ellas desarrollaron de sí mismas y las reformas que impulsaron en la sociedad. Partiendo de una posición “ambivalente” el protestantismo marcado por los revival religiosos redundaron en una apertura para la participación y reconocimiento de la mujer. Ya en el contexto rioplatense (Buenos Aires, Rosario, Montevideo), el protestantismo inicialmente sostuvo una concepción tradicional y patriarcal de los roles femeninos, que sería desafiada por las misioneras provenientes de los Estados Unidos. Estas impulsaron un modelo de mujer que buscaba flexibilizar la idea patriarcal y favorecieron la modernización de la sociedad latinoamericana a través del impulso de instituciones, sobre todo educativas, que propiciaban la participación de las mujeres protestantes en la sociedad civil.

The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. By Nancy Bradley Warren. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. xi + 339 pp. $36.00 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Embodied forms of religious devotion have long been recognized as characteristic among late medieval and early modern Catholic women, as well as, more recently, in studies of select early modern English Protestant women. But how can these experiences, from seemingly disparate contexts of pre-Reformation monastic houses, post-Reformation nuns in exile, and women from a range of reforms, be seen as part of the same culture? This is the question that Nancy Bradley Warren seeks to answer in this study of English women and what she calls their and their communities' incarnational piety, epistemology, textuality, and politics (7). Perhaps the most notable feature of the book is its scope, bridging divides not only of periodization and reformation, but also of geography in considering national and expatriate English women and their European inspirations and protectors. Almost as notable is the break from simple chronology through which Warren organizes her evidence. Thus, the book begins with the example of the miraculously preserved body of Margaret Wake, an English Carmelite nun in Antwerp, in 1716, and the wave of spiritual autobiographies and devotion among local nobility that the discovery inspired. Subsequent chapters then interlace stories of pre-Reformation or exiled nuns with those of lay women as diverse as Margery Kempe, Grace Mildmay, Anna Trapnel, and Elizabeth Cary. In so doing, the study hopscotches back and forth across time and the English Channel. Circling back, finally, to histories that, Warren suggests, define a particularly English identity across faiths, nations, and historical periods, the study reads those histories as shaped by hopes and anxieties pertaining to women's rule and succession.Warren's first chapter traces an incarnational emphasis in the writings of St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Aemelia Lanyer, from meditation on the Eucharist, the Virgin birth, and the Passion to reflection on the labor--a term implied particularly by the Brigittines--of recording their often mystical experiences in textual flesh. Although avoiding the claim that any writer directly influenced another, Warren nonetheless highlights notably international channels of textual transmission that connect the fourteenth-century women to each other and English communities (21). Addressing Lanyer, who wrote for Jacobean court circles over 200 years later, Warren identifies no such paths of textual transmission, relying on Lanyer's poetry alone to reveal an embodied piety similar to that of the medieval nuns.The second chapter connects Julian's Showings , a mainstay in the libraries of the seventeenth-century Benedictine convents in Cambrai and Paris, to the writings of women in those orders and to the autobiography of sixteenth-century Protestant gentlewoman, Grace Mildmay. Noteworthy in this chapter are two arguments: that the women's corporeal experiences are distinctly gendered, and--an argument Warren makes through the philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Karl Morrison--that the women's expressions of nuptial union and inscriptions of Christ on their hearts exceed simple metaphor. In a clarification much like the distinction between Real Presence and understandings of the Eucharist as a mere symbol of divine presence, Warren argues that the women's experiences are bona fide perceived, corporeal experiences through which knowledge is acquired (85). …

The Women's Protest: A Success with Many Shadows

On 13 February 2011, more than a million women (and many men) took to the streets of Italy’s major cities to “make themselves seen and heard,” in response to an appeal by an informal network of associations as well as individual women called Se Non Ora Quando? (If Not Now, When?). The demonstrations came about as a result of the latest sex scandal (and abuse of authority) involving Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, which had erupted a few months previously. This was due to the revelation that Berlusconi had telephoned the Milan police headquarters in the middle of the night, asking them to hand over to a “trusted person”— Nicole Minetti, a Popolo della Libertà (PdL, People of Liberty) regional councilor—a young foreign girl not yet 18 years old, known as Ruby, who had been accused of theft by a friend

Das Dienstfraulein auf dem Bahnhof: Frauen im offentlichem Raum im Blick der Berliner Bahnhofsmission 1894-1939

In this study of the Railway Travellers’ Mission (Bahnhofsmission), a charitable service first organized in 1894 and closed down by the National Socialist government in 1936, Astrid Mignon Kirchhof investigates the relationship between conceptions of gender, space and morality. Leaders of the Protestant Domestic Mission (Innere Mission) and Protestant women’s organizations identified railway stations as sites of danger and temptation to the many young women who streamed from the countryside into the city. Protestant activists feared that these young women, whom they pictured as naïve country girls, might end up in the clutches of pimps who would lead them into a life of prostitution. In order to rescue, advise and assist ‘endangered’ women, another kind of woman—the charitable worker, marked by her respectable dress and motherly manner—occupied these threatening spaces. Though travellers’ missions presumably existed throughout Germany and in other countries, Kirchhof focuses on Berlin’s many long-distance railway stations. Her central question concerns the ways in which charitable work changed the lives both of the women who administered the help and of those who received it.

Ronald E. Butchart . Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2010. Pp. xxii, 314. $39.95.

Ronald E. Butchart's new book is an invaluable addition to the historiography of African American education during and after the Civil War. To date, this text offers the most in-depth analysis of the teachers of freed people. It challenges more than a century of historical scholarship that has repeatedly typecast these teachers as being almost exclusively young white evangelical Protestant women from six New England states who went South to promote abolitionism, upended the southern way of life, and proselytized formerly enslaved African Americans into becoming pious and temperate men and women. “Working from a broader range of sources and a database of thousands of teachers,” which Butchart names the Freedmen's Teacher Project database, he writes the definitive revisionist history on the subject and offers a completely new portrait of those who taught freed people in the first two decades of emancipation (p. xi). As he illustrates in great detail, teachers of freed people were far more diverse than previously realized. For example, one of every six northern teachers was African American, not white, and “more than one-third of all the teachers in the southern black schools between 1861 and 1876 were African American” (pp. xi–xii). At least one-half of all teachers for freed people were male; nearly as many were southerners, not northerners from New England; and few if any of the teachers self-identified as abolitionists or evangelical in their applications for teaching positions. In this regard, Butchart's study moves the historiography on the education of freed people during and after the Civil War in decidedly new directions; it is a path-breaking book that is rich in detail and analysis. It is the most evidentiary rich history ever written on the teachers of freed people in the first decades of freedom.

Book Reviews: Ireland's New Religious Movements, a Comparison of the Social, Religious, and Gender Roles of Catholic and Protestant Women in the Republic of Ireland: Twenty-First Century Ireland from a Woman's Perspective, Global Politics of Health, Transforming Participation? The Politics of Development in Malawi and Ireland, Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education, Childhood and Migration in Europe: Portraits

Book Reviews: Ireland's New Religious Movements, a Comparison of the Social, Religious, and Gender Roles of Catholic and Protestant Women in the Republic of Ireland: Twenty-First Century Ireland from a Woman's Perspective, Global Politics of Health, Transforming Participation? The Politics of Development in Malawi and Ireland, Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education, Childhood and Migration in Europe: Portraits

Women, Protestant Missions, and American Cultural Expansion, 1800 to 1938: A Historiographical Sketch

AbstractOver the past forty years, historians' descriptions of American women missionaries have ranged from martyrs to cultural imperialists to social activists engaged with real people around the world to promote the welfare of women and children. New transnational approaches to the study of American missions abroad demonstrate that women missionaries were not a stock homogeneous group but a diverse group of individuals engaged in complex encounters with an equally diverse group of people in multiple settings. As scholars have highlighted the contributions of women missionaries to the projection of American Protestantism across the globe, they have increasingly recognized the importance of the cross-cultural connections that have given new meanings to the Protestant messages in local environments. This essay reviews the scholarship of the last forty years and indicates new avenues of research on American Protestant women in mission.

Reforming Japan: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period (review)

Reviewed by: Reforming Japan: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period Yosuke Nirei Reforming Japan: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in the Meiji Period. By Elizabeth Dorn Lublin. 264264 pages. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2010 (hardcover $85.00). University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 (softcover $32.95). The Meiji period brought the Japanese archipelago and people to the forefront of world history and modernity, and the Japanese converts to Protestantism who emerged during this time were more than just religionists; indeed, though few in number they played a central role in Japan's intellectual and social modernization. Elizabeth Dorn Lublin has written an important and admirable book that helps us to understand the vicissitudes of the Meiji Protestant movement. Reforming Japan examines the establishment and evolution of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)—one of the country's most important reformist and oldest women's associations—and its central programs over the last two decades of the Meiji period. The book, moreover, not only tells the story of the WCTU as a "case study" of Meiji civic activism, but also contains many insights that can be applied to other modernist intellectuals and reformist activities of the period. Reforming Japan is divided into two parts. Part 1, "The WCTU in Meiji Japan: An Organizational History," chronicles the two decades of the WCTU's development in three chapters. The first chapter explains the connections between the expansion of the American temperance movement overseas and the rise of Protestantism in Meiji Japan, placing special emphasis on the work of American activist Mary Clement Leavitt. Leavitt, Lublin claims, worked as a "catalyst" (p. 32) for the formation of a WCTU branch in Tokyo by gaining the recognition of prominent male enlightenment intellectuals (also Protestants) and the support of Japanese Protestant women. Leavitt's arrival and the establishment of the Tokyo branch of the WCTU in 1886 occurred almost simultaneously with the WCTU's broad overseas outreach and with Meiji Japan's rapid Westernization and fever for "social reform." The WCTU added more branches throughout the country and managed to establish a national umbrella organization in 1892, but from the end of the 1880s to the early 1890s, the Japan WCTU as a whole, as well as the Protestant movement in Japan, experienced a severe setback, as outlined in the remainder of part 1. Lublin cites the general political, educational, and legal changes (such as the procedural debacle in the government's revision of its Unequal Treaties with the West as well as the promulgations of the Imperial Constitution, the Civil Code, and the Educational Rescript) that formed the backdrop to these difficulties, but what really stands out in her account of this period is the internal struggle between conservative leader Yajima Kajiko and radical member Sasaki Toyoju for leadership of the organization. This was a defining moment for the future of WCTU activism and a key to understanding the ideological assumptions behind the movement's reformist program. [End Page 355] Also notable is Lublin's stress on the importance, both symbolic and substantive, of American missionaries such as Leavitt, Mary Allen West, and Clara Parrish (photographs of all three are included in the book) in developing the Japanese WCTU as a whole and bringing together discordant and sometimes disorganized Japanese groups at critical moments in the union's historical evolution. Lublin vividly describes the distinctive passion of these American women for spreading reform, as well as their methodical and diligent efforts (West, incidentally, died during her missionary tour in Japan), and she draws an interesting contrast with the personal rivalry and ideological conflict that existed among Japanese Christian women of the time. Perhaps intentionally, Lublin did not include the word "Japanese" in the book's subtitle; certainly, the early organization could not be described without mention of the significant input provided by American missionary women. Indeed, as Lublin says, it was the "convergence" of historical developments in both countries (p. 14) that came into historical play. Part 2, "Under the Guise of National Strengthening and 'Good' Citizenship: Pillars of the WCTU's Reform Program," brings the reader back to the early formative period of the movement and to the...