Protestant Women Research Articles

Женский протест в Сибири в первой половине 1930 г. как феномен радикального ответа политике насильственной этатизации деревни

The paper deals with the problem of the phenomenon of women’s protest during the process of “total collectivization” of the agricultural sector. The author investigates the phenomenon as social action within the framework of the structural-functional approach (M. Weber, R. Merton), which allows to eliminate ideological cliches and analyze women’s protest not as an affective social action (“Bab’i bunt” - women’s revolt), but as a complex social action in which the role of goal setting can be dominant. This approach makes it possible to establish the main characteristics of women's protest, its effect, and impact on the culture of peasant protest. It provides an opportunity to consider the processes of interaction between “authority – society” in the extraordinary conditions of “the Great socialist transformation”. Main sources are archival documents of the OGPU authorized representative in the Siberian region (krai); minor sources include archival documents of local party committees and Soviet organisations and also regional press. The author analyzes protest actions recorded by the OGPU officers with the participation of women in the first half of the 1930s, identifying the main characteristics of women’s protest, its forms, causes and motives, as well as the impact on peasant society and state policy. The author also reveals that this social action in the absence of a legal opportunity to influence the agrarian/peasant policy of the party was quite an adequate means to achieve certain goals of the protesters. “Bab’i bunt” was a marker of the extreme social life of early Soviet society during the “Great Break”, which demonstrated the radicalization of relations between the peasant society and authorities during a violent etatization of the village. The conclusion is that the women’s protest, as part of the general peasant protest at the first stage of “complete collectivization”, forced the authorities to adjust their policies and even seek some compromises.

With Shared Roots: Rubie Bond, the Great Migration, and the Struggle for Black Freedom in Beloit, Wisconsin

With Shared RootsRubie Bond, the Great Migration, and the Struggle for Black Freedom in Beloit, Wisconsin Francis Gourrier (bio) In early 1943, six black women sat down at a Kresge's department store lunch counter in Beloit, Wisconsin. Like most restaurants, hotels, and other businesses in Beloit, Kresge's had long refused service to African Americans. The women sought out confrontation with the Kresge's store manager and Jim Crow's grip on the Midwest.1 In contrast to the more well-documented southern sit-ins of the 1960s, this particular protest did not stir up vitriolic attacks from local whites. In fact, one of the leaders of this sit-in, Rubie Bond, recalled that only the store manager was hostile to their demands and that some white patrons supported the protesters. After an hour of sitting in, the women left the restaurant to appeal to Beloit's city manager, Archie Telfer, to do something about racial discrimination in public accommodations. Telfer dismissed their concerns, telling the women his hands were tied and there was not much he could do.2 The story of Bond and the other women's protest is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, it draws attention to the fact that racial discrimination was embedded in local custom and policy everywhere in the United States, including the Midwest. In recent years, scholars have made efforts to demystify and expose "the ways Jim Crow took many forms, had many guises, and burrowed into the law" and everyday practices throughout the country, not just in the post-Reconstruction South.3 Second, though the Kresge's protesters had grown up in Beloit, they were all originally from the same small corner of northeast Mississippi. During World War I, the city of Beloit drew in more than half of its migrant population from Pontotoc and Houston, Mississippi, as part of the Great Migration.4 The six women [End Page 1] represented two different Mississippi families: Rubie Bond and Sadie Bell were first cousins from Pontotoc while cousins Ethel Gordon Johnson, Annie Gordon Harris, Estelle Gordon Williams, and Louise Gordon had migrated from Houston, Mississippi. Such kinship networks were a prominent feature of Beloit's black history. Third, the Kresge's sit-in offers a glimpse into the early stages of the modern civil rights struggle in the Midwest and its direct connections to the Great Migration. In Beloit, the city's black population relied on kinship to foster community during the World War I migration years and to challenge midwestern racial segregation after migration. A close look at Rubie White Bond's story, woven into a broader black history of Beloit, offers important lessons on race, migration, gender, and community building in smaller midwestern cities in the early half of the twentieth century. Bond's intimate network of fellow Mississippi migrants helped catapult her into an important political leadership role in Beloit, a story that shines a light on an often-ignored aspect of the Great Migration. Much of the Great Migration historiography has focused on larger U.S. cities. To be sure, places like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia witnessed "chain migration" a systematic migration pattern that saw southern familial networks relocate in mass; yet, newcomers to those places had relocated from a wide range of origin points.5 Beloit's migration presents a unique chain migration story because its black population possessed a concentrated southern origin. This differed significantly from other cities, large and small, whose black populations were comprised of "people of disparate origins."6 Through shared roots, Rubie Bond and many black Beloiters summoned a political will to challenge racial discrimination in this small industrial city in the Midwest. Rubie White was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, in 1906 to two sharecroppers, Zack and Dora White—both the children of former slaves. Young Rubie and her sister, Laura, began working with their parents on a corn and cotton plantation at the ages of six and five, respectively. Though child labor was a fairly common practice for sharecropping families in the Jim Crow South, the plantation owner, Walt Weatherall, often scolded Zack White for overworking the girls. Weatherall's relative kindness made Rubie and Laura's...

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism: Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan

Imagining an Anti-Racist Cosmopolitanism:Localization, Imperialism and Transnational Women's Activism in Interwar Japan Noriko Ishii On 18 April 1934, Kobe College, one of the first women's colleges in Japan founded by the American Congregational women missionaries, celebrated the dedication of its new Okadayama campus, built in a beautiful Mediterranean style. This was a product of a thirty-year transnational collaboration of American Protestant women's networks across the Pacific. Japanese women of the Kobe College alumnae association provided the land and American women of Protestant churches provided the buildings for the one-million-dollar expansion. At the dedication ceremony, Mrs Hazel Thorne Wilson, representing the Kobe College Corporation in Chicago, declared that the corporation would continue promoting Kobe College as "a symbol of international friendship and goodwill."2 Hashimoto Hatsue, Class of 1926, speaking on behalf of the Japanese women alumnae, said the alumnae's success was due to "a burning love for the college" and "the loving kindness of many American friends,"3 inferring Japanese women's deference to American women's friendship. This case study of the Kobe College expansion campaign provides us a window to examine how the notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism were imagined and used as we historicize the campaign against the backdrop of the shifting world order and the changing landscape of the American foreign missionary movement between 1905 and 1934. The thirty years of the expansion campaign coincided with the end of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the 1924 US Immigration Act prohibiting Japanese immigration, the Great Depression of 1929 and the Manchurian Incident in 1931 and the emergence of uneasy tensions between the United States and Japan, each with their Pacific empires. Both Japanese and American missionaries were forced to face the controversial question of how to deal with the Japanese empire's religious policy of encouraging the three major religions, Shintoism, Buddhism and Christianity, to evangelize among the colonized in order to assimilate them into the Japanese empire. In addition, during the 1920s, women of the American foreign missionary movement faced an internal crisis in which most of the separate women's mission boards were merged with their male-led denominational parent boards. These mergers epitomized the decline of female autonomy in American Protestant foreign mission enterprises.4 Robert also points out that after the First World War, "'World Friendship' decisively replaced 'Woman's Work for Woman' as the missiology of the woman's missionary movement." Robert explained that "World Friendship assumed that western culture no longer had a monopoly on virtue" and that "what was needed of missions was not paternalism, but partnership and friendship: united work for peace and justice,"5 suggesting that such partnership entailed an equal relationship between the western missionaries and their Indigenous counterparts. This article argues that in the Japanese mission field, the transition was more complex. In the Kobe College expansion campaign, the nineteenth-century mission ideology of Woman's Work for Woman remained salient and coexisted with the ecumenical notions of internationalism, friendship and cosmopolitanism. David A. Hollinger links the concept of what he called "missionary cosmopolitanism" or liberal internationalism in the missionary movement to Wilsonian internationalism. He also called for more attention to study the role of missionary-connected individuals in postwar American diplomacy, including the so-called "mish kids" or the missionary children, because they served as the informants of prewar Asian history and culture, and became the key purveyors of liberal internationalism in the United States.6 This article argues that such was the case in the Kobe College expansion campaign, for both American and Japanese women often used the notions of Wilsonian internationalism and friendship and the concept of Christian internationalism interchangeably. Moreover, Kobe College was imagined to be an ecumenical space of aspirational cosmopolitanism and friendship by both American and Japanese women, especially under the leadership of missionary president Charlotte B. DeForest, herself a "mish kid" born in Japan. Drawing on the conceptual framework of "aspirational cosmopolitanism" defined as "the pursuit of conversations across lines of difference, between disparate socio-cultural, political and linguistic groups, that provisionally created shared public worlds,"7 this article examines how the Kobe College expansion campaign...

Charitable acts and lived religion in the funeral sermons of early seventeenth-century women

This article examines how the lived religious practices of early seventeenth-century English women were presented and memorialised, through an analysis of biographical writing and printed funeral sermons. Focusing on both Catholic and Protestant women who lived and died in London between 1600 and 1660, it suggests that women’s charity work, particularly that which involved active labours such as feeding the poor, tending the sick, and assisting with childbirth, was presented as a key aspect of their lived religion. In this chapter I take ‘lived religion’ to mean practices which individuals, in this case, women, deliberately implemented as a means of having agency over their religious practice. These sources depict charitable acts as being instigated by the individual women themselves, acts which were performed electively, in addition to routines of prayer and contemplation, and acts which were accordingly viewed as an expression of piety and ownership over their religious lives. These descriptions are also moulded to the unique attributes of these individual women; they emphasise the deployment of proficiency in medicine or skill in garment-making, they accentuate the hospitality of these women and occasions where the poor or hungry were invited into the home. These elective charitable works are consequently presented as important forms of ‘active piety’ – as central to and as an important means of acting out one’s faith.

Intersections of Feminist Identification and Hostile Sexism

AbstractThis research examines the relationship between religious identification and feminist identification. Additionally, it investigates the extent of hostile sexist attitudes among those who identify as religious feminists. Utilizing 2016 American National Election Survey data, I find that religious women are no more or less likely to identify as feminist than the religiously unaffiliated, while evangelical and black Protestant men are less likely to identify as feminist. Further, both black Protestant women and Catholic men who identify as feminist express hostile sexist sentiment to a higher degree than their feminist unaffiliated counterparts, along with Latinas and Asian‐identified men. This study offers quantitative insights into the relationship between feminist identification, religious affiliation, and hostile sexist attitudes. Additional implications for this study include conceptualizations of feminism and sexism more broadly in society.

Decision-making on maternal pertussis vaccination among women in a vaccine-hesitant religious group: Stages and needs.

IntroductionAs of December 2019, pregnant women in the Netherlands are offered pertussis vaccination to protect their newborn infant against pertussis infection. However, the manner in which pregnant women decide about this maternal pertussis vaccination is largely unknown. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the decision-making process regarding maternal pertussis vaccination, and to explore the related needs among the vaccine-hesitant subgroup of orthodox Protestant women.MethodsCharmaz’s grounded theory approach was used to develop a decision-making framework. To construct this framework we used an explorative multimethod approach in which in-depth interviews and online focus groups were supplemented by a literature search and research group meetings. This study was carried out in a hypothetical situation since the maternal pertussis vaccination had yet to be implemented in the Dutch immunisation programme at the time of the study.ResultsTwenty-five orthodox Protestant women participated in an interview, an online focus group, or in both. The findings of this study resulted in a decision-making framework that included three stages of decision-making; an Orientation stage, a value-based Deliberation stage, and Final decision stage. The Orientation stage included the needs for decision-making categorised into Information needs and Conversation needs. Women indicated that -if they were to receive sufficient time for Orientation and Deliberation- they would be able to reach the stage of Final decision.ConclusionThe decision-making framework resulting from our findings can be used by health care professionals to provide women with information and consultation in the decision-making process. Future studies should investigate whether the stages of and needs for decision-making can be found across other vaccine-hesitant subgroups and vaccinations.

Resistance, solidarity, and sisterhood in the age of Trump: images from the Women’s March in Washington, D.C

ABSTRACT On Saturday, January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, there was an impressive Women’s March in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. The guiding vision and definition of principles of the Women’s March equated Women’s Rights with Human Rights and called for the liberation of “Black women, Native Women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, Muslim women, Lesbian, queer and, trans women,” whose perspectives had too often been ignored or excluded from the predominately white mainstream women’s movement in the past. The demonstration represented a massive intergenerational protest of women, transgendered, and men from 50 states who, having donned their hand-made knitted and crocheted pink pussy hats, gathered to brandish their posters such as “Asian Pacific Islander Queers from San Francisco,” “Science is REAL,” “Take your BROKEN HEART and make ART.” The authors examine protest signs, symbols, and artifacts from the Women’s March for intersectionality of issues posed by the march organizers and participants. Critical discourse analysis is utilized to explore the messages, movements, values, and identities through the combination of images, text, historical moment (setting and time), and participants in the demonstration.

The relationship between religion and livelihood activities of women: Empirical evidence from the Yilo and Lower Manya Krobo Districts of Eastern Ghana

The study examines the effect of religious affiliation on livelihood activity choice amongst a sample of 1209 women in the Yilo and Lower Manya Krobo Districts of Ghana. We attempt to disentangle the effect religion would have through its effect on risk preferences, from the effect it would have due to creation of social capital or the effect of clustering due to social identity. We find evidence that there is a strong positive social capital or social identity effect of being Catholic, Pentecostal or Protestant when it comes to farming. This effect is also positive for Protestant and Catholic women for wage employment. This social capital and social identity effect is significantly negative for Catholic, Pentecostal and Protestant women in the case of petty retailing. Women who are willing to take risk are more likely to be in farming and less likely to be wage employed than risk averse women. However, the effect of risk aversion as a result of being Catholic, Protestant or Pentecostal only seems to have a negative effect in the case of farming. The risk aversion effect does not appear to act through religious affiliation when it comes to wage employment. It is recommended that any policy intervention aimed at enhancing livelihood activities of women in this area should take into consideration any relative advantage of having a specific religious affiliation. Such policies should take cognizance of both clustering and networking effects resulting from belonging to a religious group. Risk profiles of women are also important when implementing such policies. Other important considerations are age, household headship, education, dependency ratio, household farm ownership and household enterprise ownership.

Evangelical Protestant Women’s Views on Homosexuality and LGBT Rights in Korea: The Role of Confucianism and Nationalism in Heteronormative Ideology

ABSTRACT Much scholarly attention has been devoted to understanding the demographic, religious, and socio-economic factors that may lead to homonegativity. However, little is known about how and why people oppose homosexuality and LGBT rights. To fill this gap, this work examines how heterosexual religious mothers perceive homosexuality and LGBT rights focusing on the role of indigenous culture. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 30 evangelical Protestant women in South Korea, my findings indicate that evangelical women’s perceptions of LGBT rights and their justification display evangelical notion of procreation, motherly moral concerns about the rapid change in heteronormative ideals, and ambivalence about an individualistic, expressive culture. I argue that heteronormative ideology forms a key construct that determines the responses of evangelical women. In addition, such an idea is not only guided by evangelical teaching but also reinforced by a complex amalgamation of Confucian tradition and nationalism, thus restricting sexual drive and emotions for the sake of families and the nation. Heterosexual family norms operate in a way that it is synchronized with a combination of Confucian-family-oriented collectivism and nationalism. This study contributes to complicating a simple, one-dimensional understanding of public attitudes on homosexuality by offering a nuanced look into the configuration of heterosexual ideologies, which are unique in the Korean context.

Protestants, Gender, and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria, by Deanna Ferree Womack

<i>Protestants, Gender, and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria</i>, by Deanna Ferree Womack

Maternal religion and breastfeeding intention and practice in the US Project Viva cohort.

Religion has rarely been studied as a determinant of infant feeding practices. We examined whether religious affiliation is associated with formula feeding vs breastfeeding intention and practice in women from the United States Project Viva cohort. Between 1999 and 2002, 2128 pregnant women were recruited in the area of Boston, Massachusetts. They reported by questionnaire their religious affiliation, and their intended and practiced infant feeding mode (exclusive formula feeding vs partial vs exclusive breastfeeding) at different time points. We examined associations of religious affiliation with infant feeding intention and practice by modified Poisson regression and multinomial logistic regression adjusted for known sociodemographic confounders. Of 1637 women with complete data, 52% reported being Catholic, 29% Protestant, 11% unaffiliated, 4% Jewish, and 4% other religion. Overall, 8.5% and 15.9% women intended and initiated exclusive formula feeding, respectively. Compared with unaffiliated women, Catholics were more at risk to intend to exclusively formula-feed their infant at birth (risk ratio [95% CI]: 6.4 [1.6-26.0]) and to exclusively formula-feed after delivery (2.4 [1.3-4.2]) and 3months postpartum (1.3 [0.98-1.8]). The odds ratio for intending and practicing partial (vs exclusive) breastfeeding did not differ by religious affiliation at most examined time points. Associations of Protestant women with infant feeding exhibited estimates closer to unaffiliated than to Catholic women. Catholic women are more at risk to intend and practice exclusive formula feeding than women of other religious affiliations. Our findings may help health care practitioners adapt their breastfeeding promotion to the mother's religious affiliation.

The Magdalene in the Reformation. By Margaret Arnold

Margaret Arnold’sThe Magdalene in the Reformation explores Lutheran, Reformed, early modern Catholic, and radical depictions of Mary Magdalene, by men and by women, in theological texts but also in literature and in art. Arnold uses these depictions to reflect on the role of women and lay people in these various contexts. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, the result is a richly textured account, not only of the range of attitudes towards Mary Magdalene in this period, but also of the ways in which men and women engaged with the challenges posed by the Reformation. Arnold begins by considering ‘The Medieval Magdalene’. In the late medieval period, Mary Magdalene was depicted as a key Christian figure, sinful yet contrite and beloved of Christ, used by God. Her role as preacher or proclaimer of the resurrection challenged St Paul’s instruction—echoed by the church—that women should be silent. The Reformation inherited Mary Magdalene's somewhat controversial status. Chapter 2 considers Lutheran preaching on Mary Magdalene. Luther and his followers viewed Mary Magdelene as called by Christ to offer ‘brave and faithful testimony’ (p. 67). Luther warned against allowing women to preach (although here Arnold’s argument would have benefited from attention to recent scholarship exploring Luther’s relations to women who supported his cause); Arnold claims that ‘the next generation gives evidence of lessening anxiety on this question’ (p. 69); this evidence might have been cited. Arnold shows that Protestant women such as Argula von Grumbach, Katharina Schütz Zell, Marie Dentière, Anne Askew, Queen Elizabeth I, and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg drew on the story of Mary Magdalene to justify their public speaking and writing. Arnold observes, however, that the continuities with the medieval Magdalene tradition—‘mystical marriage with Christ, contemplation, and a divine command to preach—point to a more complex evolution for Protestant women’s spirituality than has often been assumed’, and in particular to the way that women participated in forming Protestant religious culture (p. 92).

Experiences of Non-consensual Sex of Older Adult Men and Women in Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Portugal

This study aimed to determine the prevalence of non-consensual sex in older adult men and women across Europe, and to find out what variables predict such experiences in different European countries. Data were collected using probability samples from populations, aged 60–75 years, in Norway (N = 1271), Denmark (N = 1045), Belgium (N = 991), and Portugal (N = 509), using postal questionnaires. Around 5% of men included in the study, in all of the countries, reported non-consensual sexual experiences. Non-consensual sexual experiences were higher in gay/bisexual men when compared against heterosexual men. Partnered men had a lower likelihood of childhood non-consensual sex than those without partners. Compared against men with primary education, those who had undergone tertiary education had a lower likelihood of having experienced adult non-consensual sex. For women, rates of reporting non-consensual sex before and after the age of 18 years were lowest in Portugal (2% and 6%, respectively) and highest in Norway (9% and 11%, respectively). Compared with women with no religious affiliations, protestant women showed a lower likelihood of having experienced childhood non-consensual sex. In comparison to Norwegian women, Belgian and Portuguese women were observed to have had a lower likelihood of having experienced childhood non-consensual sex. Compared to women who were non-partnered, had no religious affiliation, or had primary education, women who were partnered, Roman Catholic, and had higher education showed a lower likelihood of having experienced non-consensual sex in adulthood. Experience of non-consensual sex correlated significantly, albeit weakly, with greater levels of both anxiety and depression, decreased subjective well-being, lower perceived intimacy with one’s partner, and higher feelings of loneliness.

Protestantismus und politische Partizipation. Evangelische Parlamentarierinnen im Nachkriegsbayern zwischen Politik und Kirche

Abstract The article reflects on the interdependence of the political and ecclesial sphere and the influence of Protestant women in the first two decades after 1945. Two different biographies of women from Bavaria with active influence in politics and church and both members of the CSU, Elisabeth Nägelsbach (member of the Landtag) and Ingeborg Geisendörfer (member of the Bundestag), are taken into account concerning their self-understanding, their agenda setting and their rhetoric self-presentation. We argue, that the spheres of politics and church are interdependent and gender construction plays an important role. Furthermore, the developments in the ecclesial sphere took much longer and emancipation of women was implemented more hesitantly than in the political system. Also, theological arguments were crucial for this delay. The article suggests to consider a differentiated and context-sensible approach to understand the relationship between religious denomination and emancipation as well as the role of political conservative female politicians with an association to the church in the development of gender equalization.

The Impact of Globalization on Women's and Non‐Women's Protest*

ObjectivesWe advance hypotheses on the extent to which the three main aspects of globalization—economic, political, and social—fuel mass protest and delineate how these effects can be especially instrumental in understanding collective mass mobilization among a historically disadvantaged group, women.MethodsWe use new and updated data on anti‐government protest to examine the covariates of protest intensity cross‐nationally over time.ResultsResults from the data analysis indicate that while political globalization is associated with reduced women's protest, social globalization is associated with increased women's and non‐women's protest. Further, economic globalization has somewhat divergent effects on women's and non‐women's protest.ConclusionsResults from our thorough analysis of the three main aspects of globalization highlight the varying effects that different dimensions of globalization have on political protest. Our study offers a unique analysis of the factors associated with protest by women and compares it to other types of protest.

"Das Weib soll nicht gelehrt seyn": Konfessionell geprägte Frauenbilder, Frauenbildung und weibliche Lebensentwürfe von der Reformation bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Fallanalyse am regionalen Beispiel der Grafschaft Oldenburg und des Niederstifts Münster, seit 1774/1803 Herzogtum Oldenburg by Maria Anna Zumholz

Reviewed by: "Das Weib soll nicht gelehrt seyn": Konfessionell geprägte Frauenbilder, Frauenbildung und weibliche Lebensentwürfe von der Reformation bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Fallanalyse am regionalen Beispiel der Grafschaft Oldenburg und des Niederstifts Münster, seit 1774/1803 Herzogtum Oldenburg by Maria Anna Zumholz Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker "Das Weib soll nicht gelehrt seyn": Konfessionell geprägte Frauenbilder, Frauenbildung und weibliche Lebensentwürfe von der Reformation bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Fallanalyse am regionalen Beispiel der Grafschaft Oldenburg und des Niederstifts Münster, seit 1774/1803 Herzogtum Oldenburg. By Maria Anna Zumholz. (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. 2016. Pp. 512. €29,80 paperback. ISBN 978-3-402-13161-9.) What kind of education would best prepare girls and young women to care for hearth and home, to raise God-fearing and moral children? Do women teachers provide the best instruction for girls and young women? How should girls' education differ from boys' education? In 1808 as part of these debates and discussions, Dr. Friedrich Reinhard Ricklefs, the Protestant director of the Oldenburg Secondary School, argued Das Weib soll nicht gelehrt seyn [No learned women! directly: the woman should not be learned]. Anna Maria Zumbolz takes this phrase as the title of her book, and it also reflects the book's focus on drawing together commentary on girls' and women's education from the Reformation period to the present. A through-line in her work is the change wrought in the gender order, or in her words the "gender anthropology," as a result of the Reformation. Martin Luther's criticism of celibacy and belief that celibacy was impossible shaped his judgment that all must marry. Within marriage or within families, women were to subordinate themselves to men. Thus, the Reformation closed off the most important path to a life independent of male family control as a member of a women's religious order. In her view, Martin Luther "denied women a choice between different forms of life, the possibility of professional activity." Furthermore, in her argument, Martin Luther "laid the foundation for the ideal of the bürgerlich-patriarchal [End Page 560] marriage" as well as the "negative image of the useless old maid." In these ways, the Reformation, was a "story of loss for women" [Verlustgeschichte für Frauen] (p. 421). Taking the region of Oldenburger Land as her focus, Zumholz contrasts the Protestant emphasis on preparing women only for motherhood with the Catholic views that often seem to open up other possibilities for women to choose a respectable life outside of the family home. Zumholz finds countless examples of Catholics arguing that women best understand girls, and women make for the best teachers, even the best principals of schools. In this way, the Catholic Church offered women the possibility of real leadership in religious and educational institutions. Zumholz argues persuasively that Catholic institutions allowed for a professional life in the educational and caring professions that was not open to most Protestant women in the early modern period. Buttressing her primary source analysis with the arguments of Relinde Meiwes in 'Arbeiterinnen des Herrn': Katholische Frauenkongregationen im 19. Jahrhundert (2000), Zumholz interprets a range of Oldenburger Land religious orders and congregations as offering opportunities for fulfilling a professional life for women outside of marriage and family. She goes so far as to see early modern orders and congregations like the Ursulines and the Augustiner Chorfrauen "advocating for the interests of women" and "opening the opportunity for women to lead an independent and self-determined [selbstbestimmtes] life" (p. 422). The first chapter introduces the main themes and contrasts the twentieth-century claims of a "Catholic Bildungs-deficit" with fact that for girls, by the twentieth century, Oldenburger Land instead had a "Protestant Bildungs-deficit." Chapter two focuses on gender, education, and religion in the Reformation period and chapter three focuses on those subjects in early modern Oldenburger Land. Chapter four considers the images of women and women's education, and chapter five discusses the ways that these images shaped women's professional opportunities. A conclusion in chapter six sums up the main points of the book. Throughout the book are photos, maps, images, tables, and primary sources. The...

“A Doorkeeper in the House of My God”: Female Stewardship of Protestant Sacred Spaces in the Gulf South, 1830-1861

The movement to build and furnish new churches in the Antebellum South was not the moment of Protestant women’s religious domestication, but rather an opportunity for a new type of public stewardship of the church, one that encouraged female collective action. Women expressed their piety and leadership in the church by enhancing its materiality, they gave their churches permanence and social status.

Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity ed. by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer

Reviewed by: Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity ed. by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer Jaime Goodrich Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity. Edited by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2014. Pp. ix, 198. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-137-47473-5.) Recent scholarship on the English Reformation has been revitalized by a new focus on the intersection between gender and piety. Yet while critics have generally treated Catholic and Protestant women separately, this collection of essays edited by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer is a welcome exception to the rule. By presenting six case studies of women with diverse religious beliefs, Women during the English Reformations offers a tantalizing glimpse of how female agency operated across confessional lines in early modern England. The first three chapters explore the cultural significance of female piety during the Henrician and mid-Tudor eras. Drawing attention to printed books that were dedicated to Tudor royal women, Valerie Schutte deftly explains the perplexing [End Page 367] lack of English translations of Erasmus's Institution of Christian Matrimony by noting the book's relevance to the divorce proceedings of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon. In the standout chapter that follows, Janice Liedl considers the autonomy of Margaret Pole, one of the most powerful women of the early Henrician period. Liedl cogently demonstrates that Pole's femininity was not a sufficient defense to avoid execution for treason, despite her attempts to use gender stereotypes as a means of self-protection. Rebecca A. Giselbrecht then surveys thirteen letters sent to the Swiss reformer Heinrich Bullinger by women such as Jane Grey and the Belgian wife of John Hooper, revealing that these women drew on their familial connections and reformed piety to participate in an international Protestant network. Chapters four through six shift to the seventeenth century, investigating how women gained personal and political agency by negotiating the competing demands of gender and religion. Lisa McClain argues that Elizabeth Cary, largely known as the first Englishwoman to write an original play, developed "an alternative model of Catholic womanhood" (p. 69). Probing the differences in Cary's portrayal of marriage before and after her conversion to Catholicism in the 1620s, McClain provocatively contends that tensions between faith and femininity helped reshape English culture. In a particularly accomplished essay, Amanda L. Capern explores how Eleanor Davies similarly balanced gender and piety in order to achieve political agency within her prophecies. By identifying strands of Calvinist theology within Davies's inscrutable writings, Capern illuminates the political relevance of these texts to the social upheaval of the Stuart era and Civil Wars. Sharon L. Arnoult then examines the way that Elizabeth Delaval's meditations depict godly femininity, offering a compelling analysis of how one woman's search for worldly fulfillment clashed with gender stereotypes informed by religion. In a somewhat puzzling twist, the final chapters focus on later representations of early modern women's responses to the Reformation. Kaley A. Kramer discusses the representation of Mary Stuart's fictional daughters in Sophia Lee's The Recess (1783–1785), locating later myths about Catholics within a space between historiography and hagiography. Finally, in a survey of Tudor royal women on screen, William A. Robison provides ample evidence that film and television shows distort history by ignoring or misrepresenting the religious views of these influential women. The intended readers of this volume would seem to be scholars working on early modern history, literature, and religion. This audience will find much of interest in the volume's initial six case studies, which offer a useful introduction to several lesser-known women whose responses to the English Reformation deserve further consideration. [End Page 368] Jaime Goodrich Wayne State University Copyright © 2019 The Catholic University of America Press

Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England by Madeline Bassnett

Reviewed by: Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England by Madeline Bassnett Elisa Tersigni WOMEN, FOOD EXCHANGE, AND GOVERNANCE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, by Madeline Bassnett. Early Modern Literature in History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 248 pp. $109.99 cloth; $109.99 paper; $84.99 ebook. While still relatively overlooked, food studies is a field that has blossomed over the last decade. To this field, Madeline Bassnett’s Women, Food Exchange, and Governance in Early Modern England is a welcome and fascinating addition, interrogating the relationship that early modern English gentlewomen had to food practices in their households and communities and, by extension, the relationship that these women had to politics and the governance of the nation. Bassnett’s central argument is that “women’s writings about food practices are crucial to the work of estate hospitality, personal and political alliance, and relations of private and public authority” (p. 5). To support her argument, she examines the works of four Protestant women estate holders who wrote from the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke’s Psalmes (completed by 1599); Elizabeth Clinton, Dowager Countess of Lincoln’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie (a maternal nursing pamphlet, published 1622); Margaret, Lady [End Page 448] Hoby’s diary (written 1599–1605); and Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth’s Urania (published 1621, manuscript continued until c. 1630). Bassnett offers new and nuanced readings of texts that were composed by only Protestant gentlewomen in a narrow temporal range but are otherwise incredibly varied and rich. Together, the texts paint a vivid picture of the ways in which English gentlewomen understood and articulated their (and others’) responsibilities in regard to food practices. Crucially, Bassnett argues that not only does women’s writing reflect a politicized agriculture but also that these women actively “establish the domestic site of food exchange as . . . political, as they extend, comment on, and advise others about the virtues of manifesting God’s good governance on earth” (p. 7). According to early modern English medical, religious, and intellectual movements, the food one consumed affected physical, spiritual, and moral health, so elite women—who often controlled their estates’ food production and consumption—wielded power over the people with whom they exchanged food. The women Bassnett discusses understood their writing as an opportunity to communicate and establish political power, even as far as influencing the health of the nation, in part by encouraging monarchs to practice good governance through appropriate food management. After the introduction, the second and third chapters examine famine and scarcity. Written during the “dearth-ridden 1590s,” Sidney Herbert’s translation of the Psalmes includes agricultural metaphors that “establish God’s gifts of food as dependent on his approval of the monarch’s rule, and more worryingly, the absence of crop growth as God’s disapproval, a punishment for country and ruler alike” (pp. 65, 25). The translation thus identifies Queen Elizabeth as directly responsible for England’s famines and encourages her to adopt “policies that might return England to God’s favour” to end the national famine (p. 55). Clinton’s The Countesse of Lincolnes Nurserie, also written in a time of dearth, discourages the common practice of wet-nursing and encourages maternal breastfeeding, praising it as an example of a woman’s being graced by God’s bounty, made all the more significant during famine. Just as crop failure reflected the loss of God’s favor through poor governance, a woman’s ability to feed her child expressed her retention of God’s favor, a reflection of the nursing woman’s spiritual virtue. The act of nursing also allowed virtuous women to give their child physical and spiritual nourishment, produced “through divine intervention” (p. 83). The fourth chapter focuses on Margaret Hoby’s diary in which she records her meals and prayers—complementary spiritual practices, according to Hoby. As the middle case study and the only private (not circulated) work considered by Bassnett—Hoby’s diary was not printed until the twentieth century—this manuscript is an interesting departure from the argument that early modern women were actively establishing their political power through writing about food practices...

The 1798 Rebellion: Gender Tensions and Femininity in the Irish Gothic

The year 2018 marks the 220th anniversary of the Irish rebellion of 1798. As Susan B. Egenolf points out, this short-lived but devastating conflict between Irish insurgents and Loyalist soldiers was felt as an attack on domesticity, as rebels and loyalists alike 'invade[d] private homes'. Several scholars have already discussed the (re)writing of such a traumatic event in Protestant women's narratives, shedding light on how these women filtered their emotions with the languages of chivalry, sensibility, and the gothic. Indeed, the gothic is generally seen as a polymorphous prism through which one can apprehend anxieties, tensions and violence. This paper seeks to confront the dynamics of genre and gender through the depiction of violence (be it domestic or national) in Irish Gothic texts using the 1798 rebellion as a contextual backdrop. In Maturin's The Milesian Chief (1812) and Mrs Kelly's The Matron of Erin (1816), the (Protestant) female gothic heroine exposes her body to private and public religious and political violence.