Ten years ago, historian Ann Braude threw down a gauntlet for her discipline, declaring in the title of a widely read essay, "Women's History Is American Religious History." She was frustrated that scholars who studied women and scholars who studied religion so seldom addressed each other, even though the majority of women in America have always been religious, and the majority of religious adherents in America have pretty much always been women.
Some solid work on religious women has appeared since 1997, but women's history and religious history continue to slide past each other with few nods of recognition. A new volume edited by Catherine A. Brekus urges the strangers to face each other and see what they have been missing. Contributions to The Religious History of American Women vary somewhat in strength, but the best of them amply bear out Brekus's claim that close attention to religious women unsettles standard narratives about both gender and faith in America.
Brekus begins the volume with a masterful overview that highlights recent advances in the study of religious women and indicts both women's historians and religious historians for failing to notice. She notes that George Marsden's textbook, Religion in American Culture, mentions 246 men by name and only 29 women, and many syllabi for American religion courses skip women altogether. She expresses even more frustration with the field of women's history, which seems to have decided in the 1980s that religion was bad for women and should be ignored.
Brekus does not merely request equal time for women. Nor does she aim to replace male-dominated narratives with female-dominated narratives. She wants to change how her colleagues think, writing, "My hope is that historians will always ask themselves whether their research could be transformed or enriched if they asked questions about women's lives as well as men's." Sometimes, the answer will be no, but often, Brekus is sure, the answer will be yes.
In her own essay for the volume, Brekus takes a new look at the Enlightenment. The movement is generally considered to have been dominated by elite men, such as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, whose rationalistic outlooks threatened the survival of religion. But Brekus does not focus on Locke and Jefferson. She examines the spiritual memoirs of Sarah Osborn, a schoolteacher in Newport, Rhode Island, in the middle of the 18th century. Osborn was neither elite nor male, and she was actively evangelical. Nonetheless, key Enlightenment impulses reached her and actually enhanced her religious life. Specifically, the Enlightenment upheld experience, rather than tradition, as the most reliable source of knowledge. Osborn had no formal theological training, but she had plenty of religious experience, and Enlightenment currents of thought emboldened her to build a ministry on that basis. Clearly, the Enlightenment did not always erode faith. It altered evangelicalism by elevating the importance of testimony and expanding the ranks of potential spiritual leaders. Adding Osborn changes the whole story.
Other contributors find new insights not by adding people to the narrative but by looking at them differently. Anthea D. Butler, for example, revisits the subject of black female activists and community leaders in the Jim Crow South. Scholars of race, women's history, and Southern history already know about these women, but few scholars have taken their religious beliefs seriously. Prevailing interpretations of these women depict them as striving for respectability, using religion as a tool for political and socio-economic advancement. Butler moves religion to the center of her investigation, asking, "What if their quest for respectability was not about 'acting white' but instead about 'acting right' for God?" This line of thinking better matches what the women said about themselves, and it helps to explain female evangelists who put service to God ahead of their culturally sanctioned domestic responsibilities, sometimes fracturing their marriages in the process. Butler's work illustrates that it is always dangerous, not to mention presumptuous, for scholars to assume that when their subjects speak of religion they really mean something else.
The Religious History of American Women aims to shake up scholarly thinking, but its contents are accessible and lively enough for interested lay readers. Because religion matters to women, and women matter to religion, this book deserves attention.
Elesha Coffman is a doctoral student at Duke University and a senior editor of CH&B.
