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Gender and Religion
NO.1
In order to understand the system of race, class and gender in America, we have to look at England’s role in their systems of class. ‘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 assumption’s 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 the 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, Protestant mainline has given way to a religious studies interest in the social and cultural history of outsiders. Concurrently, an older Protestant consensus narrative has come to be seen as 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 late nineteenth century among the more than 150 Protestant denominations, not to speak of the rapidly growing population of Catholics with their own substantial differences of nationality, theology and social class. As historians have started to study seriously the deep diversities 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 simply 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, and most of this new work focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
