Alot has changed since the days when American religious history was written mostly by and about men. Over the past 15 years, an abundance of new literature has brought to light the central role of women in every kind of religious endeavor: in lay and ordained leadership, in missions, religious education, social reform, music and hymnody, revivals, and, of course, innovative and vigorous fundraising. Add to this the fact of women’s numerical superiority in nearly every religious setting, and it really begins to seem true that, to quote the title of Ann Braude’s recent essay, “Women’s History Is American Religious History.”1
Central to this provocative essay is Braude’s assertion that the overwhelming “presence of women” in churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques demands new interpretive narratives of religious history. Her implication is that we have paid too much attention to singular women, those who were first to be ordained or to sit in a theological seminary classroom.2 Obviously, this “top-down” history is important, but it has tended to slight other–admittedly more ambiguous–dimensions of “women’s presence,” especially their roles in sustaining popular religion.
This can be difficult material for historians to get at, and not only because the vast majority of women didn’t leave written records. As many emerging studies have already shown, women’s spiritual “ways of knowing” sometimes coexist uneasily in a late-twentieth-century world that prides itself on being skeptical, unsentimental, and “street-smart.” One obvious way to get at women’s inner religious experience is through diaries, biographies, and (for women in the present) ethnography. From these works we get fresh perspectives on familiar subjects; the landscape is permanently altered.
On the face of it, Writing Out My Heart, a recent volume of selections from the journals of Frances E. Willard, would hardly strike most readers as a “good read,” nor would one suspect that such a preeminently public person as Willard, renowned president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union during its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s, would have had much opportunity to record a rich inner life. Furthermore, a collection of journal excerpts is by definition missing any obvious plot line; Willard’s autobiography, Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889), is a better bet if we are looking for a text with a plan. Finally, the bulk of the journal was written in the years when Willard was a sheltered young woman without much experience of the wider world beyond Evanston, Illinois, and a farm in Wisconsin. Yet Writing Out My Heart makes Frances Willard approachable, human, and very interesting.
Carolyn DeSwarte Gifford spent years transcribing Willard’s journals (which had been assumed to be lost or destroyed until they showed up in 1982) and then selecting from the 49 volumes. The text here represents about a tenth of the total. Through her choices of what to include, Gifford has managed to give shape if not exactly a plot to Willard’s journals. In effect, the journal entries tell the story of a young woman (and then, to a lesser extent, an older one) struggling to get her spiritual, theological, and moral bearings, even though it seems as if her heart keeps going out on its own.
A shy, retiring, at times lonely young woman, Willard conceives what sounds like a schoolgirl crush on a young woman named Mary Bannister. This seems harmless enough–it was a very common phenomenon at the time; a hundred years ago young women routinely shared intimacies that might raise eyebrows today–until Mary falls in love with Willard’s brother and Willard finds that she, unlike Mary, cannot move on to marriage. Instead she is desperately jealous of Mary’s growing attachment to her brother. To make matters worse, she becomes engaged to a suitable, charming young ministerial student whom her family likes, only to break the engagement when she finally realizes she cannot love him. All this raises hard questions for her about her identity and her relationship to God: does he frown on her single condition in life and on her “unnatural” affections for women?
And then there are the predictable losses to death: her sister and father early on, and finally her mother, who dies full of years. Her mother’s passing is hardest of all, and Willard never finishes grieving for her–nor does she ever quite settle her doubts about whether she and her mother will be reunited in the world to come.
Most of this is new material that Willard barely touches on in her more “public” autobiography, and it is fascinating. Gifford’s highlighting of Willard’s moral and religious inner life is also a departure from the usual picture created by Willard’s biographers–that of a canny politician and organizer, women’s suffrage leader, and social reformer par excellence. She was all these things, but her public roles are more understandable when we begin to comprehend her religious commitments and dilemmas.
Aimee Semple McPherson’s colorful career as a Pentecostal evangelist, healer, and Hollywood-style celebrity is the subject of a richly contextualized biography by Edith Blumhofer. Much of McPherson’s legend persists in theories about her notorious disappearance in 1926, an apparent attempt at a lovers’ tryst staged as an abduction by mysterious kidnappers. But Blumhofer, while not downplaying the scandal, refuses to trivialize McPherson, pointing instead to her legacy as an innovative revivalist, founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, and compelling spiritual figure for millions of devoted followers.
Though undeniably one of the best-known and most significant women in twentieth-century American religious history, McPherson consistently eludes whatever pious constructions present-day observers may attempt to impose on her. Unlike Willard, she left no diaries to record her inner life, and, as Blumhofer points out, she continually rewrote her own autobiography. Moreover, McPherson clearly reveled in the theatricality of popular revivalism, and in its secular analogue, Hollywood culture of the 1920s.
Further, we may wonder exactly what difference McPherson’s physical charisma played in the creation of her sometimes ambiguous religious persona. Though the whiff of sexuality in her platform demeanor offended some religionists, it attracted far more. And although McPherson’s sexuality raised doubts for others about her sincerity, she was undeniably successful in combining her allure with genuine evangelical warmth–a success that points toward a growing convergence between popular religion and the secular, media-driven culture of middle America.
Biography is one way of getting at women’s religiosity; group biographies, cast as congregational studies, shed a slightly different light. Jody Davie’s Women in the Presence, for example, takes a folklorist’s approach to her study of a suburban Presbyterian women’s Bible-study group. Another good example of this genre is Joanna Bowen Gillespie’s Women Speak: Of God, Congregations, and Change, an in-depth view of women’s work in four geographically representative Episcopal congregations.
Although Gillespie’s book is not framed historically, it is still a helpful reference point for thinking about change. The book presents an unhurried, affectionate look at women’s sense of their own place in congregational life, and Gillespie’s subjects emerge as articulate and thoughtful people. But they also speak a particular language, depending upon the generation they hail from, about faith, commitment, and service that transcends theological boundaries. It is deeply personal and, Gillespie argues, deeply feminine.
This will endear her subjects to some, and frustrate others. Gillespie, in fact, quotes a response from a seminary professor who had read an early version of the manuscript: “It is as though these women have been unaffected by the evangelical, the Anglo-Catholic, the liberal, the Social Gospel, the existential, and the Jungian movements.” Certainly this gap between the language of religious professionals and that of laypeople is not unique to Episcopalians, nor does it necessarily reflect on women more than men; but Gillespie’s interviews do witness to a long-standing suspicion among many leading Protestant churchwomen, voiced even more strongly by Frances Willard a hundred years ago, that excessive concern for theology is the antithesis of true religion.
The difficulty of unearthing a feminine voice in modern religion will become only more acute as we confront the devotional literature that women of all traditions have turned out with such quiet regularity–everything from the spiritual musings of Marjorie Holmes to the pious romances of Grace Livingston Hill. Such sources probably reflect an authentic feminine voice in American Protestantism, although it may be difficult to take seriously the books our mothers left lying around for less-than-subtle, edifying purposes.
Difficulties multiply when we turn to women and Catholic devotional culture. Unless one knew Robert Orsi’s earlier book, Madonna of 115th Street, one would suppose he had taken on an impossible task in making readers care about the hundreds of thousands of devotees of the Catholic Saint Jude, the “Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes and Things Despaired Of.”
Read in one way–a reading Orsi himself does not rule out–Thank You, St. Jude is unlikely material to win our sympathy. Though the vast majority of devotees are women, male priests run the national shrine in South Chicago and control the considerable sums of money raised by it. Moreover, when women appeal to the male saint for help in matters of love and health, they seem to undercut a sense of their own agency. Occasionally they forgo sound medical advice in favor of the ministrations of the saint. They purchase and cherish “holy junk”: small statues of the saint, prayer cards, medals, greeting cards, and the like. Yet Orsi succeeds in making us care about these women.
The cult of Saint Jude (cult here is a specifically Catholic term, without the usual negative connotations) was begun in Chicago in 1929. In 1935 the publication Voice of St. Jude was started; in it are found the thousands of narratives in which women petition Jude for help and then thank him for having answered their prayers. Orsi draws on these narratives as well as interviews with current long-term devotees of Jude.
Orsi has located himself in relation to the devotees with a great deal of wisdom. He says up front that he is not a believer in Saint Jude, but he grants the women he studies their full measure of faith in him. At other times he seems almost to adopt the women’s voices as his own. Sometimes he is gently humorous, as when he describes the devouts’ insistence that statues or pictures of Jude ought to “look like” his cousin Jesus.
Orsi argues that women’s relationship to Jude clearly improved their lives. In place of hopelessness they gained hope. If they lost agency in some ways they gained it in others, especially in their determination to imagine Jude in their own way–sometimes in contradiction to the choices of the officials of the shrine. When their letters to Jude were published, they gained a public voice and permission to say things about their lives (their alcoholic husbands, their rebellious kids, their interfering in-laws) that normally they couldn’t. In helping and being helped by other devout, they enjoyed “reciprocity,” the networks of caring women.
More than any other book we’ve read (except perhaps Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity), Thank You, St. Jude suggests a model for talking about women’s experiences when those experiences could be described as unglamorous at best, exploitations of the credulity of women at worst. It is possible that Orsi is able to write so well and so sympathetically about these women because devotions like those of Saint Jude seem part of a dying world; they are the stuff of nostalgia. Currently thriving aspects of women’s popular religious culture may be harder for scholars to tangle with–for all sorts of political and personal reasons. Nevertheless, future scholars of women’s devotional lives will most certainly turn to Orsi’s approach for clues on how to proceed.
These four books, as well as many others we could name, more than justify Ann Braude’s claim that women’s experience should be central to our understanding of American religion, and not simply because women are the majority of religious believers. To what we already know of famous ministers, theological controversies, and the growth of denominations, women’s stories bring new complexities and richer textures. They should certainly arouse new curiosity about American popular religion, in all of its wonderful array, as an important arena of expression and creativity for countless, and often anonymous, churchwomen from all traditions. The emerging new literature on women’s lives is at once fascinating, theologically ambiguous, intellectually frustrating, and personally compelling. And, to make a fairly safe prediction, it will never be dull.
Margaret Lamberts Bendroth is the author of Fundamentalism and Gender: 1875 to the Present (Yale University Press). Virginia Lieson Brereton is the author of From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present (Indiana University Press). They are the codirectors of the Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism project at Andover Newton Theological School.
1. In Retelling U.S. Religious History, edited by Thomas A. Tweed (University of California Press, 1997), pp. 87-107.
2. In this respect, however, see sociologist Mark Chaves’s innovative and important study of women’s ordination (forthcoming from Harvard University Press).
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 20
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