Faith And Feminism In Nineteenth Century Religious Communities

Explore a diversity of feminist readings of the Bible This latest volume in the Bible and Women series is concerned with documenting, through word and image, both well-known and largely unknown women and their relationship to the Bible from the period of the late eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century. The essays in this collection illustrate the broad range of treatment of the Holy Scripture. Paul Chilcote, Marion Ann Taylor, Christiana de Groot, Elizabeth M. Davis, and Pamela S. Nadell offer perspectives on the Anglo-American sphere during this period. Marina Cacchi, Adriano Valerio, Inmaculada Blasco Herranz, and Alexei Klutschewski and Eva Maria Synek illuminate the areas of southern and eastern Europe. Angela Berlis, Ruth Albrecht, Doris Brodbeck, Ute Gause, and Michaela Sohn-Kronthaler examine women from the German-speaking world and their texts. Bernhard Schneider, Magda Motté, Katharina Büttner-Kirschner, and Elfriede Wiltschnigg treat the subject area of religious literature and art. Features Insight into how women participated in academic exegesis and applied biblical figures as models for structuring their own lives Exploration of genres used by women, including letters, diaries, autobiographical records, stories, novels, songs, poems, and specialized exegetical treatises and commentaries on individual books of the Bible Detailed analyses of women’s interpretations ranging from those that sought to confirm traditions to those that challenged them

A collection of essays that examine how foods express American cultural values.

This volume is the first comprehensive overview of women, gender and religious change in modern Britain spanning from the evangelical revival of the early 1800s to interwar debates over women’s roles and ministry. This collection of pieces by key scholars combines cross-disciplinary insights from history, gender studies, theology, literature, religious studies, sexuality and postcolonial studies. The book takes a thematic approach, providing students and scholars with a clear and comparative examination of ten significant areas of cultural activity that both shaped, and were shaped by women’s religious beliefs and practices: family life, literary and theological discourses, philanthropic networks, sisterhoods and deaconess institutions, revivals and preaching ministry, missionary organisations, national and transnational political reform networks, sexual ideas and practices, feminist communities, and alternative spiritual traditions. Together, the volume challenges widely-held truisms about the increasingly private and domesticated nature of faith, the feminisation of religion and the relationship between secularisation and modern life. Including case studies, further reading lists, and a survey of the existing scholarship, and with a British rather than Anglo-centric approach, this is an ideal book for anyone interested in women's religious experiences across the nineteeth and twentieth centuries.

An investigation that shows the impact of manifest destiny and domesticity on women and non-white men in nineteenth-century America American culture was firmly undergirded by two dominant rhetorics during the nineteenth century: manifest destiny and domesticity. The first celebrated a divinely ordained spread of democracy, individualism, capitalism, and civilization throughout the North American continent. The second codified "natural" differences and duties of American men and women. While the two rhetorics were touted as "universal" in their application and appeal, in actuality both assumed a belief in masculine Anglo-Saxon American superiority. The triumph of the nation could be accomplished only through the concomitant removal, acculturation, or elimination of non-white peoples and through a careful circumscription of white women. The rhetorics not only were linked through ethnocentrism and misogyny but also were connected through their reliance on the Protestant belief system and on the church itself. Yet, curiously, despite their exclusion from the Protestant rhetorics of manifest destiny and domesticity, the nineteenth century featured a remarkable growth in the conversion of women and non-white men to the Protestant faith. Indeed, by mid-century both groups had made significant inroads into select leadership positions within the Protestant denominations and had organized themselves in Protestant-based groups to seek major social reforms. Why did women and non-white men seek to join a dominant religion that in many ways set out to limit and oppress them? This book responds to that question by exploring the actual words and rhetorical choices made by some of the most progressive Protestant white, African American, and Native American thinkers of the era: Olaudah Equiano, William Apess, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, and Amanda Berry Smith. It argues that American Protestantism was both prohibitive and constitutive, offering its followers an expedient, acceptable but limited means for assuming social and political power and for forming a mutually empathetic, relational notion of self while at the same time foreclosing the possibility for more radical roles and social change. Carolyn A. Haynes is Director of the Honors and Scholars Program at Miami University of Ohio.

This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914), the resource departs from older models of ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’ in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. Volume four on ‘Disbelief and New Beliefs’ explores the transformation of the religious landscape of Britain and its imperial territories during the nineteenth century as a result of key cultural and intellectual forces.

Nineteenth-Century Women’s Movements and the Bible examines politically motivated women’s movements in the nineteenth century, including the legal, cultural, and ecclesiastical contexts of women. Focusing on the period beginning with the French Revolution in 1789 through the end of World War I in 1918, contributors explore the many ways that women’s lives were limited in both the public and domestic spheres. Essays consider the social, political, biblical, and theological factors that resulted in a multinational raising of awareness and emancipation for women in the nineteenth century and the strengthening of their international networks. The contributors include Angela Berlis, Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Ute Gerhard, Christiana de Groot, Arnfriður Guðmundsdóttir, Izaak J. de Hulster, Elisabeth Joris, Christine Lienemann-Perrin, Amanda Russell-Jones, Claudia Setzer, Aud V. Tønnessen, Adriana Valerio, and Royce M. Victor.

Nineteenth-century American women’s culture was immersed in religious experience and female authors of the era employed representations of faith to various cultural ends. Focusing primarily on non-canonical texts, this collection explores the diversity of religious discourse in nineteenth-century women’s literature. The contributors examine fiction, political writings, poetry, and memoirs by professional authors, social activists, and women of faith, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Harriet E. Wilson, Sarah Piatt, Julia Ward Howe, Julia A. J. Foote, Lucy Mack Smith, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Fanny Newell. Embracing the complexities of lived religion in women’s culture-both its repressive and its revolutionary potential-Nineteenth-Century American Women Write Religion articulates how American women writers adopted the language of religious sentiment for their own cultural, political, or spiritual ends.

A fundamental and well-illustrated reference collection for anyone interested in the role of women in North American religious life.

Why do so many women of faith have such a strong aversion to feminism? And why do so many feminists have an ardent mistrust of religion? These questions are at the heart of Helen LaKelly Hunt's illuminating look at the alliance between spiritual conviction and social action. Intelligent and heartfelt, Faith and Feminism offers a perceptive look at the lives of five spirited and spiritual women of history, women who combined their undying faith with feminist beliefs and who made the world a better place by doing so. • St. Teresa of Ávila, a woman whose bravery in confronting her shadows gave her the strength to connect with the world and live a life of divine action. • Lucretia Mott, a Quaker minister, who rose from her quiet upbringing to become a passionate speaker and activist working tirelessly on behalf of justice and peace. • Sojourner Truth, a Christian slave, who spoke out with unwavering courage to claim her God-given rightful place as an African American and a woman. • Emily Dickinson, an extraordinary poet, who touched the world with her ability to capture and transform the experience of suffering. • Dorothy Day, a radical journalist, who lived a life of voluntary poverty as a way of expressing her passion for the Christian faith and care for those in need. A remarkable book that focuses on the idea that spirituality and feminism are really different expressions of the same impulse to make life more whole, Faith and Feminism offers a powerful catalyst for reflecting on our sense of self -- and for living and loving according to our deepest values.

Contributions by Janet Allured, Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Jami L. Carlacio, Cheryl J. Fish, Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Jennifer McFarlane-Harris, Neely McLaughlin, Darcy Metcalfe, Phillip Luke Sinitiere, P. Jane Splawn, Laura L. Sullivan, and Hettie V. Williams Activism in the Name of God: Religion and Black Feminist Public Intellectuals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present recognizes and celebrates twelve Black feminists who have made an indelible mark not just on Black women’s intellectual history but on American intellectual history in general. The volume includes essays on Jarena Lee, Theressa Hoover, Pauli Murray, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, to name a few. These women’s commitment to the social, political, and economic well-being of oppressed people in the United States shaped their work in the public sphere, which took the form of preaching, writing, singing, marching, presiding over religious institutions, teaching, assuming leadership roles in the civil rights movement, and creating politically subversive print and digital art. This anthology offers readers exemplars with whose minds and spirits we can engage, from whose ideas we can learn, and upon whose social justice work we can build. The volume joins a burgeoning chorus of texts that calls attention to the creativity of Black women who galvanized their readers, listeners, and fellow activists to seek justice for the oppressed. Pushing back on centuries of institutionalized injustices that have relegated Black women to the sidelines, the work of these Black feminist public intellectuals reflects both Christian gospel ethics and non-Christian religious traditions that celebrate the wholeness of Black people.