American Religious History and Women's History: Old Divides and Recent Developments

Scholars attentive to the religious history of American women routinely lament the perceived chasm between the field of American religious history, rooted in university departments of religious studies as well as theological schools, and the field of American women’s history, housed primarily in history departments and women’s studies programs. Those desiring to bridge these fields argue, in essence, that whereas historians of American religion have developed intricate models for interpreting religious devotion, women’s history as a “secular” discipline has all too often either blunted the intricacies of religion and its complex impact upon women’s lives or simply erased religious expression from those lives altogether. Whatever intentions and assumptions continue to motivate this erasure—animosity toward religion as invariably debilitating for women; hope of severing the associations among piety, submission, and “femininity”; suspicion that religious language simply disguises more tangible social, economic, and political meanings—the usual result has been to interpret women’s religiosity in purely functionalist terms, evaluating it variously as a mixed source of false hope and limited compensation while disregarding its expressive content and expansive social impact. ¹

Gender issues aside, this disciplinary fissure between religious history on the one hand and intellectual, social, and cultural history on the other illustrates the persistent unease of many academic scholars toward the categories and questions of “religion” and a widespread reluctance to take seriously the theological beliefs and devotional practices of historical subjects as potentially transformative for them. Equating religion in general with conservative Protestant teachings on traditional gender roles and fixed hierarchies, accounts by women’s historians unimpressed by theological ambivalence and religious complexity have all too habitually (whether implicitly or explicitly) disdained religion as nearly everywhere championing a repressive status quo. Historians of religion, meanwhile, insist that close attention to articulate religious sensibilities, commitments, and rituals, including those presumed to be thoroughly reactionary, calls for a fundamental rethinking of this assumption and an ongoing reappraisal of religion’s mixed impact on individual agents, as well as on culture and society more broadly. Read together, the three volumes here under consideration distinctly illumine the stakes in this interpretive battle and represent the range of varied positions taken by several able scholars of religion, history, and literature.

Carolyn De Swarte Gifford’s selected edition of Frances Willard’s journal is a marvelous contribution to the task of rereading religious devotion into historical women’s lives. The journal, consisting of over fifty volumes and totaling more than eight thousand pages, had been presumed lost or destroyed for several decades. In the early 1980s, staff members at the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) national headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, unexpectedly discovered the volumes in the back of a cupboard, where they had apparently been deliberately hidden from prying eyes. Laboring for seven years over Willard’s uneven handwriting, Gifford transcribed the volumes in full, then selected less than a tenth of them for this published volume. (She has made the entire transcript available to researchers at the WCTU Archive, adjacent to the national headquarters.) The journal, supplemented with Gifford’s short biographical and analytic essays interspersed throughout the collection, richly evokes much seen elsewhere in Willard’s writings: her constant self-discipline and striving to improve herself; her irritation toward various social and cultural constraints on women; her abhorrence of imperfection and vice. Yet the journal also highlights what Willard’s chief modern biographer, Ruth Bordin, downplayed in her account: the passionate, concentrated piety that galvanized and sustained Willard’s...