Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England by Elizabeth Reis (review)

BOOK REVIEWS577 index. This book is certainly a fine introduction for someone interested in "popular religiosity," while suggesting the need for new approaches to American religious history. Leonard Norman Primiano Cabrini College Damned Women:Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England. By Elizabeth Reis. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. 1997. Pp. xxi, 212. $32.50.) In this interesting book, Elizabeth Reis argues that ordinary Puritans were as much concerned about damnation as they were about sanctification. Extending David D. Hall's emphasis on popular religious belief, Rets shows that our overemphasis on Puritan elites has obscured appreciation of the powerful hold that ideas about the Devil and demonic activity exerted on ordinary imaginations . In addition, she explores the reasons that women were more likely than men to be damned both in their own eyes and in those of others. Extending backward the observation Barbara Leslie Epstein first made about the gendered nature of conversion in the second Great Awakening, Reis argues that seventeenth-century New England Puritan women were more likely to think of themselves as utterly depraved while men were more likely to focus on particular sins. Thus women were more likely to be accused of, confess to, and accuse other women of the extreme sacrilege of witchcraft. Preoccupation with actual, physical manifestations of demonic power declined after the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, Reis argues, partly as a result of ministerial warnings about the mischief resulting from imagined occurrences of demonic possession. While eighteenth-century women were still more likely than men to think of themselves in negative religious terms, they came to think about the Devil in metaphorical terms. They were still more likely than men to think of themselves negatively, but they also perceived themselves to be more responsible for particular sins than earlier women and more capable of overcoming them. In its attention to popular ideas about supernatural reality and their role in constructing gender, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of American religious thought—and a timely one, given the resurgence of supernatural beliefs today. Moreover, Reis's emphasis on the power of religious beliefis enlightening, as is her skillful return to Puritan culture as a basis for understanding the historical development of American religious thought. But in pushing Epstein's argument back into the seventeenth century, Reis overlooks the degree to which men and women in Puritan culture were equally preoccupied by the inherently sinful nature of their souls. This oversight not only obscures understanding of the egalitarian implications of Puritan beliefbut also of the antiegalitarian implications ofArminian interpretations of personal respon- 578BOOK REVIEWS sibility, which undercut the morbidity of Calvinist psychology but also opened the way for the idea that women and men had inherently different natures,with women being emotional rather than rational and more concerned with relationships than with rules or truth. Puritans may not have believed the human soul to be essentially female, as Reis suggests, but rather that, with respect to God, all Christians should assume a posture ofwifelike affection and submissiveness. This belief enabled wives to exemplify sanctity somewhat more easily than their husbands. It also raised expectations about women's virtue that many women could not meet. And it never fully triumphed over medieval notions about the special corruptibility and deficiencies of womanhood. Amanda Porterfield Indiana University—Purdue University at Indianapolis American Women in Mission:A Social History ofTheir Thought and Practice. By Dana L. Robert. [The Modern Mission Era, 1792-1992: An Appraisal.] (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. 1996. Pp. xxii, 444. $30.00 paperback .) Historians and theologians have given short shrift to the role of women in the missionary movement; much research remains to be done. This work by Dana L. Robert, a professor in Boston University, begins to fill the gap. She bases her study on three assumptions: that women participated in the creation of American mission theories; that gender had an effect on those theories; and "that mission theory includes motivations, goals, theological assumptions, and reflections upon practical strategies that American women employed as they participated in foreign mission." The study moves from the wives ofmissionaries (American Board and Baptist Convention),in the early nineteenth century, to unmarried...