Gender, Power, and Religion: Orientations of the Self in African America and the Black Diaspora

In Black Women's Christian Activism, The Promise of Patriarchy, and Religion in the Kitchen, Betty Livingston Adams, Ula Yvette Taylor, and Elizabeth Pérez each explore, albeit in different ways, the role of religion in self-making and the relationship between religious self-understanding and critical engagement with racism, patriarchy, and socioeconomic marginalization. This triptych highlights a rising wave of work across scholarly fields that not only reveals the significant political work of women in seemingly mundane or unexpected spaces and places but also delves deeply into the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual lives of women who are actually far more than ordinary.¹ The early twentieth-century suburb, the Nation of Islam, and the kitchens of Lucumí priests are realms where women of color have had great impact and pivotal influence but have not received extended attention. Each project of excavation and reclamation highlights the ways in which women have affirmed themselves within the intimate ritual spaces of religious community and reveals the contradictions of patriarchy. Together these books also draw attention to how women have created and extended their religious leadership as they embodied and expressed critiques of racism and hegemonies of masculinity. Charting perseverance as a function of religious worldview is central to each volume; however, each study illustrates a different story about persistence and its complicated results.

Adams explains that the relatively new urban history, with its emphasis on the northern civil rights movement, has mostly missed the pivotal roles played by African American women to make suburbanization happen for white families and to establish black religious and civic institutions even in largely white suburbs. Adams's historical investigation of Summit, New Jersey, during the first half of the twentieth century illustrates the complex networks and relations among African American Baptist and Methodist women who worked as domestic laborers and participated in auxiliary and missionary contexts. Adams echoes recent scholarship that complicates the tendency to lump individuals and groups into overdetermined categories of the elite, the middle class, and the respectable.²

Although many will be familiar with the pattern of black women's missionary and auxiliary work in the context of Protestant churches, Adams's exploration of these institutions and their functioning is new.³ The working-class Christian activists Violet Robinson and Florence Randolph drew from older African American women's convention and auxiliary traditions even as they worked to form new racial and interracial associations. The civic righteousness of both women, their push to infuse "justice and morality in the public sphere," was animated by the dispossession experienced by African Americans (58). During World War I, the hurdles of racist employment, restrictive housing patterns, and xenophobic nationalism animated everyday women like Robinson and Randolph (71–73). In addition, the suffrage movement's victory with the Nineteenth Amendment provided black women with a new and explicitly political tool in their fight for integration and equality. Disappointment from the failure of interracial cooperation among women and growing northern segregation lay alongside a renewed hope infused by gaining the vote. From 1920 on, these women added electoral participation to their widening fusion of religion and politics. Yet Adams highlights the constant loss of power suffered by these activists even as they expended extraordinary effort to center the issues of racial and gender equality.

Although Adams does well to emphasize the...