Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

PROTESTANT WOMEN’S COLLEGES IN THE UNITED STATES

912 l MULTIDENOMINATIONAL MOVEMENTS—RELIGIOUS EDUCATION rising uncertainty about how much religious authority educators were entitled to invoke in classrooms. Women teachers were in a particularly vulnerable position, never having been credited with much theological sophistication or religious authority in the first place. By a number of recent reports, religion has begun to engage larger numbers of Americans with new intensity. Contemporary religiosity is sometimes puzzling, often invoking the cliché about the superiority of being “spiritual ” over being “religious” and the demurral that God is closer in the mountains or in a place of service to other people than in church. (This phenomenon is not entirely new in a nation of notoriously individualistic believers.) Furthermore, it is not really clear when religious seekers stop being Protestants in any meaningful sense of the term. Women, still marginalized from many of the centers of religious establishment, have been among the first to explore nontraditional vehicles for spirituality. It seems likely that if there is to be another reform period in religious education, one that will take seriously the new forms of religiosity and perhaps reconnect them to the more venerable roots of spirituality, then Protestant women and formerly Protestant women will once again play an important and creative role in this effort. SOURCES: As primary sources and indications of the ideas of teachers, the journals of the Sunday school and religious education movements are invaluable, especially J. A. James, “The Pulpit and the School,” Sunday-School Journal, April 18, 1855; The Editor, “The National Sunday School Convention,” National Sunday School Teacher 4.6 (June 1869); Matilda H. Kriege, “Kindergarten and Sunday School,” National Sunday School Teacher 7 (1872); Faith Latimer, “Does It Pay?” National Sunday School Teacher 7 (1872); Faith Latimer, “The Unbelieving Teacher,” National Sunday School Teacher 8 (1873); Sara J. Timanus, “Outline Primary Lesson,” National Sunday School Teacher; Mrs. Mary E. C. Wyeth, “Whom Shall We Gather In?” National Sunday School Teacher 8.1 (January 1873); Elizabeth Harrison, “The Child’s Spiritual Nature,” Religious Education 1.5 (December 1906); Richard Morse Hodge, “The Model Sunday School at Teachers College,” Religious Education 1.4 (October 1906); and Ralph Bridgman and Sophie L. Fahs, “The Religious Experience of Pupils in the Experimental School of Religion,” Religious Education (1925). For a biography of a Sunday School teacher, see Elizabeth Mason North, Consecrated Talents: or, the Life of Mrs. Mary W. Mason (1870; reprint ). For secondary sources on the Sunday School/religious education movements, see Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution (1988); William Bean Kennedy, The Shaping of Protestant Education: An Interpretation of the Sunday School and the Development of Protestant Educational Strategy in the United States, 1789–1860 (1966); Robert W. Lynn and Elliott Wright, Big Little School: Sunday Child of American Protestantism (1971); Harris H. Parker, “The Union School of Religious Education, 1910–1929: Embers from the Fire of Progressivism,” Religious Education 86.4 (Fall 1991); Stephen A. Schmidt, A History of the Religion Education Association (1983); Susan Thistlewaite, “The Feminization of American Religious Education,” Religious Education 70.4 (July–August 1981): 391–402; and George William Webber, Led by the Spirit: the Story of New York Theological Seminary (1990). Helpful sources on Sophia Fahs are “Sophia Lyon Fahs,” http://www.uts.columbia.edu/projects/AWTS/exhibits/fahs2.html; and Edith F. Hunter, Sophia Lyon Fahs: A Biography (1966). General background on women in American Protestantism is also useful, especially Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, Fundamentalism and Gender (1993); Margaret Lamberts Bendroth and Virginia Lieson Brereton, Women and Twentieth Century Protestantism (2002); and Virginia Lieson Brereton, Training God’s Army: The American Bible School, 1880–1940 (1990). PROTESTANT WOMEN’S COLLEGES IN THE UNITED STATES Kathleen S. Hurty THE STORY OF Protestant women’s colleges builds on the dreams and changing expectations of women yearning for higher education when little was available. Two hundred years after the founding of Harvard in 1636 by Puritan clergy for young men, the first chartered Protestant colleges for women opened their doors. The story of women’s struggle for higher education in these centuries is shaped by the cultural and religious milieu— by Puritanism, by evangelical and progressive Protestantism and moral philosophy, by ideas of republican “true motherhood” for Christian women, by the Second Great Awakening with its religious revivals, by the abolitionist and the suffrage movements, and by the ever more evident threads of desire for gender equality. The story touches on controversy—the purpose and appropriate curriculum for the education of...