Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN IN PROTESTANT CHURCH SOCIETIES AND BUREAUCRACIES

WOMEN IN PROTESTANT CHURCH SOCIETIES AND BUREAUCRACIES l 1265 which it sees as religious imperialism devoted to stealing Native American practices. Silver Raven Fox, a self-proclaimed hereditary witch, typifies New Age eclecticism. Her popular books contain Wiccan chants and spells, Pennsylvania German powwow incantations, Native American healing rituals, and even charms to empower household cleaning supplies and cosmetics. Conclusion The late-twentieth-century women’s movement made visible the hidden history of women and challenged medical orthodoxy’s assumptions about sickness, health, and traditional healing. Americans, especially women, began reclaiming the stories and practices of a variety of healing traditions. The twenty-first-century spiritual healing marketplace offers healing crystals, curing stones, services in mainline denominations, Native American chants, Wiccan spells, visualization, and meditation techniques. The people most likely to use unorthodox healing are white, middle- and upper-middleclass , well-educated women. Although the National Institutes for Health now sponsors an office for Alternative Medicine, many physicians remain skeptical of alternative and spiritual healing claims. Scientific and spiritual healing do not use the same criteria to define a cure. Science requires clear laboratory results; proponents of spiritual healing count any symptomatic relief as a success. An individual whose pain eases but whose test results do not change will count herself healed, though her physician will not. For scientific medicine, there are hopeless cases. In religious healing systems, there are none. The ultimate goal, spiritual health, can be reached even when a condition is physically terminal. Women’s interest in the art of healing has been constant throughout North American history. By the end of the 1700s the dominant medical culture marginalized and belittled women’s healing practices, calling them old wives’ tales or superstitions from a less-enlightened age. Though cultural forces conspired against them, women remembered that illness affects body and soul. They preserved the art of healing and its fundamental understanding that physical, spiritual, and social health cannot be separated. SOURCES: For general information on the history of healthcare practices, see Ronald Numbers and Darrel Amundsen, Caring and Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions (1986). For a general view of scientific thought in North America, see Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (1976). For historical information on Native American practices, see Virgin J. Vogel, American Indian Medicine (1970). For an example of early colonial understanding of the interrelationship of spiritual and physical health, see Cotton Mather’s The Angel of Bethesda (1692). For an overview of women and religion in America, see the three-volume work by Rosemary Ruether and Rosemary Keller, eds., Women and Religion in America (1981– 1986). A number of books document women’s plight in the care of North American medicine. See Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1979), and Deborah Kuhn McGregor, Sexual Surgery and the Origins of Gynecology: J. Marion Sims, His Hospital and His Patients (1989). For a sense of the nineteenthcentury male physician’s view of women, see M. L. Holbrook’s Parturition without Pain: A Code of Directions for Escaping the Primal Curse (1875). Norman Gevitz’s anthology Other Healers : Unorthodox Medicine in America (1988) provides a good look at a number of alternatives to orthodox medical practice. For an overview of women and healing, see Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer (1991). For detailed histories and analyses of particular types of traditions in which women played important healing roles, see Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (1989); Mary Ewens, The Role of the Nun in NineteenthCentury America (1971); Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (1991); Melissa Jayne Fawcett, Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon (2000); Bobette H. Perrone, Henrieeta Stockel, and Victoria Krueger, Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women Doctors (1989); Susan Setta, “Healing in Suburbia: The Women’s Aglow Fellowship,” Journal of Religious Studies 12, no. 2 (1986): 46–56; Betty Snellenberg, “Four Interviews with Powwowers ,” Pennsylvania Life 18, no. 4 (1961): 40–45; and the chapter on Elizabeth Clare Prophet in Timothy Miller’s America ’s Alternative Religions (2001). For materials written by the healers themselves, see Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875); Clifton Johnson’s anthology God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves (1969); Kathryn Kuhlman, I Believe in Miracles (1976); Aimee Semple McPherson, Healing...