Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

Introduction

xxv l Introduction Integrating the Worlds of Women’s Religious Experience in North America THIS ENCYCLOPEDIA IS non-traditional in every way. Typically, an encyclopedia contains brief descriptive statements that define institutions, movements, and individuals . A large number of the entries may be biographical sketches. The articles are organized alphabetically and only accidentally do related subjects happen to follow one another. While meant to cover a comprehensive list of topics, an encyclopedia gives only succinct introductions to a field of inquiry. If readers seek further information, the reference work provides a foundation from which to explore other sources. We as editors had a very different vision when we conceived this encyclopedia in 1996. Our purpose was to cover in depth the relationship of women to religion. We wanted to portray women’s history through the lens of religious history, a viewpoint that has been widely overlooked. The writing of women’s history from a secular viewpoint began in the 1960s. Major studies that capture the centrality of religion to women’s experience in North America have been written since then. Even so, a secular perspective remains the primary focus of women’s history today. Further, in religious history, the work of white men is still the primary theme, with gender , like race, usually remaining a specific, peripheral topic within the field. The vast amount of knowledge that has been gained over the past four decades about women and religion in North America cannot be presented in the traditional encyclopedic form of short definitive entries. Instead this volume has almost 150 longer essays that enable major themes to be developed in their deeper dimensions . The articles focus on institutions, movements, and ideas. We intentionally sought to have authors weave biographical sketches into their articles to give them a more personal and humanizing quality, and to recognize the women responsible for the gains made over the centuries . The essays demonstrate that neither the story of women nor of religion in North America can be accurately told unless the religious experience of women is integrated into the center of women’s and religious history . Our vision was that a volume that developed the history of women and religion in depth had to be an interpretive encyclopedia. It needed to analyze, rather than simply describe subjects, as entries in traditional encyclopedias are meant to do. Because of the work that has been done on women and religion in North America over recent decades, there is now an explicitly feminist reflection that transverses all the world’s religions in North America that can be discussed and compared. A feminist perspective, the view that society should be transformed to include full participation of women, is the interpretive frame through which this encyclopedia is written. Most of the contributors speak from that viewpoint. Finally, we envisioned that an interpretive encyclopedia also had to integrate the wide worlds of women and religion in North America. This work is the first comprehensive history of the interaction of women and religion on this continent over four centuries. Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century is it possible to create this encyclopedia. In the 1960s and 1970s this historical work was just beginning in the more liberal branches of Protestantism. Catholics, Jews, and other Protestant Christians soon followed, with work on women in Islam, Asian religions, and new religious movements being done more recently. Obviously, there are notable differences in the lives of women and their relationships to their many religious, as well as racial, traditions. However, when we as editors read the nearly 150 essays that were written for this volume, we were struck with the major similarities in women’s religious lives in North America. Those patterns were formed first historically by women in the Protestant Christian tradition . The striking fact demonstrated in these articles is that those patterns are replicated throughout the in- xxvi l INTRODUCTION stitutions and movements of women across both religious and racial divides. This work seeks to integrate the wide worlds of women’s religious experience in North America to enable readers to explore the likenesses and differences in the lives of women of diverse faiths and races, not just read about individual sub-topics in a fragmented way. This encyclopedia is also non-traditional in the audiences for whom it is written. Of course, it is addressed to libraries, where it will be the primary reference work in the history of women and religion in North...