610 - Women and Religion in America (Vol. 3: 1900-1968)

Women and Religion in America (Vol. 3: 1900-1968)

Edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller

San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1986. 409 Pp. $26.95.

As the visibility of women in ministry and religious studies has increased, women have raised important questions about religious history. Revisionist historians have argued that only when we take seriously the contributions of women to the history of faith communities will an adequate interpretation of religious history become possible.

The problem, however, is that the most important original sources that "tell the story" of women in American religious history have been out of print for years. Consequently, in the late 1970s a group of women scholars determined that the time was ripe for a multi-volume documentary history of women and religion in America. This book is the third and final volume in that series.

Following the pattern of earlier volumes, it is divided into nine annotated essays supported by selected documents on diverse groups of women: radical white, native American, black, Roman Catholic, evangelical, lay, and women with official leadership status in religious institutions. The twentieth century story moves from the radical post-Christian critique of so-called Victorian radicals to my own chapter summarizing recent campaigns to gain ordination for women in mainstream Protestantism.

There is no question but that this three volume set will become a standard resource in American religious studies.

Barbara Brown Zikmund, Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley, Calif.