340 - Women and Religion in America: Vol. 2, The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods: A Documentary History

Women and Religion in America:
Vol. 2, The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods:
A Documentary History
Edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller
San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983. 434 pp. $24.95.

The nine essays in this book consist of brief, lively summaries of a particular aspect of women's religious experience in the American colonies before 1800, a short iconographical collage, and a series of documents illustrating the primary sources. The latter is the heart of the book, enabling the reader to hear and to verify the genuine experience of these a I most- forgotten women in their own words, thus sharing the sense of discovery and enthusiasm which the editors exemplify in their introductions. Many of the documents are impossible to find elsewhere, and their collection in a single volume is of great value to any student of the period. Moreover, the admirable eclecticism of the editors has created one of the few scholarly, works on the period which does justice to the ethnic, geographic, and cultural diversity of the American colonies, too often seen only "New Englandly."

In their general Introduction, the editors express their desire "to chart women's role in the drama of colonization," a role which has hitherto been almost completely ignored. Jacqueline Peterson and Mary Druke (a historian and an anthropologist) analyze the traditional role of women in the North American Indian societies, and the influence of Christianity upon this tradition. Asuncion Lavrin, on the faculty at Howard University, discusses a different aspect of Christian culture in her essay on women in Spanish America. She sees the nuances of the relationship between the church and women "as significant features of the social history of Spanish America prior to independence." Her conclusion that a specific position for women within a patriarchal church was dependent on a "contract," which required female submission and deference, is shared by other contributors to this volume. The chapter on women in colonial French America, a particularly neglected area even among historians of American religion, is written by Christine Allen, a philosopher teaching at Concordia College in Montreal. Her presentation of Counter-Reformation Catholic spirituality is immensely interesting, since it is in such contrast to Puritan theodicy and Spanish Catholicism.

342 - Women and Religion in America: Vol. 2, The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods: A Documentary History

Rosemary Skinner Keller's essay, on first-generation Puritan women and on women, civil religion, and the American Revolution, covers ground more familiar to most historians of the period, although the well-chosen documents are both pertinent and not widely reprinted. Keller, one of the general editors of the volume, is Professor of Religion and American Culture at Garrett- Evangelical Theological Seminary. Her co-editor, Rosemary Radford Ruether, also at Garrett, is co-author with Catherine M. Prelinger, editor of the Franklin Papers at Yale, of the chapter on women in sectarian and Utopian groups. The Quakers, Moravian Brethren, Dunkers at Ephrata Cloister, and the "female Messiahs" of the Revolutionary War era, Mother Ann Lee and Jemima Wilkinson, offer provocative contrast to the roles played by women in more traditional Protestant sects. However, as Alice E. Mathews, Professor of History at Western Carolina College, suggests in her essay on Southern women, and Keller and co-author Marth Tomhaye Blauvelt corroborate in their work on women in the Puritan and Wesleyan Revivals, religion before 1800 did not provide civil identity but did provide -spiritual liberation" and a form of female bonding. The religious experiences or black women in the colonies, in the chapter by Lillian Ashcraft Webb, Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Clark College, shows not only this aspect of colonial religion, but also its interaction with the alternative values brought from West Africa. The mixed messages and conflicting ideas about women's nature are most clearly revealed in the treatment of women slaves, and were least affected by, the liberating historical changes of evangelical Protestantism.

This volume is of great interest to anyone in the field of American social history, and religion. Its emphasis on women Is a corrective to their general exclusion from standard texts in the field, as well as reflecting new scholarship and new interpretations of religious history.

Barbara Welter
Hunter College and Graduate Center
City, University of New York