Women, Gender, and Religion in the United States

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Braude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Policy ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Public Speech ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Multiple Markers ◽  
Early National

While historians of America attend to religion most closely in the colonial and early national periods, this chapter, in contrast, views the century following the Civil War as the period when religious women had their greatest public impact, founding huge associations that connected religious women to public goals related to reform, temperance, and missions as well as foreign and domestic policy. It explores the responses of American women to the theological basis of gender in scriptural and doctrinal injunctions governing women’s public speech, leadership, and roles in marriage and motherhood. Treating Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Muslim, and Jewish women, the chapter draws on interpretive models from African American women’s history, a field that has theorized the inseparability of multiple markers of identity, including religion. It argues that the construction of every religious prejudice, like the construction of race, advances and is advanced by the construction of gender.

Chick-a-ma-feeno

Jockomo ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 75-108
Author(s):  
Shane Lief ◽  
John McCusker
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Black Community ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Mardi Gras ◽  
Personal Histories

This chapter lays out several different narratives about the origins of Mardi Gras Indians. Some are based on oral histories shared among Mardi Gras Indians themselves, while others are based on various archives and newspaper accounts. The emergence of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition is set against the backdrop of the evolution of Mardi Gras as celebrated during the colonial period and beyond, after Louisiana had become part of the United States. The struggle for African American political power and social equality is another parallel thread for this narrative, especially as Mardi Gras Indian practices overlapped with other masking traditions and institutions in the Black community. The earliest known account of Mardi Gras Indians, identified as such, is analysed and the personal histories of the first known Mardi Gras Indians reveal connections to Black participation in the Civil War and continuing struggles during Reconstruction and through the early twentieth century.

“In the Midst of Sorrow and Death”

2020 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Margaret M. McGuinness
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Other ◽  
Subsequent Work ◽  
Religious Women ◽  
Dominican Sisters

This essay focuses on the work of Dominican Sisters in Memphis and Nashville during the second half of the nineteenth century. To a certain extent, their work often followed the trajectory of other congregations of religious women. They were sought after by priests and bishops, for example, who were anxious to establish schools and orphanages but needed religious women to staff and minister these institutions. On the other hand, the circumstances surrounding the arrival and subsequent work of the Dominicans in Memphis and Nashville differed dramatically from many of their counterparts in other parts of the United States. The sisters’ early years in Tennessee were marked by the devastation resulting from Civil War battles being fought on or perilously close to their properties. Following the war, Memphis and Nashville Dominicans experienced three outbreaks of yellow fever within a decade, as well as financial struggles that placed them in danger of being forced to abandon their schools and orphanages. Today, the Dominicans remain an active presence in both cities.

Houses Divided

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas P. Volkman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Phenomenon ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Border State

This work argues that congregational and local denominational schisms among Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the border state of Missouri before, during, and after the Civil War were central to the crisis of the Union, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Employing an array of approaches that examine these ecclesiastical fractures beyond the customary antebellum temporal scope of analysis, and as a local phenomenon, this study maintains that the schisms were interlinked religious, sociocultural, legal, and political developments rife with implications for the transformation of evangelicalism and the United States in that period and to the end of Reconstruction. The evangelical disruptions in Missouri were grounded in divergent moral and political understandings of slavery, abolitionism, secession, and disloyalty. Publicly articulated by factional litigation over church property and a combative evangelical print culture, the schisms were complicated by race, class, and gender dynamics that arrayed the contending interests of white middle-class women and men, rural churchgoers, and African American congregants. These ruptures forged antagonistic northern and southern evangelical worldviews that increased antebellum sectarian strife and violence, energized the notorious guerrilla conflict that gripped Missouri through the Civil War, and fueled postwar vigilantism between opponents and proponents of emancipation. As such, the schisms produced the intertwined religious, legal, and constitutional controversies that shaped pro- and antislavery evangelical contention before 1861, wartime Radical rule, and the rise and fall of Reconstruction.

scholarly journals Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents: A Historical Reflection On Two Cultures

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Ibrahim K Sundiata
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Forced Labor ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Historical Reflection

In 2020 Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, published Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents. An African American, she used the age-old hierarchy of India to hold up a light to the hierarchical ‘racial’ orders in the United States (Nazi Germany was included as a third case). Ever since the 1940s debate has raged over whether such a comparison is apt. In the United States, more than almost any other group, African Americans are in-marrying, residentially segregated, poor, linked to past forced labor, and stigmatized because of it. One argument put forward against comparison was that the Indian Dalits (the former ‘untouchables’) were inured to a system that was millennia old. However, slaves on Southern plantations were often described as being as humble and compliant as any Dalit. White slaveholders often thought of the India caste model. However, the very brevity of the full-fledged Cotton Kingdom (1820–1860) militated against the coalescence of a fully formed national caste consensus. The United States, unlike most places on the globe, had a constitutional armature in which, following the Civil War, former bonds people could go from being property to voters de jure. In both societies the carapace of caste is now being cracked open, but this leaves open the question of whether we should reform caste or abolish it.

“Christians Love the Jews!” The Development of American Philo-Semitism, 1790-1860

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert K. Whalen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Literature ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Early National ◽  
Social Views ◽  
British Research

Philo-Semitism is America's enduring contribution to the long, troubled, often murderous dealings of Christians with Jews. Its origins are English, and it drew continuously on two centuries of British research into biblical prophecy from the seventeenth Century onward. Philo-Semitism was, however, soon “domesticated” and adapted to the political and theological climate of America after independence. As a result, it changed as America changed. In the early national period, religious literature abounded that foresaw the conversion of the Jews and the restoration of Israel as the ordained task of the millennial nation—the United States. This scenario was, allowing for exceptions, socially and theologically optimistic and politically liberal, as befit the ethos of a revolutionary era. By the eve of Civil War, however, countless evangelicals cleaved to a darker vision of Christ's return in blood and upheaval. They disparaged liberal social views and remained loyal to an Augustinian theology that others modified or abandoned.

Women’s Rights, Suffrage, and Citizenship, 1789–1920

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Carol DuBois
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Early National Period ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
Antebellum Politics ◽  
Early National

The United States was a pioneer in the development of women’s rights ideas and activism. Far-seeing women, determined to find an active and equal place in the nation’s political affairs, pushed long and hard to realize America’s democratic promise. Over three-quarters of a century, women’s rights and suffrage leaders steadily agitated their cause through a shifting American political landscape, from the careful innovations of the early national period, through the expansive involvements of antebellum politics, into the dramatic shifts of revolution and reaction in the post–Civil War years, up to the modernization of the Progressive Era. The meaning and content of “womanhood,” the sign under which these campaigns were conducted, also shifted. Labor, class, and especially race inclusions and exclusions were contentious dimensions of the American women’s rights movement, as they were of American liberal democracy in general.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

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