0.4 1.1 introduction to "hidden work: baptist women in texas 1880  (Page 3/10)

In small communities and frontier settlements where there were few church members of either sex to fill teaching and benevolent roles, women stepped in and took an active part in these areas, leading the way, as well, in burgeoning mission efforts. The church was the first place outside the home a woman went unapologetically to learn about wider causes, develop skills, and form strengthening bonds with her "sisters." Ironically, churches became woman's launching pad into the murky atmosphere of wider public life and, at the same time, legitimated time-honored patterns that firmly delineated the distance she could rise.

Studies of the history of feminism acknowledge the role religion played in simultaneously fostering and resisting innovations in woman's sphere. In a suggestive article published in 1966, Barbara Welter revealed the religious piety that lay at the core of the restrictive nineteenth-century model of ideal womanhood. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly , 18 (1966), 151-174. The Southern Lady , by Anne Firor Scott, further documents that pious mentality in Southern women, but translates it into an activism that resulted in widespread organization beyond the religious realm. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970). Nancy F. Cott's elegant essay on the definition of woman's sphere from 1780-1835 identifies religion as a strong force in assisting females of that period to define their usefulness and provide group solidarity. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). The "sisters," however, achieved less positive objectives than group identity, according to Ann Douglas, who claims that in the late nineteenth century, they joined with the disestablished clergy to impose their bankrupt piety, reduced to sentimentalism, on the culture at large. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).

That the woman suffrage movement fought religious forces is recognized in virtually every analysis of its development; Aileen Kraditor even gives a description of the problems with biblical exegesis encountered by the suffragists. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 67-8. Most studies, however, deal with the encounter between religion and feminism that occurred in the nineteenth-century phase of the movement. They concentrate their focus on leading women who ceased to be controlled by biblical literalism, either by embracing modern textual criticism as a way of interpreting the Bible in favor of expanded rights for women or by dismissing Christianity as irrelevant to modern life. Particularly in the urbanized and industrialized northeast, these activists moved beyond church-related activities into the temperance movement, settlement house work, women's clubs, and labor and pro-suffrage organizations, all of which enlarged their avenues of power and attacked social ills in a more direct fashion. Or, having exhausted their impulse to social service, they moved toward the consumer-oriented secularism Ann Douglas describes.