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These attempts to understand the leaders of the feminist movement and the women who first participated in an industrial work pattern are instructive about the sexual definition and accommodation of contemporary times, but those who heralded societal change were exceptional within their period and do not exhaust the subject of the relationship between the Bible and the role of women. The average American woman maintained her literal faith long after feminist leaders became disillusioned. Throughout the twentieth century many females continued to order their lives and make sense of their experiences in the light of a biblical interpretation that upheld both male supremacy and individual freedom.

The popular mind's tenacious hold on biblical authority, the conflicting claims made on women by that allegiance and the uneven success of women's intermittent attempts to join the democratic, egalitarian current moving through United States history led me to undertake this study of the interplay between the Bible and women's role in American society. The primary issues that shaped my investigation included: In what way was the Bible authoritative to those who espoused its teachings? How did their beliefs inform the role of those women who claimed allegiance to biblical authority? Did those parts of the Bible that pertained to feminine nature and role shape the changes that occurred in women's lives? Was the Bible reinterpreted to accommodate general cultural patterns? Or was it simply ignored? To answer these questions, I decided to examine a biblically conservative group at a period of time when the role of women, both within the group and within society as a whole, was changing. Texas Baptists met all the criteria.

Although waves of change that included new forms of work in urban, industrial settings, the application of scientific analysis to all areas of learning, and a breakdown of traditional social structures began transforming American culture in the nineteenth century, Texas remained isolated from their effects until after the Civil War. That event marked Texans' awareness of a new order, but frontier conditions and the disarray of Reconstruction postponed its reaching the state for a couple of decades. Texas, therefore, entered the 1880s with the implications of modernity present—certainly with a recognition that the world was changing—but with its rural settlements still more closely resembling the pre-industrial world than the coming order. Land was still plentiful and much of it was undeveloped. The population was small and scattered and engaged predominantly in agriculture. Anglos, primarily from the Deep South, had settled in the southern and eastern part of the state, while those from Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri formed communities in north Texas. Pockets of blacks were interspersed through south and east Texas, Germans, Slavs, and Scandinavians in central Texas, and Mexicans toward the southern border. D. W. Meinig, Imperial Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 46-56.

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Source:  OpenStax, Patricia martin's phd thesis. OpenStax CNX. Dec 12, 2012 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11462/1.1
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