A marginal majority : women, gender, and a reimagining of Southern Baptists / edited by Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Flowers, Elizabeth Hill, editor.

Seat, Karen K., editor.

Series:

America's Baptists

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Southern Baptist Convention--History.

Southern Baptist Convention.

Baptist women--United States--History.

Baptist women.

Feminism--United States--History.

Feminism.

History.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

xxxvii, 254 pages ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Knoxville : The University of Tennessee Press, [2020]

Summary:

"This multiauthor volume represents a far-ranging effort to bring women into our understanding of recent Baptist history, thereby opening up the historiography of Baptist studies, which the editors argue has been too insular for far too long. This interdisciplinary approach extends the latest feminist scholarship to embrace racial issues within the denomination, the role that women had in the SBC takeover, Baptist women during the Progressive Era, a couple of essays on the Woman's Missionary Union, Baptist women in feminism (specifically the ERA), Beth Moore, and other topics"-- Provided by publisher.

In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women's roles provoke lively debate in today's evangelical sphere. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding this issue, and determining what exactly women's roles in home, church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors examine the SBC's complex history regarding women and how that history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its contemporary debates. This comprehensive volume starts with women as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of "teaching" or "women's" ministries. Along the way, it introduces new personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth. Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency, they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the past. By providing a history of contentious issues from the nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced within the United States' largest Protestant denomination. Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American denominational life and culture. -- back cover.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: One. "A Greater Influence Than You Imagine": Women Lead the Way to Southern Baptist Centralization / C. Delane Tew

Two. "I Can't Go in Alone": A Frontier Girl's Transformation into a Southern Baptist Missionary / Kari S. Rood

Three. "The Mammy Sues Are Scarce in the South Now": Southern Baptist Women, Domestic Workers, and Progressive Era Racial Uplift / Joanna Lile

Four. Saving Souls and Society: The WMU and Social Reform in the Progressive Era / Carol Crawford Holcomb

Five. Making a Home in the New "House Beautiful": The Woman's Missionary Union Training School Negotiates Change and Decline, 1942

1963 / T. Laine Scales

Six. "A Christian Attitude toward Other Races": Southern Baptist Women and Race Relations, 1945

1965 / Melody Maxwell

Seven. "I'M FOR ERA": Faith, Feminism, and the "Southern Strategy" of a Southern Baptist First Lady / Elizabeth H. Flowers

Eight. Camelot Revisited: Women Doctoral Graduates of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1982

1992, Talk about the Seminary and Their Lives since SBTS Again / Tisa Lewis

Nine. From Molly Marshall to Sarah Palin: Southern Baptist Gender Battles and the Politics of Complementarianism / Karen K. Seat

Ten. "My Husband Wears the Cowboy Boots in Our Family": The Preacherly Paradox of Beth Moore / Courtney Pace.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Marginal majority.

ISBN:

9781621905998

1621905993

OCLC:

1143616043