Good and Mad : Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980 / Margaret Bendroth

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bendroth, Margaret, author.

Series:

Oxford Academic

Oxford scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Protestant women--History.

Protestant women.

Genre:

Biographies

Physical Description:

1 online resource (265 pages)

Edition:

First Edition

Place of Publication:

New York, NY Oxford University Press 2023

Summary:

Good and Mad tells the story of women in liberal Protestant churches, the so-called mainline, during a complex era, after the suffrage amendment and before the advent of second wave feminism. These socially progressive churchwomen, predominantly white but also African American, coastal urbanites as well as salt-of-the-earth Southerners and Midwesterners, campaigned for human rights and global peace, worked for interracial cooperation, and opened the path to women's ordination-and chose to do so within churches that denied them equality. Historian Margaret Bendroth explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of churchwomen in this "between time," interweaving a larger story with vignettes of individual women who knew both the value of compromise and the cost of anger. This lively historical account, told with women at the center rather than the periphery, incorporates the efforts of churchwomen from the rural South to the halls of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland. It explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches but also why change was so long in coming.

Contents:

Contents: Acknowledgments - List of Abbreviations - Introduction: A Woman-Centered History of Mainline Protestantism - 1. And Yet: Christian Womanhood after Suffrage - Portrait: Helen Barrett Montgomery's Bittersweet Missionary Jubilee - 2. The Gender of Efficiency: "Woman's Mission" in a Modernizing Church - 3. Liberating the Ladies' Aid: Protestant Churchwomen in the 1930s - 4. Race and Class, but Not Gender: Ambitions, Limitations, and Realities - Portrait: Anna Swain and the Fundamentalists - 5. Is the Church Male or Female? The Problem of Mainline Masculinity - 6. Forming the Question: A European Critique of "Woman's Mission" - 7. Pursuing Answers: Ecumenism and Feminism in the World Council of Churches, 1948-1953 - Portrait: Georgia Harkness and the Spirit of Heaviness - 8. Assuming Equality: American Churchwomen in the 1950s - 9. Finding Feminism: A Prehistory of Women's Liberation in Mainline Protestant Churches - Portrait: Cynthia Wedel and the Limits of Cooperation - Afterword: Stubborn, Unlaid Ghosts - Notes - Selected Bibliography - Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0-19-765408-8

0-19-765409-6

0-19-765407-X

OCLC:

1351204715