Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980

by Margaret Bendroth

Overview

Providing a new, women-centered view of mainline Protestantism in the 20th century, Good and Mad explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of liberal Protestant churchwomen who campaigned for human rights and global peace, worked for interracial cooperation, and opened the path to women's ordination, all while working within the confines of the church that denied them equality. Challenging the idea that change is only ever made by the loud, historian Margaret Bendroth interweaves vignettes of individual women who knew both the value of compromise and the cost of anger within a larger narrative that highlights the debts second-wave feminism owes to their efforts, even though these women would never have called themselves feminists.

This lively historical account explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches, but why the change was so long in coming. Through its complex examination of the intersections of faith, gender, and anger at injustice, Good and Mad will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of gender and religion in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197654064
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/13/2022
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	9.35(w) x 6.40(h) x 0.94(d)

About the Author

Margaret Bendroth is a historian who served over 15 years as Executive Director of the Congregational Library and Archives. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Johns Hopkins University and worked as a Professor of History at Calvin College from 1998 to 2004. Over the course of her career, she has been president of the American Society of Church History (2015) and authored and edited eight books and numerous articles on modern American religion, including The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (2015), Fundamentalists and the City: Conflict and Division in Boston's Churches, 1885-1950 (2005), and Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (1993).

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: And Yet: Christian Womanhood after Suffrage
Portrait: Helen Barrett Montgomery's Bittersweet Missionary Jubilee
Chapter Two: The Gender of Efficiency: 'Woman's Mission' in a Modernizing Church
Chapter Three: Liberating the Ladies' Aid: Protestant Churchwomen in the 1930s
Chapter Four: Race and Class but Not Gender: Ambitions, Limitations, and Realities
Portrait: Anna Swain and the Fundamentalists
Chapter Five: Is the Church Male or Female? The Problem of Mainline Masculinity
Chapter Six: Forming the Question: A European Critique of 'Woman's Mission'
Chapter Seven: Pursuing Answers: Ecumenism and Feminism in the World Council of Churches, 1948-1953
Portrait: Georgia Harkness and the Spirit of Heaviness
Chapter Eight: Assuming Equality: American Churchwomen in the 1950s
Chapter Nine: Finding Feminism: A Prehistory of Women's Liberation in Mainline Protestant Churches
Portrait: Cynthia Wedel and the Limits of Cooperation

Afterword: Stubborn, Unlaid Ghosts

Editorial Reviews

"This book uncovers the wounds hidden inside the placid 'church ladies' of mid-twentieth-century mainline Protestantism. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it reveals the now-forgotten world of women striving for equality within institutions that took them for granted yet couldn't survive without them. Both a daring and mature work of scholarship, Good and Mad is Margaret Bendroth at her best." — Dana L. Robert, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, Boston University

"Recovering the stories of churchwomen who were noted, if at all, as 'Mrs. Husband's Name' might seem tedious and unrewarding, but this book is quite the opposite—energetic, colorful, enlightening, and propelled by an undercurrent of justified rage. Bendroth's canny institution-shapers were conspicuously well-behaved, yet they did make history." — Elesha Coffman, author of Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith

"Good and Mad reveals the centrality of gender to the rise and fall of the Protestant mainstream. With her incomparable knowledge of relevant sources, Bendroth introduces a cast of little-known characters, conferences, and documents that paint an entirely new picture of debates over women in the churches. The result is the most important re-interpretation of 20th-century U.S. Protestantism to appear in years." — Ann Braude, Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School

"Mainline Protestantism was a distinctive cultural and institutional setting for twentieth-century American women to confront patriarchy and to question their own instincts about gender and faith. Bendroth's characters were often 'mad' at patriarchy, but in keeping with their churchly milieu they were determined to be 'good,' which made them slow to recognize their own anger and how to act on it. Good and Mad is a fresh and probing analysis of a substantial piece of American religious and women's history." — David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley

"It is a fascinating — if sometimes exasperating — read." — Rebekah Miles, Modern Believing

"The decades from 1920 to 1980 are painful ones to examine, but in Bendroth's hands they are revealed as more interracial, ecumenical, tolerant, international in scope, and enduring-largely because of women's ways of leadership." — Jon Sweeney, Christian Century

"Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals." — Choice

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