What difference does it make to include women's stories in our narratives of American religious history?

This is the question that more than 40 historians will consider at an upcoming conference on Women and American Religion: Reimagining the Past, which will be held at the University of Chicago Divinity School on October 8-10. On one hand, the conference celebrates the extraordinary outpouring of scholarship on women's religious history that has appeared over the past twenty-five years. The titles of some of the conference papers reflect the diversity and richness of the field today: "Revelation, Witchcraft, and the Danger of Knowing God's Secrets," "The Circle of Culture: African American Women and Slave Religion," and "'Are You the White Nuns or the Black Nuns?': Women Confounding Categories of Race and Gender."

Yet on the other hand, the conference arises in response to a problem. Even though women's historians have published books on an astonishing variety of topics -- from Spiritualist female mediums to women missionaries -- their work has rarely been integrated into synthetic narratives of American religion. Most textbooks still include only a few paragraphs or pages about women. While historians usually tell the stories of notable women such as Anne Hutchinson, the "Jezebel" who was exiled from Massachusetts Bay in 1639, or Fanny Wright, who scandalized the American public during the 1840s by advocating women's rights and free love, they tend to ignore the vast numbers of women who filled the pews. Given the fact that women have made up the majority of most Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant congregations from the eighteenth century until today, their absence in textbooks is particularly surprising.

While it would be easy to argue that women's exclusion is the result of sexism, the issue is far more complicated. Most historians seem genuinely perplexed about how to integrate women's stories into the traditional narratives of American religion. Like medical researchers who limit their research studies to male patients, historians seem to exclude women, whether deliberately or not, in order to make their stories less complicated. As historian Ann Braude has argued in a pathbreaking essay, "Women's History is American Religious History," women's stories often don't fit into the frameworks that have structured the field (Tweed, Retelling U. S. History). For example, many historians have organized textbooks around the theme of secularization, but secularization theory fails to explain women's growing involvement and power in modern-day religious institutions. Does this mean that religious historians should no longer use secularization as an organizing theme? Rather than struggling with difficult questions such as these, most historians, male and female, have tried to supplement older narratives by simply adding more women's names.

So what difference does it make to include women's stories in our narratives of American religious history? The conference speakers have many answers. To give just a few examples: Susan Juster, in a paper on "The Women of Revelation: Gender and the Making of a Prophet," will argue that the eighteenth-century "Age of Revolution" no longer seems as "revolutionary" when seen through women's eyes. Emily Clark, in her presentation on "Hail Mary Down by the Riverside: Black and White Catholic Women in Early America" will explain that black and white women in the South helped to build the American Catholic Church. And Pamela Nadell, in "Engendering Dissent: Women and American Judaism," will show how Jewish traditions have been fundamentally transformed by controversies over women.

This conference grows out of the conviction that women's history not only enriches our understanding of American religion, but transforms it. Only twenty-five years ago, someone interested in women and American religion would have found little to read in the library. But today there are dozens of excellent books about everything from Mormon wives to the Women's Aglow movement. With the help of this groundbreaking research, we can now begin the hard work of reimagining the past.

Author, Catherine Brekus, is Associate Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is currently working on a book entitled Sarah Osborn's World (1714-1796): Popular Religion in Eighteenth-Century America.

Women and American Religion: Reimagining the Past will be held at the University of Chicago Divinity School, October 8-10. Those who are interested in the conference can find information and a schedule of events at: http://womenandreligion.uchicago.edu. The conference is free and open to the public, but registration is strongly encouraged.