Good and Mad – Video + Transcript
- January 18, 2023
Dr. Margaret Bendroth on Her Book, Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980
In this important book, Dr. Bendroth, former Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives, explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of Protestant churchwomen after the suffrage amendment and before the advent of second wave feminism.
In this “between time,” 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.
Told with women at the center rather than the periphery, this account explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches but also why change was so long in coming.
You can purchase Dr. Bendroth’s book here.
JANUARY 18, 2023
KYLE ROBERTS: Good afternoon, or good morning if you’re on the West Coast. My name is Kyle Roberts, and I’m the Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives. Thank you so much for joining us today for today’s virtual discussion with Dr. Margaret Bendroth to celebrate the release of her wonderful new book, Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980.
To begin with, I want to acknowledge that the Congregational Library & Archives resides in what is now Boston, which is in the Place of the Blue Hills, the homeland of the Massachusett people, whose relationships and connections with the land continue to this day and into the future.
For those joining us for the first time, the Congregational Library & Archives is an independent research library. Established in 1853, the CLA’s mission is to foster a deeper understanding of the spiritual, intellectual, cultural, and civic dimensions of the Congregational story and its ongoing relevance in the 21st century. We do this through free access to our research library of 225,000 books, pamphlets, periodicals, and manuscripts, as well as in our digital archive, which has more than 100,000 images, many drawn from our New England’s Hidden Histories project.
Throughout the year, we offer educational programs and research fellowships for students, scholars, churches, and anyone interested in Congregationalism’s influence on the American story. Please do check out our website, congregationallibrary.org, to learn more about… about what we do and for news of forthcoming events.
Margaret Lamberts Bendroth, former Executive Director of the Congregational Library & Archives, is a respected historian, author, and lecturer. In addition to being a past president of the American Society of Church Historians, she is the author of several books, including Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present, published by Yale in 1993; Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950. Peggy has co-edited several other volumes, including Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism, with Virginia Brereton, and her more recent works include The Spiritual Practice of Remembering, and The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past.
And I would be remiss as the new Executive Director without thanking her in this setting for being such a fantastic colleague. She has been really helpful as I have kind of learned about this place, and I was so pleased when she agreed to let us do this book talk with her. But you didn’t come to hear me talk, so I’m gonna turn myself off now and turn it over to you, Peggy.
PEGGY BENDROTH: Thanks, Kyle. And hello, everybody. It’s nice to be here, and especially in this setting. I’m just, have to start off by saying how grateful I am to the Congregational Library & Archives. And, of course, everyone kind enough to Zoom with us today. This book would not have been possible without, I want to say, the library’s collection, and we can talk more about that later. And of course, the support of the board and the staff before I retired in 2020. I also want to put in a good word for the Louisville Institute, which provided a grant for me to do research in denominational archives in Philadelphia, New Jersey, Atlanta, and of course, here, and my first overseas trip to Geneva, Switzerland. Most of the writing for this book was done after I retired in 2020, right at the, basically the same week that COVID hit, I just need to say. And so I also need to thank Dana Robert and the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University, because they provided me with a visiting scholar position, which meant for those of you who know how this goes, access, electronic access to their library and all the riches that come through electronic access. So I am indebted to many people.
My plan today, I’m gonna explain the book as best as I can in 20, 30 minutes, and… and starting off with the title. And then I’m going to introduce you to some of these unknown but admirable, complicated, and persistent women that I came across in the course of my writing and research. And I want to talk a little bit at the end about the writing process itself, because I think that was one of the biggest challenges for me in telling this story. Telling the story that I wanted to write, but also did full, as much justice as possible to my subjects, which is something that historians always have to deal with.
This is, I feel it’s fairly safe to predict, that this is the last, my last academic book. And in many ways, it brings together just decades of reading, and researching, and writing about women and American Christianity. And yeah, it goes all the way back to my doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, yeah before… I think it was a lot of that written on typewriters, folks. And so this deals with a relatively unexplored and misunderstood period in women’s history and also in the history of American Christianity: the mid-twentieth century, that period between the suffrage amendment in 1920 and the rise of second wave feminism.
And as I’ll say it at the end, I was just aware throughout the writing and the work on this book, I really could not have written this early, when I was a doctoral student, when I was a younger woman. It just takes a, kind of a, the kind of perspective that I have now on life and on women in American Christianity from… in order to really work it through. So Good and Mad popped up in my mind as the perfect title.
These women were loyal. They were accomplished. They were adept in what we could call institutional work. That is, you know, knowing how organizations run, how to best take care of them. But that loyalty came at a cost. The mainline Protestant churches, to which they were clearly so devoted, denied them equality. Not only were women denied ordination, pretty much across the board, they were given only token representation on policy-making boards and committees, and they were oftentimes valued more for their fundraising capacity than for any particular spiritual wisdom or any deep zeal, their deep zeal for Christianity and its role in the wider world. And so it’s hard as a, as a person in our time and era not to believe that they weren’t just completely, flat out angry over this injustice.
And so the question is, can these women be both good and mad at the same time? And how did they manage the gap between these two? So I want to say two things that will orient us as we get, kind of, into the problem here.
And the first, just thinking about what mainline Protestant churches are, and I don’t know who’s out there and what you know about mainline Protestant Christianity, but it is a kind of a complicated term. And these are, you know, on the one level, the big, white, northern denominations–the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ–but it’s, we need to remember what those churches were and still are in their history.
They were not the liberal left wing of American Protestantism, the front line of social justice. I think of them as essentially what we could call mediating institutions. They were kind of, for much of their history, leavening forces in American society in an era well before, you know, the kind of polarization that exists today.
Many of the leaders of the mainline denominations, especially those with backgrounds in missionary work, were way out front in cross cultural understanding, even racial politics. You know, and I invite you to read anything by David Hollinger, as he’s made this, made this achingly clear.
But the denominations and the congregations themselves focused also as a kind of, a social glue for much of the 20th century. These are community institutions with strong local ties. They placed a high value on social stability. Cooperation was a word, as we’ll see, that they really loved. And if we turn the lens on gender, that’s particularly clear. There were just too many good reasons for maintaining a status quo. And as we all know, a status quo can be a very sticky thing and hard to dislodge.
So, just thinking about the mainline churches, let’s think about them particularly before the 1980s and the effect of the 1960s on American society and American religion generally. So these are, you know, kind of the, the place where Americans went, a lot of Americans went, for just all about belonging.
The second point is about women and the status of women, the role of women in not just those churches, but American religion more generally. The story that I ended up telling takes us really outside this heroic narrative that we like to often use when we’re talking about women, you know that they’re all kind of feminists in the making, that they were battling away against patriarchy, even if they didn’t know that they were.
But they were, you know, they were trying to change things. That they were unhappy with their status, and they were trying to oppose oppression. The situation for mainline Protestant churchwomen, I want you to understand today, was much more complicated because first of all, they were not a minority group, either, you know, numerically, anyway. The statistical truth is really the opposite. Women have numerically dominated American church life for most of our history. You know, you could look at the average American congregation today, and it’s still true. Women are the majority of church members, they’re over-represented across the board teaching Sunday school, on committees and social events. And much of this is a legacy of the 19th century.
Let’s talk about that for a moment. In the 19th century, Protestant women created a very potent, separate power structure, a network of denominationally-based missionary organizations, which they ran and funded with varying degrees of independence. Some denominations kept a fairly tight rein on the women’s missionary organizations. These are both for home and what we call foreign and home missions back then. Others gave them a little bit more independence. But these organizations, by the early 20th century, were so large and so successful that people were starting to get nervous, and even to use words like “feminization” to express the worry that the women were just getting too visible, too powerful.
And if you let the women kind of dominate, especially, you know, kind of the public perception of religion, that the men were gonna opt out entirely. If there’s a problem in American Christianity, at least from the perspective of this book, it’s not a woman problem. It’s kind of a man problem. The public perception would be that religion is only something for ladies and children, and red-blooded men, you know, play golf on Sunday or whatever else they do. So we have that particular dynamic going on.
In the early 20th century, to kind of pick up with our story, nearly all of these women’s organizations were dismantled or absorbed back into their denominational bureaucracies. This is a part of the story that is not often told, but it’s really significant. Separate groups for women, especially groups that were competing for donations, you know, out among the people in the pews, were deemed redundant. And that, one of the favorite words of the early 20th century was… “efficient.” These were inefficient, it was claimed.
And of course, there was a real problem. Denominations were, by the early 20th century, they were kind of an organizational… You know, if you tried to build an organizational flowchart or whatever, they were a mess. They, anybody could kinda start their own committee, and start getting money, and it wasn’t clear, you know, where all the money was going or coming from. They were jury-rigged structures with little in the way of, kind of, top down management. And so the criticism, you know, of worry about inefficiency is real.
But the criticism of women’s organizations is very, is at the very least ironic. Given that these women’s groups were well-run, they were cost efficient, after all, most of the people working in these missionary organizations, raising money were volunteers. And they were hugely popular among laypeople.
So this is a pretty traumatic series of events, and much of the book just deals with the fallout behind it. What do you do? You start another set of organizations? In the 20th century, it’s kind of hard to get a rationale for a separate women’s organization, especially if you’re the majority of members. Maybe you just want to be equal for a change, give up that separate power structure and just say, we’re going to be church members just like the men, and don’t anybody think about our gender. Just let us do whatever it’s in our power or interest to do.
It’s interesting that in the 1920s, as all of this was taking place, several denominations–Presbyterians and also Methodists–made some serious moves towards allowing women’s ordination. You know, we think of this as kind of a feminist thing that happened in the 70s and 80s. Well, this was a big talking point in a number of denominations in the 1920s.
The assumption is that, you know, these women were clearly very angry. And I read some of their internal correspondence. Good and Mad was a, as a… was a very astute title. Well, maybe we’ll just offer them ordination and, you know, nobody’s gonna really want it, but maybe that’ll… things’ll just tone down, and we can move on to other issues.
The problem was that the women just were not interested in getting ordained. The opposition to ordination was really coming from women more than men during the 1920s. We have this ironic situation of a male bureaucracy pushing women’s ordination and the women opposing it. Why? Well, and this is, again, what we see throughout the book.
They were, first of all, smart enough to know appeasement when they saw it. And they weren’t really, you know, they were not in a mood to capitulate. But they also didn’t see that ordination would bring benefit to the average churchwoman. You know, it would elevate a particular group of professional women. But it was, to many, just kind of too narrow a goal and, you know, would just bring on a few pastors. Nobody thought it was gonna be anything major. And plus, these women were used to running things.
So in the 1920s and 1930s, a new word emerges. And that’s in the title of my book. It’s a very important word. It’s “churchwomen.”
Churchwomen. This sounds a little quaint to us, especially if you watched Saturday Night Live and you’re familiar with the church lady. It sounds kind of all about lace doilies, and tea, and, you know, nothing that any young woman would be particularly interested in.
But in the 1930s and 1920s, it was kind of an exciting, almost revolutionary, very modern sounding word. The churchwoman was not interested in fundraising for missionaries, running a white elephant sale for the ladies aid. She wanted to be involved in the full agenda of Protestant church life, from world peace to race relations.
And they were particularly passionate, these churchwomen, about the ecumenical movement. This, you know, huge Protestant passion of the 20th century to erase all the historic differences in Christendom and unite all the churches in making a better world.
And so, just to say it in 5 or 10 minutes, in the pre-civil rights era, particularly, they were surprisingly successful. It’s a really fascinating story. White and African American churchwomen were surprisingly adventurous. They organized what they called interracial gatherings where they were able to be surprisingly candid with each other about a subject that, you know, was socially taboo: what racial discrimination actually felt like.
They believed that this could be done through the power of friendship. You know, that this was, if we can build strong friendships, strong interpersonal interracial relationships, that’s going to erode these… eventually erode the structures of injustice in society. It’s very idealistic, but it’s also pretty… pretty out front and out there for its time. You know, some of these organizations like the YWCA, which we don’t think of in these terms today, were way out in front. The YWCA adopted an interracial charter in 1946, declaring that here’s a little quote: “Wherever there is injustice on the basis of race, whether in the community, the nation or the world, our protest must be clear and our labor for its removal, vigorous and steady.”
This is in 1946, eight years before the Supreme Court removed our decision against segregation. Two of the organizations that I pick up in the book, United Church Women and the Methodists… Methodist Women Division, Women’s Division of Christian Service, also laid down rules against racial segregation in their charter documents.
Ecumenism, as one of them said, has to be interracial. And here’s a case where I think this is a particularly women’s take on what ecumenism means. When we think of the ecumenical movement, for those of you who know it, we think of gatherings, and theologians, and polity, and, you know, people processing in robes and so forth, and a lot of serious theological talk about institutions.
But for these women, ecumenism started… it was a grassroots form, a grassroots ecumenism that meant reaching out to someone who you, you know, were socially distant from. So here, here we go.
Why don’t we know these stories? As every historian’s advertisement. Why don’t we know who Helen Barrett Montgomery was? Anna Swain, Georgia Harkness, Twila Cavert, Cynthia Wedel, Mildred McAfee Horton?
Why don’t we know who these people are?
Why don’t we have, you know, trading cards with their faces on them? Why aren’t we celebrating them?
And, you know, we can talk about this in the question and answer. There are a number of ways of thinking about this. But first of all, they were just pretty well-behaved people. They’re not, you know, we’re told well-behaved women don’t make history. Well, they made a lot of history, but they didn’t do it by being badly behaved. They wore white gloves and pillbox hats. They went by their husbands, you know, first, husbands’ names. They didn’t like using their first names. The social class conventions of mainline Protestantism weighed very heavily on these kinds of people. And, you know, in many ways, not getting angry, not throwing furniture around, not protesting is a form of social privilege.
And that’s really part of our story here. Their option, and the option they took, was simply to persist. I included in the, in the book five portraits of individual women that just show a small snippet, a small story, a little dynamic of what it cost and the limitations they knew that they faced. And so, you know, this is a very difficult part of the story.
And so just to kind of bring it up to the present, as is true for many of us, it took other people, other people from the outside, friendly outsiders in this case from beyond their American world, beyond their Protestant world, to bring their own situation into sharper relief, which meant being confronted and challenged by women who were simply more comfortable with getting mad, with their anger, and who had good reason to be furious. These were not secular feminists.
But first, the first group that I talk about are European women in the ecumenical movement. The front cover of my book has a picture of a gathering that took place in 1948 in Baarn, The Netherlands, right before the inaugural meeting of the World Council of Churches in 1948. I love that picture. They look both good and mad.
The other group are Roman Catholic women after Vatican II. So in 1948, these American churchwomen were invited to come over to this gathering in Baarn and some even to be kind of token represented at the World Council of Churches. And it’s there that they met these European women, some of whom had been in, during World War II, served as pastors, many had theological training, and never had had women’s organizations on the scale of Church Women United or any of the organizations in the United States. These women were educated, they were articulate, and they were also passionately interested in theology, which is a word that I haven’t used yet, right?
American Protestants are, especially mid-century, were kind of pragmatic bunch and pretty allergic to too much highfalutin talk that was too abstract about God, especially in the pews. They liked to keep things practical. And so our churchwomen had no, kind of, theological interest or background until they came across this group.
And of course, they’re also very, very angry because after the war, several, you know, the Anglican Church and other French reformed churches are pushing back and voting against women’s equality. And they’re just come to this Baarn meeting just ready to speak their minds.
The other push came from Roman Catholic women who really were the original second wave religious feminists: people like Mary Daly, who is, of course, well known, and Elizabeth Farians, who ran the NOW, National Organization for Women, Task Force on Religion. You know, Elizabeth Farians actually invited Betty Friedan– they called themselves the two Bettys–out for I guess it was tea or some kind of drinks. And that’s where they kind of, this was, you know, before, you know, feminism was a household word. And she was the one to kind of say, you know, there’s a religious angle and there’s a religious constituency for this. These Roman Catholic women, of course, had plenty of reasons after Vatican II to be very disappointed, very angry, and also, I should say, really good at performative acts of anger.
You know, just these… the famous Easter bonnet protest, going to mass without head coverings. Or in 1970, they burned a copy of the Roman Catholic Missal, which is a set of rules that allowed women to participate outside the gates of the sanctuary. They sent the ashes in a box tied up with a pink ribbon to the National Council of Catholic Bishops. Now, that’s being mad and getting your point across in a way that people cannot ignore. And then came the culture clash of the 1960s.
There’s so many different ways of understanding what happened then and why. And, you know, we could spend all afternoon just kind of going through what a cataclysmic shift this was.
In the mainline churches it came in the form of a shift away from, you know, this interest in ecumenism, that was always their central cause. National Council of Churches. World Council of Churches.
They wanted to unite Christendom back together. That’s not something you hear about so much after the 1960s. It becomes now, of course, the litany of causes that we’re familiar with: civil rights, the Vietnam War, and feminism. But in another way, we can say that this is a different ethic of belonging for churches: from cooperation to a focus on individualism, from institutional caregiving, to crashing it all down and rebuilding it in a better way.
And so our churchwomen, who are treading for decades this careful path of cooperation: don’t get too visible, don’t let them see how powerful you really are or how capable you really are. They had a real hard time with this cultural shift in the wind direction.
This new rising generation of women had a different set of goals, and they pushed for ordination. They saw what an important, at very least symbolic issue this is, that could not be denied. They pushed for theological education. And in this new setting of confrontation, our old ethic of cooperation, of joining, of getting along, of institutional caregiving began to look like compromise, even capitulation.
You know, and I end the book with just a short, just a short epilogue I guess you could call it, just about how difficult it is for women of faith to be flat out angry, to burn it all down.
These are institutions that for many of us, and certainly for our women, they loved deeply and felt the importance of loyalty. And how do you, you know, begin the process of change? How do you mount a critique?
How do you get listened to in that critique, especially when the younger generation, quite frankly, is kind of not interested? You know, there’s a big generational dynamic that’s going on here.
And so finally, I want to just say a few words about the, about the… my experience doing this as a writer at what, you know, I have to say, and I have said this before to other people, that the research involved in this was mostly in archives, reading committee minutes, memos, reports, agendas.
You know, it’s, you know, when you come home and someone says, so what did you learn today? Oh, they merged this committee with another committee, and I can’t believe they renamed it. And then so-and-so didn’t come to… you know, that’s not the stuff of which historical drama is made.
And so, how do you write this? I said at the beginning, this is a book that I could not have written 20 or more years ago. It’s from a perspective of a woman at the end of her career, really, you know, into my early retirement years.
Looking back, as many of us do at the what ifs and the whys and what might have beens, I’m very empathetic with women who found themselves in positions of care for institutions, in my years at the Congregational Library, who made compromises in order to persist, who had big ideas and big ambitions, but also understood the kind of built in limitations of a situation and how much delicacy, and care, and tact it often takes… kind of the, you know, the kind of wisdom of understanding people as well as understanding institutions and how they work and how they’re maintained.
But the biggest challenge, I think, for me was just to make the darn thing interesting, that someone else would want to read it besides me. As I said, ladies in white gloves, and pillbox hats, and pearl chokers aren’t heroic. They’re, at least in our typical sense of understanding heroism, they’re not grappling with life’s injustices, they’re, they don’t even appear to be having much of a conflicted inner life. You know, there’s not a lot of diaries or, you know, certainly a lot of correspondence, but not journaling.
They weren’t journaling necessarily about their internal conflicts. So how do you tell that story? You know, I can tell you some of these portraits that I did, you do a little writer’s trick, and you just imagine them, the story turning out very, very differently… or, and what would that have looked like? Or what if this person had done that?
And then you begin to understand their context, their position in time a little bit better. But for… looking for anger was one way of doing that. Looking for it at different points in the narrative where it pushed people, where it prodded people, and where it was deemed counterproductive.
And I think I came away from this with this understanding that women’s lives–and maybe I’m speaking for myself and not everybody I certainly recognize that–are rarely a straight line from one career milepost to another, a straight trajectory toward a goal. They’re episodic. They’re punctuated by children, what Jane Addams, notably called “the family claim,” by competing obligations and opportunities that are often accomplished through compromise and cooperation. And so there can be a very high price to be paid for this.
But there’s also a reward. And in the end, you know, we have a complicated story, one that reminds us that history is made by all of us, and that no one’s life is not worth our compassion and our thoughtful attention.
So I thank you very much for your thoughtful attention. And I think we have a bit of time for some conversation.
KYLE: Thank you so much. That was fantastic. And the questions are flowing in.
PEGGY: Uh oh.
KYLE: Not surprisingly. Your fantastic work really is generating an important conversation that people want to have. So jumping into the questions here, a great question here from Nick Pruitt, who says: Thank you, Peggy. for such a…
PEGGY: Hi Nick.
KYLE: While working on this project, did you notice differences between organizational leaders and laity, you know, and how did you approach that difference? What recommendations do you have for scholars who are facing that, you know, sort of interpretive challenge?
PEGGY: Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s easy to tell a story on just one level: what the denominational bureaucrats and the theologians did. And then you can take it down another level. What, you know, denominational, you know, people who were in charge of committees, or on policymaking boards, or so forth. And then, you know, how do you get down to the level of congregations and what was actually going on?
I think that, you know, when you’re doing women’s history, especially history and religion, you have to do that. And it’s not as difficult as it might sound. Particularly because a lot of the, a lot of what was going on during my time period, and you could tell that church leaders were always uneasy, always not really settled.
They were sending out survey after survey, questionnaires, and trying to get the temperature of things among the lay women because, you know, they were a fundraising machine. And everybody knew if the ladies aid wasn’t happy, nobody was happy. So, those… that kind of evidence is out there, but you also just have to keep, you know, dipping into… you can’t possibly read every congregational history, history of every organization, and the kind of little regional entities. But you can dip into them. You know, you can kind of keep one eye on that one eye and the other.
You know, part of this is, again, I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’ve read more committee reports than anybody ever should. And, you know, so, you know, it’s… being a historian, you know, you kind of keep that knowledge, and that information. and those particular insights into your next project, Nick.
And you just kind of, kind of keep the ball bouncing back and forth between them. Knowing… and you know, in the case of my subjects, the leadership, as I said, these were many cases wives of wealthy husbands, famous husbands.
And, you know, they were like many of these kinds of people. They should have been famous, maybe more so than their husbands. So they weren’t like, just being dragged in because they were wealthy. But they were, you know, kind of in a different social echelon. And what you see happening, especially after World War II, is, you know, these ladies are kind of mystified because the lay, the women in the pews are starting to go to work. You know, the whole Rosie the Riveter drama is not completely true.
Women did stay in the workforce after World War II, and they had to, you know, and go… where did they all go? Why aren’t they coming to our meeting? Where are they? And how can we assure them that we care about what they care about? So, you know, it’s a perpetual problem, but, you know, that’s probably a really, really important question.
KYLE: I think one of the things, you know, you’re talking about sort of the maybe the mundaneness of the sources, right, that you have. But what you don’t sort of succumb to them because you do give us these wonderful vignettes of individual women leaders in here.
And I’m curious for the grad students and maybe the, you know, really bright undergrads who are gonna watch, you know, who are listening now, who are gonna watch this talk. Who are the women that didn’t make it into the book, or who you think that are just that the archives are rich and, you know, really have… deserve to have their story told?
PEGGY: Yeah. I mean we don’t have the women who left. No. These… you know, I can talk on, and on, and on about persistence. But, you know, as is always true, I think with religion, which is voluntary, who left? Who said, I’ve had enough of this? Who decided, you know, I’ll just join the League of Women Voters and, you know, a pox on all their houses?
We don’t really have a way… I mean, you know, I tried to kinda keep some kind of focus on what was being done and said in secular circles. But, you know, I think, you know, there’s a whole other story out there to be told.
KYLE: Yeah, that’s great. So Charlie Hambrick-Stowe asks…
PEGGY: Hi, Charlie.
KYLE: Could you comment on the role or importance of CWU’s annual World Day of Prayer in your story? This was organized at the top, but implemented locally in very many communities. Still is, though on a much diminished scale.
PEGGY: And so, the World Day of Prayer was, you know, other people can tell the story better than I, but this was instituted in the World War I era. And this is, you know, in some ways, it comes out of this, this international experience that women are having in the missionary, you know, world. Women’s mission, women’s missionary groups could not go and preach to people.
They had… they started schools. They had to be more grassroots. They had to be more in touch, you know, you know, and form these connections with woman to woman. And so there is this kind of international sense that they have of the wider world and the ties of friendship, you know, that can be created and sustained through prayer and through, you know, we… This was a genuinely ecumenical effort before, you know, all the harrumphing about the Federal Council of Churches and… Before that even got there, these women are just quietly just doing this, creating this incredible network, and, you know, this set of resources.
It wasn’t just a Day of Prayer. It was a whole series of books and instructional, you know, about foreign missions, you know, educating the public. And so, you know, it’s a, it’s, I think Charlie would say it’s a pity that we don’t know more about this and it’s not a more robust enterprise today.
KYLE: So a comment and a question from Catherine Brekus, good friend of the library.
PEGGY: Hello.
KYLE: And so she writes, thanks for this wonderful talk. I’m looking forward to reading the book. I hope that you’ll change your mind about this being your last book. I think something we can probably all agree with. Your work has been absolutely crucial to recovering the history these women.
PEGGY: Thank you.
KYLE: So she asks, Black Christians were remarkably successful during the 1950s and 60s in convincing the American public that Christianity is a religion that supports racial equality. Feminist Christians, by contrast, were overshadowed by anti-feminist figures like Phyllis Schlafly and Beverly LaHaye. Do you think that feminist Christians could have done something differently to convince the American public that Christianity and feminism should not be understood as oppositional?
PEGGY: Yeah, yeah. I mean, and part of that is, you know, people like Schlafly and the evangelicals and fundamentalists that I studied, you know, back in the 1990s were pretty good at jumping on the narrative and, you know, getting out in front as they are, are now.
But I think the other thing that I found was that there really was a fascinating discussion that was going on in the forties and fifties, late forties, fifties, about gender theology, you know, creation. They just, there just weren’t a lot of resources. You know, you had Karl Barth. But, you know, there were serious gatherings of people who were talking about what we would now call institutional sexism. You know, this conversation was taking place.
I think that it, you know, it’s one of those… And the World Council of Churches, you know, these women, they had a, it was called the, you know, Department of Cooperation Between Men and Women in Church and Society, you know, this word cooperation. Well, they were reading, they were reading Simone de Beauvoir.
And, you know, all of these, you know, World War II, era a feminist scholars. They were just, you know, absorbing all of this and trying to think theologically about that. And I you know, I think it’s too bad that, that this was just… There’s another reason why I think this you know, it was happening.
There were things that were going on. But it just, it… I think, you know, and I think this is… we can think and argue about it. It was a real casualty of the, the culture of the 1960s. There are certain things that just become harder and harder to say. They called churchwomen “Aunt Janes.” You know, you had an Uncle Tom and an Aunt Jane.
KYLE: Wow. There’s an anonymous question here. Thank you for this great talk. Although covering different denominations in different periods of time, do you see your book in conversation with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920?
PEGGY: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I could not have written this book without that book. And you know, that, that the story that she tells, you know, stops around 1920. It’s turn of the century. But it’s, you know, Nannie Helen Burroughs and a lot of the people in that book reappear in my story.
You know, in, you know, they suffered kind of the same institutional dynamics that the white women, you know, in the story also that… They were just too successful, and they were sitting on large pots of money, and it’s the Depression era. So, so this, you know, she talks a lot about the importance of respectability. Well, you know, my churchwomen had… were tightly bound by that. And, you know, had, you know, manuals on how to sit on a platform with your knees together, and don’t chew gum, and, you know, all this kind of stuff. You know, you become kind of a prisoner of that social class convention if you’re not careful. It serves a purpose. But it also in my story, it limits you.
KYLE: Great question here from Lindsay Miller, who says so fascinating, Peggy, thank you! I’d like to hear more about Mildred McAfee Horton. I know her as president of Wellesley. Was she good and mad?
PEGGY: I, you know, she… if you’re familiar with the United Church of Christ, the denomination, you know, that the Congregationalists, you know, joined in 1957. The most famous figure in that, in that ecumenical creation was Douglas Horton. And Douglas, you hear all about him.
Well, his wife was, you know, president of Wellesley. She was the, you know, what the head of the WAVES during the war. She was there at the World Council. I mean, she was one of my favorite people.
I went to Wellesley and, you know, got to read some of her archival stuff, and, you know, it’s a pity I… These kind of people that you would want to get to know but be scared to get to know because she was just so… She was on all kinds of corporate boards. She was a force of nature. And she was absolutely against any kind of, you know, what we might call affirmative action for women. Just get in there, and be as good as they are, and just don’t complain, you know, which is real hard to hear right now.
And I’m sure it was very hard for less privileged women to hear back then. But she just, you know, she had a kind of a military demeanor. And, you know, there’s a lot of fun resources about her, Lindsay, that I can point you to. But she is one of my favorites. I’m glad you picked up on her.
KYLE: Got a good question about another figure in your book. Did Constance Parvey’s leadership in the World Council of Churches study on the community of women in the church figure into your research?
PEGGY: Yeah, that’s, yes. So Constance Parvey, yeah, I got to read her papers at the Schlessinger Center, and all these kind of things. And, you know, here’s a person who, you know, kind of started out, kind of basically unchurched. And as she said, she was drawn to be a Lutheran. It never occurred to her that there was, you know, I should worry about sex discrimination or any of this.
But she is at the World Council of Churches and becomes drawn into theology, talking theologically about what gender differences are and developing a language for that. And of course, the group of people that she convened in Boston is, you know, is a real core of the changes that are going to come. Absolutely. I loved her.
KYLE: Nice question here from Garland Gates down on the… at the Evangelical and Reformed Historical Society about the sort of afterlife of this. You know, is it a story where the sort of the tumult of the sixties, in the seventies, in this new generation, really pushed the generation of churchwomen aside? Or do they have a tradition that still kind of continues today?
PEGGY: Yeah, I mean, others, I don’t see that. I mean, I, you know, the first, the first public presentation I gave on this book was a month ago at a women’s group, at a local church up here on the North Shore, you know, and I guess I was the youngest one there. So it was a real hoot for me.
You know, these women’s groups, they, they were really taken with this story because it resonated with them. But, you know, it was a… they were, they were of course, this women’s group had been formed, you know, way, way, way back when. I think I have something else that I was going to say, and now it’s starting to escape me. So, you talk Kyle, and I’ll… it’ll come back to me. Oh, I know what I was gonna say.
A lot of what, what this describes, the book describes… Robert Putnam, the sociologist, has a book called “The Upswing,” and he talks about this kind of cultural belonging, or, you know, cooperation, or togetherness, or, you know, kind of social glue as a kind of a bell curve. You know, that starts out in the early 20th century. It’s this kind of robber baron, dog-eat-dog world. And political, and economic, and religious mechanisms are created so that, you know, people figure out ways to be together. And there’s, you know, high levels of bipartisanship in politics and, you know, all these kind of things.
You know, certainly people left out of this lovely legacy of belonging is, is he is very clear. But this is what my story also tracks. You know, that these women are keepers of this bell curve, and they’re beneficiaries of it. And then, you know, he ends the book by talking about how we just, you know, eroded… We not… but these structures eroded and almost became forgotten.
And, you know, he’s writing this during the space of COVID and all this, wondering, are these gonna come back? Will there be other ways, you know, to kind of resurrect that sense? You know, people are longing for it, obviously, but, you know, we don’t have the tools or the language. And in some ways, you know, my ladies, they had a forgotten art, you know. And then I learned when I was at the library, you can’t just call a meeting. You got to think of an agenda, and what would be best to go first, and who’s gonna take minutes, and then what do you do with it and what kind of, you know, there’s a certain real tools and skills, as Kyle can attest, that that most of us don’t learn.
We’re, you know, kind of charting, we’re the captains of our souls. We’re out there, especially academics, or writing our books. We don’t want to be on committees. But, you know, how do you keep an institution healthy and keep it going? You know, this is kind of a… this is why I, why I was… another reason I was drawn to them. Because they had a particular set of skills, and knowledge, and attitude that might help with, you know, what we’re trying to resurrect today.
KYLE: And I think there are ways in which, why this book is going to be so fruitful for reading groups is that real dichotomy between the individual and the institution, right? It’s the… it’s not, you know, it’s not just suddenly become the issue of 2023. But it is, you know, even in a sort of late-stage pandemic world, how can you rebuild that sense of community, and how can you… and not just the Kumbaya-ness of it?
PEGGY: Yeah.
KYLE: Responsibilities, right, that come with being in that community? And I was intrigued by your answer about the, you know, the people who left. And there’s always that dichotomy, right? Those who work within and those who… Well, I’m just gonna go to the next church down the road.
PEGGY: Yeah, oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
KYLE: As we know in many of the communities that you’re studying, there are plenty of other churches to go to.
PEGGY: It happens. [Laughter] Absolutely.
KYLE: Well, this is, absolutely… there’s many more questions that’ve come in, and I will share these all with you, Peggy.
PEGGY: Okay.
KYLE: We’re running out of time.
PEGGY: Thank you so much.
KYLE: If, of course, if it’s beyond your budget, this copy right here is available at the Congregational Library & Archives, 14 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts. So come on down and read it here.
PEGGY: It’s free!
KYLE: So thank you so very much. Thank you, everybody who is out there listening, and take care, everyone.
PEGGY: Thank you.
