Women's History is Still American Religious History
by Samira K. Mehta
Women with Church League for Women's Suffrage banner, LSE Library
Ann Braude’s essay “Women’s History Is American Religious History” was a groundbreaking piece when she wrote it, but it is also a piece with immense staying power. Many of us continue to teach it—it has not, as it turns out, ceased to be relevant and it continues to resonate with students. “Women go to church,” Braude begins her essay. Understand that this reality, she argues, challenges the then prevailing understanding that “religion declined in the colonial period, was feminized in Victorian America, and gave way to a secular order in the twentieth century.” She says that, if we pay attention to gender, we will understand why this argument has held such sway in the historiography even though, she contends, none of these trends ever really happened. She then proceeds to explore these themes, not through the lens of male absence, but of female presence. And, as a note, it turns out that, if you start a class with “Women’s History is American Religious History,” you will create a class who will, as you move throughout the semester, continue to use gender as an analytic lens, asking “where are the women and what would we see if we included them,” at all of the key moments of the class. (This turns out to be embarrassing if you have a day, or worse a week or a unit, when you were less attentive to gender than you should have been.)
While Braude's essay did not give birth to women's studies in religion, it really did take one of the key first analytic steps to creating gender studies--there is telling the stories of women so that we know the stories of women, and then there is looking at how telling the stories of women (and, by extension, other people/gender identities who are absent) reshape the narrative. It causes us to think about how attention to gender reshapes what we think we know. This was the first essay to do this in a way that found a broad audience and became canon in American religion as a field. In that way, it became formative for the field. It set the tone for how women’s studies, and eventually also how gender studies would operate in the field of American religious history.
It continues to be influential today—I opened by saying that many of us (and so many people have told me that they teach it that I have found myself wondering if most of us) still teach “Women’s History Is American Religious History.” It also still influences research—fundamentally, it is there whenever anyone says, “where are the women in this story (or, the non-binary, or the queer people) and how would their inclusion change the story that we are telling?” It is the corrective against simply adding in the women’s story running parallel to the men’s, but rather saying women’s stories likely change and influence the story. It also reminds us to look for absences in who is being discussed. To use an example from my own work, I am currently at HDS, in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program which Ann Braude has run since 1998, working on a book about contraception. All of the forms of contraception that I am talking about—the diaphragm, the pill, Norplant, the IUD–act on the body of women and others with the capacity for pregnancy, and yet no one really ever talks about women in these 1960s based religious and public policy discussions about what birth control can do for marriage, family, or society. Braude’s work makes me attentive to what this silence does, what anxieties it signals, and what arguments are possible because women’s voices are not mentioned. It continues to provide a clear and compelling theoretical frame for the importance of such work.
“Women’s History is American Religious History” was written twenty-five years ago, and as a result it talks about women, their presence in religious history, and their absence in historiography. As Tom Tweed notes in his response, he had initially asked Ann to write about gender, and she told him that they did not have the scholarship yet. But the approach to women’s history that she uses—not simply telling a history of women, but talking about how the inclusion of women in the story of religion changes the story, set the stage for both the gender studies in religion and the sexuality studies in religion that would follow. In this way, it is a theoretical frame that continues to expand.
Samira K. Mehta is the Director of Jewish Studies and an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) was a National Jewish book award finalist. She is also the author of a newly released book of personal essays called The Racism of People Who Love You (Beacon Press, 2023).