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Introduction

This Study Guide has been designed to help you read Her Story more effectively. It provides an introduction to every chapter and to its readings. There are also chapter-specific bibliographies to give you access to the latest scholarship on each period, and questions to guide your reading and to help you relate the readings to each other. Finally, related Websites are noted for each chapter. They contain further information, primary documents, biographies, or graphics of the main figures and places and issues from each period.

A separate document, "A Short Guide to Writing Research Papers on Women in the Christian Tradition," offers tips on how to tackle a research paper, a few dozen suggestions for paper topics, links to online theological dictionaries and aids, and further links to primary and secondary Web sources on women in Christian history.

Her Story brings historical knowledge and debates about women in the Christian past before a wide audience of students and members of communities of faith. It also provides primary sources to illustrate and expand upon the conclusions of the first book. The book covers the early church, the Western medieval past and the Protestant Reformation. To place some limitations on the scope of the material, the last five chapters focus on women in the American context.

Her Story first appeared in 1986, a transitional period in women's history and feminist theology. Pioneering work had been done in the late 1960s and 1970s documenting sexism in the Christian tradition and, in many cases, revealing women who found ways to contribute to and benefit from the evolution of that tradition. Scholars uncovered the major contours of a whole new landscape, and these contours have remained largely unchanged over the past two decades. Medieval theology, the exclusion of women from pulpits, and the social arrangements of ancient Israel continue to be discussed as locations for patriarchy and misogyny. The Gospel tradition, the religious orders, and the nineteenth-century voluntary societies continue to be seen as part of a more liberating counter-tradition.

The introduction to each chapter of Her Story will help you to find your way around this landscape and will guide you through the significant points of the primary texts, numbered parenthetically in each introduction. Each chapter introduction concludes with a list of questions for reflection. These questions have several objectives: they will help you review the main points of the texts; they will solicit your personal experiences on a wide variety of topics; and they will ask you to evaluate some of the conclusions historians have already drawn.

Since the mid-1980s an explosion of scholarship has allowed us to see in more refined detail the landscape of women's past. Some early interpretations of parts of that past have been revised, and new historical data, along with relevant interpretations, have emerged. Much more attention, for example, has been paid to racial, denominational, and class distinctions among women in various historical periods. Significant studies of women in Europe after the Protestant Reformation offer opportunities to compare experiences across Western civilization. The words of women themselves, whether interviews with modern clergywomen or the writings of seventeenth-century Juana Ines de la Cruz, are helping to redefine our understanding of the past. Some events and movements that were hailed uncritically as progress for women are now given a more sober assessment, while the ambiguity of others, once labeled as clearly patriarchal, is being recognized. Finally, there is a growing interest in broadening this landscape of women's past by including the experiences of men in similar situations.

The introductions to each chapter begin to give you access to this new scholarship in a variety of ways. There is an extensive list of additional readings at the end of each chapter summary. These lists are not exhaustive, but they will point you to some of the most significant recent books and articles. Some excellent collections of essays and books that cover the whole sweep of Christian history are attached to the end of this general introduction, along with material on historiography. The directions new studies have taken are also suggested in the chapter summaries and in the projects for further study given in the guide to writing a research paper.

Additional Readings

  • Brekus, Catherine A. "Studying Women and Religion: Problems and Possibilities." Criterion 32 (Autumn 1993): 24-28.
  • Conn, Marie A. Noble Daughters: Unheralded Women in Western Christianity, 13th to 18th Centuries. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
  • Coon, Lynda L. et al., eds. That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990.
  • Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "Two Steps Forward and One Step Back: New Questions and Old Models in the Religious History of American Women." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53 (1985): 465-471.
  • Greaves, Richard L., ed. Triumph Over Silence: Women in Protestant History. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.
  • Lindley, Susan Hill. You Have Stepped Out of Your Place: A History of Women and Religion in America. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.
  • McNamara, Jo Ann. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millenia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.
  • Malone, Mary T. Women and Christianity: The First One Thousand Years. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001.
  • Marty, Martin A., ed. Women and Women's Issues. Modern American Protestantism and Its World. Vol. 12. Munich: K.G. Saur, 1993.
  • Oden, Amy, ed. In Her Words: Women's Writings in the History of Christian Thought. Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.
  • Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.
  • Schmidt, Alvin J. Veiled and Silenced: How Culture Shaped Sexist Theology. Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1989.
  • Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth and Collins, Mary, eds. Women Invisible in Church and Society. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985.
  • Sheils, W.J. and Wood, Diana, eds. Women in the Church: Papers Read at the 1989 Summer Meeting and the 1990 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by B. Blackwell, 1990.
  • Tucker, Ruth A. and Liefeld, Walter. Daughters of the Church: Women and Ministry from New Testament Times to the Present. Grand Rapids: Academie, 1987.
  • Wessinger, Catherine, ed. Religious Institutions and Women's Leadership: New Roles Inside the Mainstream. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
  • Wessinger, Catherine, ed. Women's Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the Mainstream. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Related Websites for Introduction