You Have Stept Out of Your Place: A History of Women and Religion in America

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 11, 1996 by Mary Jeremy Daigler

By Susan Hill Lindley Westminster John Knox Press, 500 pages, $35, hardcover

In the words of the late, great Mae West: "Too much of a good thing is never enough!" And that aphorism did occur to this reviewer while reading You Have Stept Out of Your Place. On the one hand, the sheer mass of historical data is "too much of a good thing" and seems overwhelming; and on the other hand, even the nonhistorian reader knows that the whole story needs to be recovered and has lain buried for too long. That burial covers the roots of the current harvest of many women's anger or indifference toward organized religions.

The author of this work, Susan Hill Lindley, notes at the outset that "By the mid '90s women differ in their assessment of the viability of remaining within the Jewish or Christian communities, but there is no question that a usable and fascinating past has been recovered." By the writing of this book, she proposes to gather into one volume very much of that "fascinating past" in the churches, synagogues and other religious groupings in North America from the time of the East Coast colonies til today.

Lindley's significant contributions to the scholarship on this topic are important and very specific: proof of the universality of the issues across religions, cultures and time; illustration of the inevitability of changes in religious groups, though they are made at a maddeningly slow pace; and the documentation of the consistent pattern with which the changes are effected.

For example, in all the groups considered, women's leadership was at first limited to the home, then to modeling fidelity to the group and its moral code, then to faith-related charitable work and on to home missions, foreign missions, membership on church committees, then boards, preaching and ordination.

(The four religions excepting themselves from this progression are Eastern Orthodoxy, Orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism and Missouri Synod Lutheranism.) Some groups have faced the issues earlier than others, but all the issues arise eventually in each of the groups. (The awkward term "group" is used in this review to acknowledge the fact that Judaism, Buddhism and Quakerism are among the many in the book that do not describe themselves as "church")

The metaphor of the domino effect comes to mind: One can take a bird's-eye view of the map of the United States, noticing a tremendously long path of upright domino tiles falling one after the other across the country over the three centuries studied. One after another those tiles fall, upon the impact of the ones standing next to them. There is suspense, there are obstacles (perhaps the mountains will prevent this one or that one from toppling) but in the end all those mini-walls fall. Lindley portrays a consistency and persistence of change in religious groups that can be heartening to observe.

Certain segments of the volume shine with clarity, insight and warmth: Chapter 8 on the "Foreign Missionary Movement in the Nineteenth Century," Chapter 14 on "Roman Catholic Women in the Nineteenth Century America" and Chapter 17, "A Nineteenth Century Feminist Critique of Religion."

Particular insights accessible through these chapters include the realization of the magnitude of the service and energy of Protestant women toward church reform as well as of the Roman Catholic women religious. The clarity of each of these chapters derives in part from the fact that the historical context is presented in manageable doses, which is not the case throughout the book. In several other chapters, in fact, the context is presented so voluminously that the specifically women's history is diminished.

The reader might look for more extensive exploration of the groups west of the Mississippi, as well as for greater clarity in distinguishing culture from religion (as on page 206, where Italian culture seems to be interpreted as Roman Catholicism; and in Chapter 15 on the roles of Jewish women). While the line between "secular" and "sacred"--between religion and culture--is admittedly fine and blurry, the purposes of this author might have been served by making such distinctions.

In general, the organizational principles (chronologies, issues and individuals) of the book are clear and effective in the early chapters and must be less so in the later ones. It must be noted that the author's ambitious scope and massive research probably contributed to this problem. This is the sort of book that will serve very well as textbook for a formally structured course: amazingly rich in content yet needing assimilation time and perhaps even some refocusing of the material. It is an indispensable resource book for libraries. For the general reader, it can be digested most enjoyably if taken in small segments over an extended period. It will be a mother lode of information from which further scholarship will spin off for some time to come.

Mercy Sr. Mary Jeremy Daigler is based in Baltimore, currently doing research and writing in the history of women religious in Catholic higher education.