Actions for New Occasions Make New Duties : Pious Agency and Gendered Mobilization in the Emergence of the American Protestant Woman's Missionary Movement, 1800-1925

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New Occasions Make New Duties : Pious Agency and Gendered Mobilization in the Emergence of the American Protestant Woman's Missionary Movement, 1800-1925

Author
Goff, Kerby
Published
[University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2022.
Physical Description
1 electronic document
Additional Creators
Adler, Gary
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Open Access.
Summary
Described by contemporaries as "the woman's century," the 19th century featured drastic changes for women in the U.S. Women gained access to education and the professions, secured property and other legal rights, and eventually won the right to vote. In analyzing this "first wave" of the women's movement, many have missed a larger and more transnational component--the Woman's Missionary Movement--a movement which expanded in tension with the domestic-focused moral reform and women's rights movements of the 19th century. This movement expanded transnational organizational opportunities for U.S. women and expanded education for girls and medical access for women to much of Asia, Africa and Oceania, laying the foundation for later opportunities for women in the Global South. In this dissertation, I extend social scientific analysis of this first wave of women's movements to include the Woman's Missionary Movement. I analyze the discursive justification for this movement and, through historical and quantitative analysis, the contextual factors contributing to its emergence and diffusion through nearly half of all American Protestant denominations. While feminist scholarship on religion and women's agency assumes that piety and collective agency are in conflict, this analysis shows how pious agency can expand women's opportunities and further religiously informed goals. Additionally, women's movements often benefit from gendered opportunities in public and/or elite support for women's expanded scope of action, but research shows that traditional and progressive gender ideologies support such opportunities. This analysis shows how gendered opportunities are field-specific and temporal and emerge when the cost of maintaining categorical distinctions regarding gendered positions in the field rises too high, thereby clarifying the concept and providing tools to analyze gendered opportunity in its relational context rather than with respect to a "universal" feminist standard. This dissertation shows how gendered religious agency is more than instrumental, compliant, or resistant, and how gendered opportunity is relative to the gendered context of the field.
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Dissertation Note
Ph.D. Pennsylvania State University 2022.
Reproduction Note
Microfilm (positive). 1 reel ; 35 mm. (University Microfilms 30396310)
Technical Details
The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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