Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present

by Margaret Lamberts Bendroth

In this fascinating book, the author surveys the complicated interplay between fundamentalist theology, which is dominated by the search for order and hierarchical gender roles that have women subservient to men, and fundamentalist practice, which often depends on women in important ways to further the movement's institutional growth. Illustrations.

Genres: History, Feminism, Christianity, Religion, Nonfiction

192 pages, Hardcover

First published November 24, 1993

Reviews

[Autumn]

First of all, I think it is paramount to point out that this seems to be a published dissertation. Don't launch into it expecting a contemporary, mainstream analysis with modern storytelling flair. This is a work that Bendroth clearly labored over and put a ton of research into. I, for one, appreciate her efforts.

Next, I am glad I found this book. Is it sparse in areas? Yes, but one can only write so much. And besides, there are some excellent writers who have taken up where Bendroth left off in 1996. I appreciated the deep historical framing that explained the genesis for all the ideas I grew up with, ideas that were taken for granted as "gospel truth" by the time I encountered them.

She contrasts the fundamentalists' emphasis of the doctrines of inerrancy and dispensationalism with the changing social conditions (sufferage, WWII, the rise of the Christian businessman, etc.) and shows, quite compellingly, how and why the leading preachers of the day reacted to these things. And let me just say, it's not pretty. Many, many of the men who were revered in the churches I attended (Rice, Jones, Moody, Sunday, et. al.) are on record saying some flat-out heretical things about women and men alike.

I'm so glad I read this. I feel like I now have a good foundation for the other things I've read and will be reading.

[Joseph Hirsch]

Mainline American low church denominations have a strange history with the female sex. For large periods of their history, female church attendance and participation has been high, while the male cohort has lagged behind. Sometimes the menfolk were lagging in indolence, shooting craps or drinking their pay packets, and sometimes they were busy fighting in wars that made it hard for even the most sober-minded to not believe the apocalypse was penciled in there for somewhere within the coming calendar year.

Christianity is very much phallocentric in dogma, and very gynocratic in its day to day administration. How to resolve these tensions (which sometimes arguably shade into outright contradictions) is something Margaret Bendroth's book does in respectable, workmanlike prose in her slim study "Fundamentalism and Gender." The tone isn't exactly academic, but it is a bit bloodless. The work clocks in at less than 130 pages and yet, despite that, felt like a bit of slog.

There are some things to recommend it, some insights on the tensions between various factions of Christians looking to save souls, differences between how holiness/charismatic sects deal with the whole "woman being from the rib of man," thing. And since, from the outside, these differences between Pentecostals and Evangelicals are granular at best, and more likely not even recognized, this part of the book is true yeoman's work. But other than that, most of this information is covered elsewhere, and in more detail, in other books. See for example "American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism." See also "Righting America at the Creation Museum," which deals extensively with the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial," in which dispensationalist and literalist Christian groups took a drubbing in the public square, from which they arguably have not recovered. But that's probably a topic for another book, or even another series of books.

[Susie Meister]

This book covers the issue of gender within fundamentalism and the 20th century problem of attaching meaning to the fact of human gender in a society where arbitrary roles seem unnecessary. While women were seen as inherently more religious in the late nineteenth century, by the 1920s fundamentalists had adopted the belief that it was men, not women, who had the true aptitude for religion. Bendroth seems this issue as key to understanding fundamentalism's internal development and its interaction with the dominant forces of American culture. Because fundamentalism was born in an era of anxiety over gender roles making it a natural focus of the tradition. Moody and Sunday contributed to the masculine ideal and appealed to male converts. Feminne brazeness was a sign of the last days. Bendroth agrees with Marsden that in the eyes of fundamentalists,American society represented Babylon and Jerusalem.

[Stan Rea]

I found this short book interesting but not as helpful as I though it would be. Although the book was written in the mid-90s, for all practical purposes the story ends in the 1970s. Given that I am reading this in 2020 it's like two generations of leadership of the various movements (Fundamentalism, Neo-Evangelicalism, New Evangelicalism or it's modern name Evangelicalism). I enjoyed reading about some of the people I was huge fans of back in the day. I heard John R Rice preach on multiple occasions. I used to subscribe to the Sword of the Lord. I worked for Bill Rice. I spent 3 1/2 years in close proximity to the multi-generational Jones family (if you know what I mean). This book makes me want to go out and read "Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers" by John Rice although given that its cost, used, on Amazon is $103.00, I am not that interested.

[Joshua Sim]

My short one paragraph book review: Margaret Bendroth's Fundamentalism and Gender is a nuanced study that examines the complex evolutionary development of masculinity, femininity and gender roles within American Protestant Fundamentalism. Bendroth's detailed analysis of gendered meanings and roles within the movement highlights the crucial role that gender played in accentuating and complicating the inherent contradictions that were already existent within fundamentalism (which is made up of a combination of different traditions) as the movement searched for internal order (in terms of clear gender roles) in the midst of a rapidly secularising twentieth-century North American cultural and religious environ. This search for order meant that the movement was never really prepared for the feminist critique that arose in the latter-halves of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the notion of masculinity suffered setbacks during those periods, the movement had the strength to resist the critique by drawing on its Protestant roots -- the belief in an infallible and inerrant bible enabled a literal reading of the various curses, prophecies and injunctions within Calvinist and dispensationalist traditions, grounding the movement's anti-feminist convictions in the immutable authority of God's word, despite the strong internal and external challenges that it faced.

[Anson Cassel Mills]

This is the sort of book that one reads for the information that it contains without expecting much more. Bendroth has done exhaustive research, and her writing is clear enough, but she is not a storyteller. Early on the reader senses that the author has organized her notes in patterns that are roughly logical but which lack adequate synthesis. (After all, what is “fundamentalism”? And did its practitioners treat gender issues differently than other contemporary Protestants?) The book’s treatment is also uneven, strongest for the early 20th century, weaker for the late nineteenth and post-war eras.