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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2018
Since the early 1980's, advances in the study of gender in American history have come primarily through an unmasking of the assumptions of earlier studies. Some have questioned the explanatory power of the field's dominant interpretive paradigm, that of “women's sphere,” because this theoretical lens has often led historians to mistake what was said by and about women for their actual historical experience. Others have laid bare the earlier scholarship's assumption of universal gender definitions that do not take into account differences in women's roles based on race, class, or region. Additionally, several historians have begun to explore the influence of gender relations on the lives of men. As a result, we are beginning to get a picture of gender in American history that goes beyond the “women's sphere” experience of white, middle-class, northeastern women.
* This article was written with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University, and the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton Theological Seminary.
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73. Tentler, “On the Margins,” 108.
74. See especially Orsi, Robert Anthony, The Madonna of ll5th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Orsi, Robert, “The Religious Boundaries of an In-Between People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned Other in Italian Harlem, 1920-1990,” American Quarterly 44, no. 2 (September 1992): 313-47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Dolan, Jay's work, especially: The Immigrant Church: New York's Irish and German Catholics, 1815-1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience, 1830-1900 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978); and The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1985).
75. See McDannell, , The Christian Home In Victorian America, 52–75.Google Scholar
76. In her study of middle-class Irish-Catholic masculinity, Colleen McDannell identified three ideals promoted by Catholic culture as characteristic of the “true man.” These included: “regular participation in Catholic rituals and associations, leadership in domestic affairs, and moderation in economic ambitions.” Catholic advice literature carried this emphasis into the home by encouraging men to moderate their economic ambitions and, instead, assert their authority over family life. McDannell, Colleen, “ ‘True Men as We Need Them:’ Catholicism and the Irish-American Male,” American Studies 26, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 19–36.Google Scholar
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78. See Kauffman, Christopher J., Faith and Fraternalism: The History of the Knights of Columbus, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).Google Scholar
79. Clarke, , Piety and Nationalism, 72.Google Scholar
80. See McDannell, Colleen, “Catholic Domesticity,” in American Catholic Women: A Historical Exploration, ed. Kennelly, Karen (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 48–80 Google Scholar; and Taves, Ann, The Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986).Google Scholar
81. See Clarke, , Piety and Nationalism, 86.Google Scholar
82. Orsi, Robert, “What Did Women Think They Were Doing When They Prayed to St. Jude?” U.S. Catholic Historian 8 (Winter/Spring 1989): 76.Google Scholar
83. Orsi, Robert, “ ‘He Keeps Me Going’: Women's Devotion to St. Jude and the Dialects of Gender in American Catholicism,” in Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion, ed. Kselman, Thomas (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 160.Google Scholar Orsi's study of Catholic women's devotion to St. Jude, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes, 1929-1965, is forthcoming from Yale University Press. Additional earlier work of Orsi's on this project can be found in the following places: “What Did Women Think They Were Doing When They Prayed to St. Jude?” U.S. Catholic Historian 8 (Winter/Spring 1989): 67-79; “The Center Out There, In Here, and Everywhere Else: The Nature of Pilgrimage to the Chicago Shrine of Saint Jude,” Journal of Social History 25, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 213-32; and “ ‘Have You Ever Prayed to St. Jude?’ Reflections on Fieldwork in Chicago,” in Reimagining Denominationalism: Interpretive Essays, ed. Robert Bruce Mullin and Russell E. Richey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 134-61.
84. Orsi, “ ‘He Keeps Me Going,’ ” 148. See also Scott, Joan Wallach, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).Google Scholar
85. See Gerson, Judith M. and Peiss, Kathy, “Boundaries, Negotiation, Consciousness: Reconceptualizing Gender Relations,” Social Problems 32, no. 4 (April 1985): 317-31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
86. See Orsi, “ ‘He Keeps Me Going,’ ” 160.
87. See David G. Hackett, “The Church and the Lodge: Gender Tensions, Region, and Theology in Late Nineteenth Century Protestant Culture” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian American Studies Association, Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 15-16, 1993).
88. The concept of separate spheres has been criticized by many scholars for its tendency to reify the division of social experience into public/male and private/female worlds and to neglect the interactions between them. See, for example, Gerson and Peiss, “Boundaries”; Kanter, Rosabeth Moss, Work and Family in the United States: A Critical Review and Agenda for Research and Policy (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1977)Google Scholar; and Pleck, Elizabeth, “Two Worlds in One: Work and the Family,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 2 (1976): 178-95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
89. See Rosaldo, M. Z., “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 3 (1980): 389–417.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
90. The most recent and illumining study of the transformations of family life within a religious tradition is A. Gregory Schneider, The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Kane offers insight into Boston Irish Catholic families in Separatism and Subculture. The now classic Statement on the emergence of the modern family within mainstream Protestantism is Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class. What “family” meant outside the confines of the “nuclear” family has not yet been explored.
91. Don Browning, Pam Couture, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Margaret Bendroth, Phyllis Airhart, David Watt, and their associates are currently at work on a multivolume study of religion and the family in American life that promises some exploration of this historiographical problem. For two interim reports on this project, see Browning, Don S., “The Religion, Culture, and Family Project,” Criterion 32, no. 2 (1993), 5–11 Google Scholar; and Wall, John, “The New Middle Ground in the Family Debate,” Criterion 33, no. 3 (1994).Google Scholar
92. See Carnes, Mark, “Iron John in the Gilded Age,” American Heritage 44, no. 5 (September 1993): 42 Google Scholar; and Carnes, , Ritual and Manhood, 3.Google Scholar
93. Lane, Roger, William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Post and Future of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 279.Google Scholar
94. Muraskin, , Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society, 13–31.Google Scholar
95. Kauffman, , Faith and Fraternalism, xiii-xv.Google Scholar
96. Mark Carnes compares and contrasts nineteenth-century fraternal Orders with the contemporary men's movement in “Iron John in the Gilded Age,” 37-45.
97. Orsi, “What Did Women Think?” 79.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Next up for investigation: doesn't “religion” here really mean Christianity (though see note 14)?