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

Susan Hill Lindley, Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996. 500pp. $35.00 (cloth).

This book aims to create "a single-volume survey text" on women and religion in the U.S. It is, as the dust jacket proclaims, the first narrative history of women and religion in America, but it is not in any sense a new narrative. In its structure it follows the basic outlines of Rosemary R. Ruether's and Rosemary Keller's three-volume documentary history, Women and Religion in America (1981-86), and Barbara MacHaffie's Herstory: Women in Christian Tradition (1986). The former is now out of print, superseded by the presumably more course-friendly one-volume edition, Ruether and Keller, In Our Own Voices (1995).

The first eleven of the book's twenty-two chapters, with the exception of chapter 4, are devoted to Euro-American Protestant women from the colonial era to the end of the nineteenth-century, although they are not described as such. Chapters 12-15 are devoted to non-Euro-American Protestant women during the nineteenth century: Native American, African American, Roman Catholic, and Jewish. Chapters 16-17 focus on nineteenth-century European-Americans of Protestant heritage: the "alternative religions" (Shakers, the Oneida Community, Mormons, and Christian Scientists) and the nineteenth-century "feminist critique of religion." Chapters 18-20 examine women's religious leadership in the twentieth century with a chapter on "mainline" traditions (i.e., "mainline Protestants" and the "less traditional branches of Judaism"), the "ambivalent" traditions ("conservative Protestants"), and traditionalist traditions (i.e., Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Orthodox Jews, and some Protestants). The book concludes with chapters on women and reform in the twentieth century and a look forward to the twenty-first century.

The first half of the book roughly follows the narrative track laid out by MacHaffie, although Lindley begins abruptly with a chapter on Anne Hutchinson, followed by chapters on "Quakers" and "Puritanism." Rather than surveying the diversity present in the British colonies at the outset, as MacHaffie does, Lindley waits to acknowledge it until chapter 4, a chapter devoted to those who are not Euro-American Puritans (i.e., Anglicans, Catholics, Native Americans, and African Americans). In contrast to Ruether and Keller (1983) who discuss women in what would become the United States (i.e., the British, French, and Spanish colonies), Lindley limits herself to the British colonies and thus tacitly embraces the traditional Puritan to pluralism story line that has dominated texts on U.S. religious history until recently.

The chapters on non-Euro-American-Protestants (4, 12-15) illustrate both the de facto Euro-American Protestant focus of the central narrative line and the conceptual difficulties writers in the "women and religion in America" genre face with regard to cultural and ethnic differences. While MacHaffie mentions African American women in the context of the Christian traditions of which they are a part, Lindley subordinates religion to ethnicity in the case of African Americans and Native Americans but so subordinates ethnicity to religion in the case of Euro-American Protestants that their ethnic heritage is effectively erased. Only in the case of Catholic and Jewish women, who are depicted as immigrants, do we get a sense of the ethnic diversity within a tradition.

If, in its efforts at inclusion, this genre suffers from inconsistency and confusion with regard to the relationship between ethnicity and religion, it is driven by a focus on the issue of women's historic subordination to men and their resulting exclusion from positions of public religious leadership. The overarching narrative line focuses on women's response to their situation, so conceived. This suggests why the volume opens with the iconic Anne Hutchinson and concludes with six chapters that analyze women's quest for equality and leadership within various religious traditions in the twentieth century. The overall picture, as Lindley acknowledges at the outset, is a mixed one. The foregrounding of Euro-American Protestants certainly makes for a more optimistic narrative, one that highlights the trajectory that runs from Anne Hutchinson to the ordination of women in many Protestant denominations.

This is not a bad approach to the subject of women and religion in the history of the U.S., especially in a synthetic volume designed for classroom use. The lack of a substantive introduction to the volume, and the consequent absence of reflection on the critical issues involved in constructing a narrative such as this, suggest that Lindley's decisions in these matters were made relatively uncritically. The volume would have been strengthened by an introduction that acknowledged the strengths and limitations of this trajectory in relation to the variety of new approaches now taken in narratives of U.S. religious history more generally. This might also have been the occasion for creatively confronting some of the conceptual difficulties that have plagued the "women and religion in America" genre.

ANN TAVES