{"id":8577,"date":"2025-01-16T14:21:40","date_gmt":"2025-01-16T19:21:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/?post_type=event&p=8577"},"modified":"2025-03-27T17:27:57","modified_gmt":"2025-03-27T21:27:57","slug":"missionary-women-and-the-imperial-roots-of-white-evangelical-feminism","status":"publish","type":"event","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/event\/missionary-women-and-the-imperial-roots-of-white-evangelical-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"Missionary Women and the Imperial Roots of White Evangelical Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an \u201cempire of Christ\u201d that was racially diverse but, they believed, they were uniquely qualified to manage. America\u2019s burgeoning power combined with women\u2019s rising roles within the church led white Protestant women to adopt a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.<\/span><\/p>\n

In <\/span>Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire<\/span><\/i> (NYU Press, 2024), Gale L. Kenny traces how the women\u2019s missionary movement created a Christian world order. She shows that Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant worldview that focused on moral and racial purity where interactions among different races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racial integration as well as the uplift of women. Although it aspired to a racially diverse world Christianity, it was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In a departure from recent scholarship that examines these dynamics within the context of white evangelical nationalism, this book focuses on racial politics within white religious liberalism. <\/span>Christian Imperial Feminism<\/span><\/i> adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gale Kenny<\/span> is Associate Professor of Religion at Barnard College. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, race, and American religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of two books, <\/span>Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica <\/span><\/i>(University of Georgia Press, 2010) and <\/span>Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire <\/span><\/i>(NYU Press, 2024). She is currently working on a new project about race and spirituality through a history of Theosophist Katherine Tingley and her early twentieth-century Southern California commune, Lomaland.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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Exploring the origins of a new world order in Christian imperial feminism. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":8578,"template":"","tags":[76,258,1001],"class_list":["post-8577","event","type-event","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-christianity","tag-feminism","tag-imperialism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event\/8577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/event"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event\/8577\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8601,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event\/8577\/revisions\/8601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/staging\/2435\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}