Women and religion in America, vol. 2, the colonial and revolutionary periods Book

This book is new edition of a revised dissertation first published by Augsburg/Fortress in 1990. DeBerg (b. 1953) has done extensive research in the primary sources, and the book, while unexciting reading, is more coherent than much of what passes for English prose in the academy. DeBerg believes that the rise of American fundamentalism is tied to male fear of losing dominant societal status, that even the fundamentalist emphasis on biblical inerrancy was "designed to promote and defend...[the] conventions of the Victorian separate-spheres ideology." (128)

DeBerg has collected a large number of anti-feminist quotations from various turn-of-the-century evangelicals, but her thesis is weakened both by a loose definition of fundamentalism and by her admission that fundamentalists "were not the only men who tried to reassert traditional notions of masculinity during this time of cultural and social stress" (151-52), providing as examples Social Gospel theologians, liberal ministers, and Catholics. Furthermore, her research ignores some influential fundamentalists of the period, including the evangelist Bob Jones, Sr. (1883-1968), who made quite a few radioactive statements about women before founding an eponymous college and naming as its dean a woman, one of the first female deans of an American co-educational institution.