* 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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3. For a good Statement of the problem of class in American women's history, see Nancy Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History in the 1980's,” in Unequal Sisters, ed. DuBois and Ruiz, 1-14. See also Ginzberg, Lori D., Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Ruth M. Alexander, “ ‘We are Engaged as a Band of Sisters': Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840-1850,” Journal of Social History 22, no. 4 (December 1988): 763-85; Cantor, Milton and Laurie, Bruce, eds., Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977)Google Scholar; DuBois, and Ruiz, , eds., Unequal Sisters; Hewitt, Nancy A., Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Newton, Judith L., Ryan, Mary P., and Walkowitz, Judith R., eds., Sex and Class in Women's History (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983)Google Scholar; Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986)Google Scholar; Turbin, Carole, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, New York, 1864-1886 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, “Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian American,” American Quarterly 23 (October 1971): 562-84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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5. See Gilmore, David D., Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Carnes, Mark C. and Griffen, Clyde, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Griswold, Robert L., Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993)Google Scholar; Kimmel, Michael S. and Mosmiller, Thomas E., eds., Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 1776-1990: A Documentary History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Kimmel, Michael S., Manhood: The American Quest (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)Google Scholar; Murphy, Peter F., The Fiction of Masculinity: Literary Constructions of Manhood (New York: New York University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformation in Mascu¬linity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).Google Scholar

6. See Harry Stout and Robert Taylor, “Studies of Religion in American Society: The State of the Art,” working paper no. 201, Program on Non-Profit Organizations, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 1994.

7. The problem of how to convey the story of American religious history through multiple narratives is currently being explored by Thomas A. Tweed and colleagues. For a progress report on their project, see Tweed, Thomas A., “Narrating American Religious History: A Progress Report on a Collaborative Project,” Religious Studies News 9, no. 3 (September 1994): 12, 32.Google Scholar

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13. Until recently, theorizations of gender have been uncritically founded on a role theory that posits a “traditional” male or female sex role and compares these to emerging “modern” gender roles. For example, see Pleck, Joseph H., The Myth of Masculinity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).Google Scholar In contrast, much of the new work tends to view masculinity and femininity not as fixed “roles” that individuals “have” but, rather, as changing relational constructs. These are not wholly biologically nor divinely determined but fashioned from notions of womanhood and manhood available in different historical periods, shaped by biology, race, economic circumstances, religion, and other factors. Moreover, masculinity and femininity continually recreate themselves in an arena of unequal but shifting power relations. See especially Messner, Michael, “ ‘Changing Men’ and Feminist Politics in the U.S.,” Theory and Society 22, no. 5 (1993): 723-37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stacey, J. and Thorne, Barrie, “The Missing Feminist Revolution in Sociology,” Social Problems 32, no. 4 (April 1985): 301-16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carrigan, Tim, Connell, Bob, and Lee, John, “Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity,” Theory and Society 14, no. 5 (1985): 551–604 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Connell, R. W., Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Hearn, Jeff and Morgan, David, eds., Men, Masculinities and Social Theory (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990)Google Scholar; and Segal, Lynne, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

14. The focus of this essay is primarily upon Protestant and Catholic Christianity, though attention is also given to the religious life of fraternal Orders. These are the areas where most of the new work on gender and religion is taking place. Some work, however, is also underway in Mormon and Jewish studies. For a collection of essays on women and the Mormon people, see Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach and Anderson, Lavina Fielding, eds., Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).Google Scholar For women and American Judaism, see especially Karla Goldman, “Beyond the Gallery: The Place of Women in the Development of American Judaism” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1993). See also Umansky, Ellen M., “Spiritual Expressions: Jewish Women's Religious Lives in the Twentieth-Century United States,” in Jewish Women in Historical Perspective, ed. Baskin, Judith R. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 265-88Google Scholar; and Braude, Ann, “The Jewish Woman's Encounter with American Culture,” in Women and Religion in America, Volume I: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Ruether, Rosemary Radford and Keller, Rosemary Skinner (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), 150-58.Google Scholar Essays on men and Judaism can be found in Brod, Harry, ed., A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1988).Google Scholar For an insightful discussion of the cultural frameworks within which knowledge about gender and Judaism is produced and distributed, see the forthcoming issue of Shofar (Spring 1996), edited by Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, entitled “Feminist Critical Study and Judaism.”

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31. See note 5.

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36. Men were also in the new College fraternities, the YMCA, and the Boy Scouts, each of which paid attention to ritual in their collective lives. See McLeod, David I., Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Filene, Peter G., Him/Her/Self: Sex Roles in Modern America, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Kett, Joseph F., Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977).Google Scholar

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46. The close relationship between the church and the lodge within the black Community began with Prince Hall and lasted at least until the 1930's. Prince Hall was a minister of the Methodist Church. When the fraternity spread out of his home State of Massachusetts, other clerics were in the vanguard of its growth. The Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania was established in 1815 by the Rev. Absalom Jones, founder of the Negro Episcopal Church, and the Rev. Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Absalom Jones served as the Pennsylvania Grand Lodge's first Grand Master. The movement of the Order into the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction was often accomplished by ministers simultaneously spreading Masonry and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. One of the major links between Freemasonry and religion in the newly liberated South was Bishop J. W. Hood of the American Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. During Reconstruction, Hood wore three hats: Assistant Superintendent of Public Instruction of North Carolina under the Freedmen's Bureau; Superintendent of Missions for the A.M.E. Zion Church; and Superintendent of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Masonic Grand Lodge of New York. In North Carolina, he helped establish both his church and large numbers of Masonic lodges. When both institutions were firmly established, he became a bishop of the church in 1872 and Grand Master of the Masons of North Carolina from 1870 to 1883. See Muraskin, William A., Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).Google Scholar Though good statistical data is hard to come by, Carter Woodson's 1934 study of the Negro Professional Man found that, among African American lawyers, 53 percent were members of churches while 50 percent were members of fraternal lodges. See Woodson, Carter Godwin, The Negro Professional Man and the Community with Special Emphasis on the Physician and the Lawyer (Washington, D.C.: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Inc., 1934).Google Scholar

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48. Many critics have called attention to this tendency to assume what Elizabeth V. Spelman terms an “homogeneous womanhood” that all woman have in common despite their racial, class, and ethnic differences. See Spelman, Elizabeth V., Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).Google Scholar See also Hull, Gloria T., Scott, Patricia Bell, and Smith, Barbara, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982)Google Scholar; McDowall, Deborah E. and Rampersad, Arnold, eds., Slavery and the Literary Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; White, Ar'n't I a Woman?; bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); and Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood.

49. For an overview, see Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood.”

50. See Fields, Barbara Jeanne, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. Kousser, J. Morgan and McPherson, James M. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143-47.Google Scholar See also Fields, Barbara Jeanne, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review no. 181 (May/June 1990): 95–118 Google Scholar; Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986)Google Scholar; Webster, Yehudi O., The Racialization of America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Gates, Henry Louis Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).Google Scholar

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70. Handlin, Oscar, Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (New York: Atheneum, 1972).Google Scholar Despite the reactionary positions of Popes Pius IX (1846-1878) and Leo XIII (1878-1903), there was some Catholic support for labor organizations. See Moore, , Selling God, 173-81Google Scholar; and Foner, Eric, “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish America,” Marxist Perspectives 1 (Summer 1978): 26.Google Scholar

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72. For the past decade, Margaret Susan Thompson has pioneered the research on Catholic women, particularly Catholic women religious. She provides an overview in “Women and American Catholicism, 1798-1989,” in Perspectives on the American Catholic Church, 1789-1989, ed. Stephen J. Viccio and Virginia Geiger (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1989), 123-42; and “Women, Feminism, and the New Religious History: Catholic Sisters as a Case Study,” in Belief and Behavior: Essays in the New Religious History ed. Philip R. VanderMeer and Robert P. Swierenga (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 136-62. Thompson has also explored the plight of African American nuns in “Philemon's Dilemma: Nuns and the Black Community in Nineteenth Century America: Some Findings,” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 96-98 (1985-1987): 3-18. Two essays explore differences within congregations of women religious: “Sisterhood and Power: Class, Culture, and Ethnicity in the American Convent,” Colby Library Quarterly 25 (September 1989): 149-75; and “Cultural Conundrum: Sisters, Ethnicity, and the Adaptation of American Catholicism,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 74 (October 1992): 205-230. Thompsons book on women religious is forthcoming, The Yoke of Grace: American Nuns and Social Change, 1808-1917 (New York: Oxford University Press).

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

77. Clarke, Brian P., Piety and Nationalism: Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850-1895 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993), 257.Google Scholar Clarke's innovative treatment of Irish ethnicity and Catholicism assumes that ethnicity is not an inherited, fixed identity. Rather, it is constantly being reformulated by people amidst changing cultural and social conditions. The ethnicity formed by the interaction between Irish nationalism, Catholicism, and the new American environment was therefore something new and different from some presumed primordial Irish ethnic identity. For a discussion of the construction of ethnicity, see Sollors, Werner, ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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)?