Fundamentalism and Women's Suffrage

Of all the things that contemporary society thinks it knows about fundamentalism, perhaps the notion that it is opposed to feminism is one of the most prominent. This general impression has also been adopted by scholars. Bruce B. Lawrence, for example, in his Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age, pronounces confidently when expounding the nature of historic fundamentalism in America that ‘Secondary male elites provided their leadership, extolling women as mothers and custodians of family values but never recognizing an individual woman as authoritative teacher.’ This is a typical assessment, but it is simply not true. ‘Authoritative teacher’ is a slippery category for fundamentalists, as they believed that the Bible was the true authority and that no human being had the right to dictate to others how it was to be interpreted, but, beyond an a priori assumption that it just could not have been so, it does not seem demonstrable that Pankhurst was any less an ‘authoritative teacher’ than the males on the fundamentalist circuit. Nor is her case singular. Attitudes toward women in the life and ministry of the church and attitudes toward women in society in general are naturally entwined – in reality as well as in the scholarly literature – but, for the purpose of clarity of analysis and presentation, this chapter will focus on fundamentalism and women in society, leaving a full discussion of women in ministry and fundamentalism for the next chapter.

The most important book making the case that fundamentalism in the 1920s was a movement especially hostile to women is Betty A. DeBerg's Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism.Repeatedly, DeBerg makes her case by the simple expedient of only citing the evidence in its favour, and then pronouncing the picture thereby assembled as the monolithic fundamentalist view. Although this will be demonstrated more fully as different specific issues are addressed below and in the next chapter, it is worth observing here that despite the fact that she wrote an entire monograph on gender and fundamentalism that is centred chronologically in the 1920s, DeBerg never once even referred to Christabel Pankhurst.