Searching for Woman's Place in Evangelicalism

July 29, 2005 by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

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A review of God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission by R. Marie Griffith (University of California Press, 1997).

R. Marie Griffith’s inside look at the culture and beliefs of the Women’s Aglow Fellowship, an international charismatic Christian women’s organization, illuminates how and why so many evangelical women support and identify with the doctrine of female submission to male authority. This, in my estimation, is the book’s most valuable contribution.

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Review of Christel Manning, God Gave Us the Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism

New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999

October 01, 2004 by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

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In this carefully done ethnographic study, religion professor Christel Manning offers an intriguing picture of the lives and beliefs of women in conservative religious traditions today. Manning surveys and assesses responses to feminist social values and the secular feminist movement by women in an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, a charismatic evangelical church, and a Catholic parish with a fairly large conservative constituency.

She finds that religiously conservative women are not all alike; different religious traditions produce different responses to the issues and tensions in their lives and communities. Manning also finds that these women share many concerns with women in general (e.g., balancing work and family, ensuring good child care, winning cultural respect for motherhood, discomfort with certain aspects of the feminist movement), and that they have accepted and appropriated many feminist values (e.g., vocational choice for women, equal opportunity and equal pay in the workplace, equal opportunity for political leadership and other positions of authority). However, religiously conservative women’s appropriation of feminist values is highly selective and individualized when it comes to their negotiation of roles, responsibilities, and authority in the home, and it is nearly suspended altogether in their views of women’s place in the church or synagogue.

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Review of Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Boundaries: When to Say Yes, When to Say No, To Take Control of Your Life and Boundaries in Marriage

Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992 and 1999

May 05, 2003 by Rebecca Merrill Groothuis

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The material Cloud and Townsend set forth concerning personal boundaries is basic to everyone’s emotional and relational health. How do so many of us miss it? Since reading these books, I must concur with Bill Hybels’s comment in his endorsement of Boundaries, that “my life would have been different and better had I read this twenty years ago.”

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