Gender, Power, and Religion: Orientations of the Self in African America and the Black Diaspora

• Published in: Journal of women's history 2020-04, Vol.32 (1), p.156-162
• Main Author: Sesay, Chernoh M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Activism; African Americans; Attention; Churches; Civil rights movements; Clergy; Diaspora; Female roles; Gender; Husbands; Islam; Justice; Leadership; Marginality; Masculinity; Missionaries; Morality; Muhammad, Elijah (Elijah Poole) (1897-1975); Non-binary gender; Patriarchy; Perseveration; Public sphere; Racism; Religion; Religious leaders; Social classes; Suburbanization; Truth; Women; Working class; Worldview
• ISSN: 1042-7961; 1527-2036; 1527-2036
• DOI: 10.1353/jowh.2020.0012

In Black Women's Christian Activism, The Promise of Patriarchy, and Religion in the Kitchen, Betty Livingston Adams, Ula Yvette Taylor, and Elizabeth Pérez each explore, albeit in different ways, the role of religion in self-making and the relationship between religious self-understanding and critical engagement with racism, patriarchy, and socioeconomic marginalization. This triptych highlights a rising wave of work across scholarly fields that not only reveals the significant political work of women in seemingly mundane or unexpected spaces and places but also delves deeply into the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual lives of women who are actually far more than ordinary.1 The early twentieth-century suburb, the Nation of Islam, and the kitchens of Lucumí priests are realms where women of color have had great impact and pivotal influence but have not received extended attention. Each project of excavation and reclamation highlights the ways in which women have affirmed themselves within the intimate ritual spaces of religious community and reveals the contradictions of patriarchy. Together these books also draw attention to how women have created and extended their religious leadership as they embodied and expressed critiques of racism and hegemonies of masculinity. Charting perseverance as a function of religious worldview is central to each volume; however, each study illustrates a different story about persistence and its complicated results.