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In These Days of Female Evangelists and Hallelujah Lasses: Women Preachers and the Redefinition of Gender Roles in the Churches in Late Nineteenth‐Century Australia
Author(s) -
Swain Shurlee
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of religious history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.117
H-Index - 13
eISSN - 1467-9809
pISSN - 0022-4227
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9809.00142
Subject(s) - power (physics) , period (music) , reading (process) , gender studies , history , sociology , law , aesthetics , political science , art , physics , quantum mechanics
The presence of two women amongst the seventeen international revivalists who visited Australia in the period 1863 and 1912 has been seen as unremarkable by religious historians, or read as evidence that the Christian churches were outside, or perhaps even in advance of, the nineteenth‐century struggle for women’s rights. However, only representations of their performance remain, representations which, this article argues, attempted to normalize both their presence and their message. A more critical reading of contemporary reports would suggest that the way in which female evangelists were reported should be seen as intrinsic to the attempt by church leaders to contain and control women’s expanding role. The success of their endeavours rendered female evangelists largely invisible but the lengths to which they went to discount the challenge the female evangelists mounted to conventional constructions of gender, provide evidence of its power.