| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Without Benefit of Clergy: Women and the Pastoral Relationship in Nineteenth-Century American Culture. By Karin E. Gedge. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. viii, 290 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-19-513020-0.)
For twenty-five years Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (1977) has remained the great straw man of American cultural history. No matter how many historians have challenged her thesis that the rigor and richness of American religion were vitiated by its increasing association with women, she remains the opponent to whom every one wants to give the final knockout blow. Karin E. Gedge's book, Without Benefit of Clergy, is not a knockout blow, but it provides a great deal of hard evidence contradicting Douglas's arguments.	1
Gedge argues that Douglas and subsequent scholars essentially recapitulate the nineteenth century's long-standing anxiety that ministers and women might grow too close, thus violating the proper division between male and female spheres. Instead of increasing ideological alignment between women and the clergy, Gedge finds deepening tensions and conflicting interests, stemming largely from the imposition of strict gender roles on a relationship that by its nature must include much male-female contact.	. . .

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