Book Review

Canada and the United States

This book argues that Protestant women in early America wielded significant power in their families, churches, and communities. Rejecting the interpretation that women were "victims of a deeply ingrained patriarchy," Leslie J. Lindenauer argues that their Protestant faith empowered them to engage in private prayer, to teach their children, to speak publicly in the church, to shape church politics, and to testify in courts of law (p. xii). In her words, "evidence suggests that the fundamental belief in the equality of the Protestant soul shaped women's conceptions of themselves as Christians, blurred distinctions between their roles in the public and private sphere, and gave them a voice in arenas often assumed by historians to have been closed to them" (p. xii). In contrast to scholars such as Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Jane Kamensky, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton, who have argued that seventeenth-century women faced growing restrictions on their religious and legal authority, Lindenauer frames her book around a triumphant narrative of progress. In her epilogue, she claims that women's political activism during the American Revolution was a natural outgrowth of their religious identity as "soldiers of Christ."

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The greatest strength of this book is its broad focus. Instead of concentrating on a single region, Lindenauer examines the stories of Dutch Reformed women in New York, Puritan women in New England, and Anglican women in the South. Although Lindenauer sometimes exaggerates the theological similarities among these women, she should be commended for her attempt to compare their stories.

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