| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Piety and Power: Gender and Religious Culture in the American Colonies, 1630–1700. By Leslie J. Lindenauer. (New York: Routledge, 2001. xxviii, 181 pp. $70.00, ISBN 0-415-93392-7.)

This book makes a good case for studying religious culture in relationship to gender, but its main focus is feminine piety, its sources, character, and impact on the evolution of Protestant communities and cultures in early America. Leslie J. Lindenauer wisely adopts a comparative approach to the important topic, analyzing in particular how feminine spirituality was realized and lived in Puritan New England, Dutch Reformed New York, and Anglican Virginia. Where historians have mainly focused on the peculiarities of each region, Lindenauer focuses on their similarities, linking demographic and social disparities to common religious values and behaviors. Thus the women of the three regions drew upon similar sources of Protestant piety and made similar contributions to what became in each colony a vibrant Protestant culture. These women were also led by God's grace to similar paths of authority in the same range of spheres, including the self, the family, the church, and the community. Lindenauer considers these arenas "as a series of ever-expanding spheres—from the intensely private to the most public—where women exercised the voice of authority" (p. xx).

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