Booknotes: Daughters of Divinity

New Arrival:

• Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930 by Katherine E. Rohrer (LSU Press, 2025).

From the description: Covering a one-hundred year period straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Katherine Rohrer's Daughters of Divinity "tells the story of how well-educated white women of the South used evangelical Protestant Christianity as an instrument to expand their intellectual and professional capacities as well as their agency and influence at home and throughout the world between 1830 and 1930." Given that Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia had the most opportunities in those areas for southern women, through their comparatively more numerous Protestant churches and the female educational institutions those faiths founded, women hailing from those states are the focus of this study.

According to Rohrer, Protestant clergymen traditionally served as the South's "intelligentsia," and their female compatriots used the same connection with religion to exert their own influence domestically and abroad. As explained in the introduction, over the chronological span indicated Rohrer "trace(es) both change and continuity in women's religious identities and experiences." She also uses "female mission work as a looking glass into religious and cultural values of the American South." It was through such religious work that these women assumed positions of authority, wielded in both conservative and progressive ways (pp. 4-6).

The first chapter examines private activities in the early part of the nineteenth century through the end of the Civil War. In her study's addressing of the Civil War period, Rohrer's research challenges but "does not entirely reject (Drew Gilpin) Faust's and (LeeAnn) White's interpretations of southern womanhood." According Rohrer, her work fits into the discussion of post-Civil War southern women by scholars such as Sarah Gardner, Caroline Janney, and Karen Cox.

Following chapters focus on the roles evangelical women assumed in domestic religious instruction among the South's slave population and their part in foreign missions to Liberia. The last four chapters look at religious work opportunities for women during Reconstruction and emergence of the New South, their domestic defense of a "conservative worldview," recruitment programs, and individual case studies of female involvement in foreign missionary work in faraway China, Brazil, and Belgian Congo (pp 8-12).