A Marginal Majority

Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists

Elizabeth Flowers, Karen K. Seat

• Publisher: University of Tennessee Press
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781621906018
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

In step with the #MeToo movement and third wave feminism, women’s roles provoke lively debate in today’s evangelical sphere. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has a complicated past regarding this issue, and determining what exactly women’s roles in home, church, and society should be, or even what these roles should be called, has been a contentious subject. In A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, editors Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat and eight other contributors examine the SBC’s complex history regarding women and how that history reshapes our understanding of the denomination and its contemporary debates.

This comprehensive volume starts with women as SBC fundraisers, moves to the ways they served Southern Baptist missions, and considers their struggles to find a place at Southern Baptist seminaries as well as their launching of “teaching” or “women’s” ministries. Along the way, it introduces new personalities, offers fresh considerations of familiar figures, and examines the power dynamics of race and class in a denomination that dominated the South and grew into a national behemoth.

Additionally, the essay collection provides insights into why the SBC has often politically aligned with the right. Not only did the denomination become increasingly oriented toward authoritarianism as it clamped down on evangelical feminism, but, as several contributors reveal, even as Southern Baptist women sought agency, they often took it from others. Read together, the chapters strike a somber tone, challenging any triumphal historiography of the past.

By providing a history of contentious issues from the nineteenth century to the present day, A Marginal Majority provides invaluable context for the recurrent struggles women have faced within the United States’ largest Protestant denomination. Moreover, it points to new directions in the study of American denominational life and culture.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Marginal Majority: Women, Gender, and a Reimagining of Southern Baptists, Elizabeth H. Flowers and Karen K. Seat
• One. “A Greater Influence Than You Imagine”: Women Lead the Way to Southern Baptist Centralization, C. Delane Tew
• Two. “I Can’t Go in Alone”: A Frontier Girl’s Transformation into a Southern Baptist Missionary, T. Laine Scales, Chelsea L. Cichocki, and Kari S. Rood
• Three. “The Mammy Sues Are Scarce in the South Now”: Southern Baptist Women, Domestic Workers, and Progressive Era Racial Uplift, Joanna Lile
• Four. Saving Souls and Society: The WMU and Social Reform in the Progressive Era, Carol Crawford Holcomb
• Five. Making A Home in the New “House Beautiful”: The Woman’s Missionary Union Training School Negotiates Change and Decline, 1942-1963
• Six. “A Christian Attitude Toward Other Races”: Southern Baptist Women and Race Relations, 1945-1965, Melody Maxwell
• Seven. “I’M FOR ERA”: Faith, Feminism, and the “Southern Strategy” of a Southern Baptist First Lady, Elizabeth H. Flowers
• Eight. Camelot Revisited: Women doctoral Graduates of the Southern Baptisst Theological Seminary, 1982-1992, Talk about the Seminary and Their Lives since SBTS …Again, Susan M. Shaw, Kryn Freehling-Burton, O’Dessa Monnier, and Tisa Lewis
• Nine. From Molly Marshall to Sarah Palin: Southern Baptist Gender Battles and the Politics of Complementarianism, Karen K. Seat
• Ten. “My Husband Wears the Cowboy Boots in Our Family”: The Preacherly Paradox of Beth Moore, Courtney Pace
• Contributors
• Index