Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe—Beyond the Feminization Thesis

Contemporary US readers may be surprised to discover a book on gender which is not a book on women's studies. The book is from Belgium, and the editors are historians. It is distributed in the US by Cornell U. Press. Its subject is Christian perceptions of masculinity and femininity in modern Europe. The book is written with little jargon, but often shows the heavy style of academic writing in English by native speakers of another language. The purpose of the editors is to de-emphasize the "feminization thesis" (the idea that in the modern era, faith became a feminine quality and Christianity the cultural territory of women, and therefore socially sentimentalized, emotionalized, and devalued). The editors point out this theory was created within the context of American Protestantism. They also note that such sweeping definitions of qualities as universally male or female harden gender stereotypes and deny that gender associations vary over time and in different places. This book asks how we can look at gender in ways that account for the religious roles and beliefs of men in modern Christian Europe, as well as the fact that men continued to run the Catholic Church. Contributors take a variety of approaches: Jan Art's psychohistory, Marjet Derks' look at a women's religious conversion army between the wars, Hugh MacLeod's analysis of Victorian British sporting men vs. Muscular Christians. Contributors focus most often on masculinity and Catholicism as the underrepresented areas of study. They also point out that married clergymen were seen as subordinate to their wives and celibates as subordinate to the Pope (with a range of possible values attached), that gender was mapped onto differences in national culture, that Christian women were considered more suited for nursing and poverty work than men because they were seen as more emotional, or less emotional, or willing to work for lower wages, and that the local Christian ideal might be defined according to or against local gender stereotypes, or as a complete being with both local "male" and "female" traits. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)