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Females' reputation for upholding morality and bringing the practical influences of Christianity to bear on society were keys in the development of Baptist women's attitude toward their civic duty. During this period their primary involvement in influencing society at large (apart from their attempts to evangelize it) was working on behalf of the temperance cause. As in their efforts to influence matters within the church, they tried initially to work informally, through males. Only when that method proved insufficient or ineffective were they willing to speak out and to vote. They did not demonstrate an interest in politics for its own sake and continued to be wary of exercising direct power, feeling more comfortable with informal, indirect means of influence in both religious and secular political contexts.
Women who lived in Texas between 1880 and 1920 felt they were living through a period of change. The transformation was expansive for them, transporting them from the isolated confinement of rural life and its preoccupation with physical toil into a wider world of experience and influence in both the church and society. As conservatives, accustomed to operating within the boundaries of authoritarian guidelines, they reacted to that charge with caution, always aware of the tension between freedom and authority. Their affinity for authority was not the product of intellectual timidity, but of an isolated lifestyle and a restricted world view. If that isolation and restriction have been dominant features of childhood, as they were with most Texas Baptists, they become adult habits—ways of perceiving reality and bases for making decisions. Whether a woman's allegiance to biblical authority was based on this kind of psychological need or was the result of an intellectual decision, she justified changes in her life under the rubric of that system. She did not abandon belief in the Bible when its pattern no longer fit her experiences, but, at least initially, altered her conception of its teachings. Some, but certainly not all, who made this transition followed it with other steps that carried them outside the belief structure, but first, they needed to justify their freedom within the system that had provided meaning and authority.
Feminist philosopher Mary Daly exemplifies this process, although her journey began in another authoritarian segment of the Christian church, Roman Catholicism. Her first book, The Church and the Second Sex, called for a removal of the patriarchal emphasis of the Christian message.
Daly,
The Church and the Second Sex . Mary Daly,
Beyond God the Father (New York: Beacon Press, 1973).
Nancy Cott, in The Bonds of Womanhood , her study of New England women, has a suggestive footnote in which she labels a similar response "de-conversion." Her definition is
an ideological disengagement from the convincing power of evangelical Protestantism (or the inability to accept the whole of it).
Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 204-205. The process of "de-conversion" is applicable beyond her direct reference to evangelical Protestantism. The problem of extrication from the tenacious grasp of other authoritarian ideological systems would be similar.
The term aptly suggests that one does not move beyond the boundaries of an authoritative order without a radical reinterpretation of its power over one's life. This does not imply that women who become more liberated within the Christian system will inevitably leave it, but it does acknowledge the profound impact that system has on one's world view.
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