She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Daughters of Divinity: Evangelical Protestant Christianity and the Making of a New Southern Woman, 1830-1930, and shared the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Daughters of Divinity at the LSU Press website.These southern evangelical women demonstrated particular concern for poor whites, Blacks, and immigrants in a number of urban locations throughout the South, including New Orleans, Nashville, Charleston, and Atlanta…. In such missions, southern women typically exuded an attitude of concern that, although often mixed with enforced deference and condescension, conveyed their interest in education, health care, and improved living and social conditions among the South’s poor and underserved.I believe that page 99 does illuminate a key argument from this book. More than anything, Daughters of Divinity seeks to underscore that evangelical Protestant Christianity (what we would today refer to as “mainline Protestantism”) offered southern women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one of the very few outlets to experience educational and professional fulfillment. As mission workers engaged in domestic and foreign work, such women served in a multitude of roles. They were not only proselytizers, but educators, administrators, fundraisers, and even medical doctors, honing skills in such varied areas as public speaking, financial management, persuasive writing/recruitment, public health, and logistics. Southern society at large—men in particular—did not feel threatened by women’s participation in religious work; women likewise appreciated that engagement in mission work did not preclude them from holding the covetous, unofficial title of “lady.” Quite simply, mission workers could “have their cake and eat it, too.” Page 99 complicates this idealized narrative by underscoring that such southern women engaged in mission work did exercise some agency. However, while such women sought to reshape and expand conceptions of southern femininity in their favor, they used this same agency to reinforce a conservative and rigid racial- and class-based hierarchy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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