Women and the Sacred in the Transatlantic Religious Marketplace of the Nineteenth Century: An Exploration of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant Women's Religious Societies

In the early nineteenth century transatlantic world, women from traditions as varied as Judaism, Catholicism, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion formed cooperative societies to promote and preserve particular views of the sacred.  These views are reflected in activities such as missions, charity, and education.  What distinguishes these societies is that they were led, funded, and staffed mostly by women and that they opened up for women key roles in preserving particular views of the sacred in the emerging religious marketplace in the transatlantic world.  This marketplace formed from competition among many faiths and was nurtured by the liberalizing political forces that were also at work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in the transatlantic world.  Established visions of faith and the sacred often confronted heterodox groups with divergent theologies, religious practices, and ethnic/racial backgrounds, and each competed with each other for adherents and influence.  Women’s religious societies created support for maintaining particular visions of the sacred at the center of transatlantic identities and in the religious marketplace.  Notions of exceptionalism (particularly among white Protestants) or the maintenance of tradition (among Irish and American Catholics and Jewish Americans) lay at the center of these activities.  In the space occupied by women in the religious marketplace, Protestant women’s religious societies supported the vision of Anglo-American (Protestant) culture as the bearers of salvation not only theologically but also economically and politically to women throughout the world.    Ironically, the Catholic and Jewish women who often were the targets of these efforts responded with the same tactics utilized by the Protestant women—they formed women’s religious societies to preserve their own views of the sacred for their communities.  This further cemented the role of women’s religious societies in maintaining the sacred and even in the development of the religious marketplace itself.