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Beyond the Feminization Thesis Gender Christianity in Modern Europe

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Beyond the Feminization Thesis Gender Christianity in Modern Europe GENDER AND CHRISTIANITY PATRICK PASTURE, JAN ART & THOMAS BUERMAN EDS Beyond the Feminization Thesis and Gender Christianity in Modern Europe PATRICK PASTURE, JAN ART & THOMAS BUERMAN JAN DE MAEYER, LEEN VAN MOLLE, TINE VAN OSSELAER, VINCENT VIAENE EDS Leuven University Press EDITORIAL BOARD Urs Altermatt, Université de Fribourg Jan Art, Universiteit Gent Jaak Billiet, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Jan De Maeyer, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - KADOC Jean-Dominique Durand, Université Lyon 3 Emmanuel Gerard, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - KADOC James C. Kennedy, Universiteit van Amsterdam Mathijs Lamberigts, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Emiel Lamberts, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Jean-Michel Leniaud, École pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne, Paris Patrick Pasture, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Andrew Saint, University of Cambridge Liliane Voyé, Université Catholique de Louvain Cover: cf. ill. p. 106 © 2012 Leuven University Press/Presses Universitaires de Louvain/Universitaire Pers Leuven Minderbroedersstraat 4 bus 5602, B-3000 Leuven (Belgium) All rights reserved. Except in those cases expressly determined by law, no part of this publication may be multiplied, saved in an automated data file or made public in any way whatsoever without the express prior written consent of the publishers. ISBN 978 90 5867 912 3 D/2012/1869/40 NUR: 704 CONTENTS Patrick Pasture Beyond the feminization thesis. 7 Gendering the history of Christianity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Bernhard Schneider 35 The Catholic poor relief discourse and the feminization of the Caritas in early nineteenth-century Germany Angela Berlis 57 Celibate or married priests? Polemical gender discourse in nineteenth-century Catholicism Jan Art 73 The Cult of the Virgin Mary, or the feminization of the male element in the Roman Catholic Church? A psycho-historical hypothesis Hugh McLeod 85 The ‘Sportsman’ and the ‘Muscular Christian’. Rival ideals in nineteenth-century England Thomas Buerman 107 Lions and lambs at the same time! Belgian Zouave stories and examples of religious masculinity Tine Van Osselaer 121 ‘From that moment on, I was a man!’. Images of the Catholic male in the Sacred Heart devotion Marit Monteiro 137 Repertoires of Catholic manliness in the Netherlands (1850-1940). A case study of the Dutch Dominicans Marieke Smulders 157 The boys of Saint Dominic ’s. Catholic boys’ culture at a minor seminary in interwar Holland Marjet Derks 173 Female soldiers and the battle for God. Gender ambiguities and a Dutch Catholic conversion movement, 1921-1942 Michael E. O’Sullivan 191 A feminized Church? German Catholic women, piety, and domesticity, 1918-1938 Bibliography 212 Index 236 Christianity became associated with femininity in different ways: not only did the religion appeal to women more than men, religiosity became a women’s affair and femininity sacred. Women dominated in this devotional procession. [F. Van Leemputten, Candle procession, Montaigu (Belgium), 1903; Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten] BEYOND THE FEMINIZATION THESIS: GENDERING THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES PATRICK PASTURE he origin of this book lies in a collective research project aimed at developing a gender perspective on socio-religious history. The project focused on Belgium, Ta country that was relatively understudied - although an extensive literature exists on the social and political aspects of Christendom in Belgium, gender was (and arguably still is) hardly used as a research perspective1 - but particularly interest- ing because of the dominant position of Catholicism and the country’s geographical position between Germany and France. At the time, the project was conceived in the perspective of the ‘feminization thesis’ that seemed to be becoming an alternative master narrative replacing secularization - a concept that was increasingly aban- doned by historians and sociologists of religion alike (it has returned to some degree since).2 However, it raised some critical issues, in particular with regard to men and masculinity, the importance of the denominational context, and chronology. It appeared that the concept as we knew it from studies on American Protestantism could not that easily be applied to Europe, and particularly not in Belgium, and that a * This text bears influence of discussions with the participants in the projectIn search of the good Catholic m/f. Feminization and masculinity in Belgian Catholicism (c 1750-1950), a research project funded by the FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) with additional funding from KADOC and the Arts faculties of the universities of Ghent and Leuven. The project was supervised by a scientific committee consisting of the editors of this volume. I am particularly grateful to Claude Langlois, Tine Van Osselaer and the anonymous reviewers (who reviewed the whole volume) for their com- ments on an earlier version of this chapter. 1 Longman, “De marginalisering van ‘religie’ binnen genderstudies”. Compare Van Osselaer and Buerman, “Feminization Thesis”. 2 The latest state of the art in Brown and Snape eds, Secularisation in the Christian World. PATRICK PASTURE 8 more sophisticated approach might be needed. This volume revisits the feminization thesis in the light of the results of the project and other recent research on Europe.3 It will discuss the validity of the feminization thesis through a series of case studies mainly relating to Western Europe in the nineteenth and especially twentieth century, and will conclude that while the concept has no doubt made an important contribution to contemporary research on the functioning of religion in society and has fundamentally altered our ways of looking at this past, it is time to move beyond it. Not only is the concept used with different meanings, more specifically it entails a huge risk of failing to properly historicize gender stereotypes and, by doing so, of actually confirming them. Still, it is useful to remember the context in which the concept was developed and to point out some results it has generated, without losing sight of the criticisms that were expressed in earlier studies. This will be done in the first paragraph of this introductionary chapter. Afterwards it will become easier to develop a more sophisticated historical approach that historicizes and problemizes gendered identities and practices, with more attention for ambiguities than for clear- cut differences. This will be also the logic of the order followed to subdivide this book, along with the more obvious chronological order of the subsequent chapters. THE ORIGINAL FORMULATIONS OF THE FEMINIZATION THESIS In 1974 Barbara Welter published a seminal article on religion in North America, in which she not only argued that “the Christianization [my emphasis] of the West, indeed the domesticating of the West, was probably the most important religious, cultural, and political event of the nineteenth century”, but also that Christianity profoundly changed, in its theology, institutions, and membership: it had become, in her words, “more domesticated, more soft and accommodating - in a word, more ‘feminine’”.4 A few years later Ann Douglas in her equally seminal The Feminiza- tion of American Culture confirmed and generalized Welter’s conclusions, describing Victorian America as a “perpetual Mother’s Day”.5 Indeed, while American public life secularized and industrial capitalism triumphed, a romantic and anti-intellectual counterculture developed which cherished domesticity and sentimentalism while 3 This project also resulted in two PhD dissertations (Buerman, Katholieke mannelijkheden and Van Osselaer, The Pious Sex, publication in this series forthcoming), and another collective volume Van Osselaer and Pasture et al., eds, Households of Faith, which will be published in this series in 2012. The chapters published in both collective volumes were discussed at workshops held at the Univer- sity of Ghent (‘Dieu changea de sexe?’ Christian Feminization and masculinization in Europe, 3-4 Jan. 2008) and the University of Leuven (‘Households of faith’: Domesticity and religion, 4-6 Sept. 2008). Papers were reviewed by the editors as well as two external reviewers appointed by the editorial board of the series KADOC Studies on Religion, Culture and Society, and subsequently rewritten. For various reasons not all papers were finally included in the present volumes. 4 Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800-1860”. Some ideas she already developed in “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”. 5 Douglas, The Feminization, 6. BEYOND THE FEMINIZATION THESIS 9 abandoning serious theological reflection. In many ways, Douglas asserts, this was exactly the opposite of the dominant culture: [Sentimentalism] asserts that the values a society’s activity denies are precise- ly the ones it cherishes; it attempts to deal with the phenomenon of cultural bifurcation by the manipulation of nostalgia. Sentimentalism provides a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated. […] Many nine- teenth-century Americans in the Northeast acted every day as if they believed that economic expansion, urbanization, and industrialization represented the greatest good. It is to their credit that they indirectly acknowledged that the pursuit of these ‘masculine’ goals meant damaging, perhaps losing, another good, one increasingly included under the ‘feminine’ ideal (p. 12). Although for Douglas this ‘caramel’ Christian culture distinguished the young republic from
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