book reviews 167

Kristin Kobes Du Mez A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of . Oxford and ny: Oxford University Press. 288 pp. £15.37.

The subject of Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s A New Gospel for Women, Dr. Katharine Bushnell, had in the late nineteenth century been very well known as one of the most prominent of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance (wctu) mission- aries, an activist against prostitution and international trafficking of women. In the early twentieth century she published God’s Word to Women, a reinterpre- tation of Christian scriptures that emphasized “liberation for women,” while “upholding the authoritative truth of scriptures” associated with fundamen- talist theology. (2) However, as Du Mez points out, Bushnell had “faded from prominence” even by the time her book was published, was largely unknown at her death in 1946, and today has been “all but forgotten” in “most circles.” (1) Other scholars have discussed various aspects of Bushnell’s life. Most promi- nently, Ian Tyrrell has treated Bushnell’s career as a World wctu missionary in his 1991 Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire and emphasized her role as a global purity activist in his 2010 Reforming the World.1 I have briefly treated her career as a missionary physician.2 In contrast to this focus on Bushell’s early career, numerous theologians have studied God’s Word to Women without awareness of the historical context in which it was produced. Du Mez skillfully brings together these different aspects of Bushnell’s career, giving historians and the- ologians alike a much fuller picture of her life and work. As she emphasizes, however, this book is “not merely an exercise in recovery,” but is about “forgetting as much as remembering.” (3) Exploring the question of why Bushnell faded from prominence in the early twentieth century, Du Mez’s broader goal is to illuminate the complex relationship between Chris- tianity and ideas about empowerment and rights for women that in the early twentieth century became known as “feminism.” She argues that in the late Victorian era, evangelical impulses to “reform the world” could easily coalesce with movements for women’s rights, including suffrage campaigns. During this period “social purity” movements against prostitution resonated strongly among both women’s rights activists and evangelical reformers, as social purity

1 Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 2 Connie Shemo, The Chinese Medical Ministries of Kang Cheng and Shi Meiyu, 1872–1937: On a Cross-Cultural Frontier of Gender, Race, and Nation (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2011).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/18748945-02901013 168 book reviews activists argued against a “sexual double standard,” instead insisting that both men and women “ought to exercise sexual restraint.” By the early twentieth century, Du Mez argues, women’s rights advocates had begun to focus more on “liberation of female sexuality,” thus fostering a split between “feminism” and Christian evangelism. The kind of appeal to “scriptural authority” empha- sized by Bushnell was also out of step with feminism as it developed in the twentieth century. The split between evangelical and feminism continued as the twentieth century progressed, until they came to be seen as opposing camps. By the 1960s and 1970s, when second wave feminist activists were looking for “inspirational figures” from the past, Bushnell’s emphasis on sexual restraint, opposition to birth control and abortion, and her insistence on adherence to scripture made her seem “more a relic of a time gone by than a feminist foremother.” (5–6) Du Mez draws an interesting contrast between Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s and Bushnell’s God’s Word to Women. Unlike Bushnell, Stanton did not have the training that would enable her to read scriptures in the original language, and furthermore did not consider every word of the Bible to be authoritative. She had no problems dismissing whole portions of scripture. The result shocked conservatives, became a “powerful weapon” among anti- suffrage activists, and ultimately, Du Mez argues, convinced the new generation of women’s rights activists to avoid “entanglements with religion altogether.” Bushnell’s book, on the other hand, received positive reviews among leading theologians for her careful use of evidence from the scriptures in their original languages, even when they did not agree with all her conclusions. However, her book did not find a wide audience at a time when women’s rights and evangelical reform were growing apart. Du Mez’s goal is to “introduce Bushnell to multiple audiences” – theologians, historians, “interested Christians,” and the “general reader.” (9–10) However, Du Mez does not idealize Bushnell. In exploring Bushnell’s life and career, Du Mez is clear about the linkages between late Victorian female reform move- ments, imperialism, and ideologies of race. Bushnell, she makes clear, “was not immune to the prejudices of her day.” As a missionary to , she crit- icized Chinese footbinding practices, and in her social purity activism, foreign born owners of brothels, in ways that “reinforced conventional prejudices.” Yet she also argues that Bushnell increasingly focused on the abuses of women by “‘respectable’ Anglo-Saxon Christians.” (75) Her cross-cultural experiences, “rather than confirming her sense of Western superiority … revealed to her the enculturation of the gospel in her own society, and ultimately enabled her to develop a prophetic critique of her inherited Christian tradition.” (40) It was as a missionary in China that Bushnell first encountered the notion that transla-

Social Sciences and Missions 29 (2016) 141–206