Good and Mad: Mainline Protestant Churchwomen, 1920-1980

Providing a new, women-centered view of mainline Protestantism in the twentieth century, Good and Mad explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of liberal Protestant churchwomen who campaigned for human rights and global peace, worked for interracial cooperation, and opened the path to women’s ordination, all while working within the confines of the church that denied them equality. Challenging the idea that change is only ever made by the loud, historian Margaret Bendroth interweaves vignettes of individual women who knew both the value of compromise and the cost of anger within a larger narrative that highlights the debts second-wave feminism owes to their efforts, even though these women would never have called themselves feminists.

This lively historical account explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches, but why the change was so long in coming. Through its complex examination of the intersections of faith, gender, and anger at injustice, Good and Mad will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of gender and religion in America.

Margaret Bendroth is a historian who served over 15 years as Executive Director of the Congregational Library and Archives. She received her Ph.D. in American history from Johns Hopkins University and worked as a Professor of History at Calvin College from 1998 to 2004. Over the course of her career, she has been president of the American Society of Church History (2015) and authored and edited eight books and numerous articles on modern American religion, including The Last Puritans: Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (2015), Fundamentalists and the City: Conflict and Division in Boston’s Churches, 1885-1950 (2005), and Fundamentalism and Gender, 1875 to the Present (1993).