Good and Mad

This book uncovers the wounds hidden inside the placid 'church ladies' of mid-twentieth-century mainline Protestantism. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, it reveals the now-forgotten world of women striving for equality within institutions that took them for granted yet couldn't survive without them. Both a daring and mature work of scholarship, Good and Mad is Margaret Bendroth at her best. * Dana L. Robert, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, Boston University * Recovering the stories of churchwomen who were noted, if at all, as 'Mrs. Husband's Name' might seem tedious and unrewarding, but this book is quite the opposite-energetic, colorful, enlightening, and propelled by an undercurrent of justified rage. Bendroth's canny institution-shapers were conspicuously well-behaved, yet they did make history. * Elesha Coffman, author of Margaret Mead: A Twentieth-Century Faith * Good and Mad reveals the centrality of gender to the rise and fall of the Protestant mainstream. With her incomparable knowledge of relevant sources, Bendroth introduces a cast of little-known characters, conferences, and documents that paint an entirely new picture of debates over women in the churches. The result is the most important re-interpretation of 20th-century U.S. Protestantism to appear in years. * Ann Braude, Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School * Mainline Protestantism was a distinctive cultural and institutional setting for twentieth-century American women to confront patriarchy and to question their own instincts about gender and faith. Bendroth's characters were often 'mad' at patriarchy, but in keeping with their churchly milieu they were determined to be 'good,' which made them slow to recognize their own anger and how to act on it. Good and Mad is a fresh and probing analysis of a substantial piece of American religious and women's history. * David A. Hollinger, University of California, Berkeley *