Conceiving Christianity: Anglican women and lived religion in mid-20th century Conception Bay, Newfoundland

dc.contributor.advisorKealey, Linda
dc.contributor.advisorMullally, Sasha
dc.contributor.authorColleen Morgan, Laura Bonnie
dc.date.accessioned2023-03-01T16:31:04Z
dc.date.available2023-03-01T16:31:04Z
dc.date.issued2014
dc.date.updated2023-03-01T15:02:33Z
dc.description.abstractEmploying previously unexamined primary documents, nominal census data, official Anglican publications, oral history and material culture methodologies, this study explores lived religious beliefs and practices among Anglican women who lived on the south shore of Conception Bay, Newfoundland, in the middle decades of the 20th century. It demonstrates the making of a female theological culture informed by the material and social circumstances of ordinary women's lives as well as by the doctrines and discipline of official Anglicanism. While domestic matters influenced women's religiosity, this influence is not rooted in Anglican women's acceptance of prescribed roles related to "motherhood" or middle-class notions of women being the safe keepers of religious practice within the home. Instead, women's Christian belief and practice were shaped by the household labour they performed within the family economy. Women's popular theology was not a response to prescribed notions of what they should be domestically, but a reflection of what they were: labourers within a domestic workplace. The study considers especially connections between Christian belief and traditional female work in childbirth and mortuary services, caring for the sick, textile production, and feeding the household. Women's lived religious practices demonstrated a commitment to benevolent mutuality, the negotiation of gender roles, and resistance to male authority, suggesting a theological culture more informed by feminist consciousness than "patriarchal piety." This changed somewhat in the 1960s, as the study area transitioned from a rural, household economy to a wage-based economy largely dependent on male breadwinning. Anglican women's theological culture began to reflect their acceptance of middle-class gender expectations, as well as their emerging commitment to domesticity as an appropriate female identity within households, church and community.
dc.description.copyright© Bonnie Morgan, 2014
dc.formattext/xml
dc.format.extentIx, 435 pages
dc.format.mediumelectronic
dc.identifier.urihttps://unbscholar.lib.unb.ca/handle/1882/14018
dc.language.isoen_CA
dc.publisherUniversity of New Brunswick
dc.rightshttp://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
dc.subject.disciplineHistory
dc.titleConceiving Christianity: Anglican women and lived religion in mid-20th century Conception Bay, Newfoundland
dc.typedoctoral thesis
thesis.degree.disciplineHistory
thesis.degree.fullnameDoctor of Philosophy
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of New Brunswick
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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