Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.10 (577 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0195165071 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2014-05-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Eliza F. Kent is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Colgate University.
Kent is able to understand with precision and care the interactive way in which local Christians and extra-local lady missionaries--unmarried but devoted and sometimes larger than life--helped to articulate middle class respectability and the protection of women's sexuality only through marriage. Kent's work adds important depth to our understanding of colonial and gendered power dynamics as well as to the intricacies of conversion itself."--Corinne G. Dempsey, University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point"Converting Women
Stephanie Oxley said Women in cultural shift. A bit over-documented for my needs, but thoroughly explains the importance of women setting the pace for cultural shift and caste elimination.
Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. In this book, Eliza F. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. At the height of B