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Analyzes the role of emotions in the religious lives of women from across Germany and Europe from the nineteenth century to the 1970s.Scholarship on women and religion has focused primarily on the intersection between women's religious engagement and their emancipation. This volume goes beyond that to examine the vital role religion has played in the private and public lives of German and European women. Because emotions are central to the expression of religiosity, it draws on approaches from the history of emotions to examine how women understood, felt and practiced religion in their search for meaning.
Spanning from the nineteenth century to the 1970s, the volume's essays show how religion helped women make sense of their lives. It also illuminates the degree to which women used religion and its attendant emotional scripts to shape modern society and how religious discourses in turn shaped women's emotions and comportment in the public sphere. The volume builds on recent research that shows that religion-especially the religiosity of women-remained a pressing public concern in modern Europe. From anxieties over the religiosity of Bavarian servants to restrictive norms imposed on Jewish widows, from the interfaith commitments of kindergarten teachers to the autobiographical narratives of aspiring Protestant deaconesses, from the suffering of stigmatics in Germany and Belgium to Irish women's public narratives of their religiosity, this book reveals how women's faith and attendant religious emotions have been central to their public and private lives.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction: Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany and Beyond
Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker and Martina Cucchiara Part 1: Expectations for Women's Religiosity and Emotions1. Piety, Obedience, and Contentment: The Cultivation of Appropriate Emotions in Maidservants in the Catholic Publication
Notburga in Imperial Germany
Martina Cucchiara2. Faithful beyond Death: Jewish Widows in Imperial Germany
Christian J. Bailey3. Maria Meyer-Sevenich and the Politics of Emotions, Gender, and Religion in Postwar Germany
Maria D. Mitchell Part 2: The Pursuit of Meaningful Work4. "Spiritual Motherliness": Gender, Emotions, and Religion in the Kindergarten Movement, 1840-1900
Ann Taylor Allen5. Grief, Grace, and the Calling to Care: Emotional Scripts and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century German Protestant Deaconess Narratives
Aeleah Soine6. Emotions, Gender, and the Power of Piety in Transnational Contexts: The Norwegian Missionary Marie Monsen and Christian Revival in China, 1927-1932
Karina Hestad Skeie7. Detachment as an "Emotional Practice" in British Convents, 1950s-1970s
Carmen M. Mangion Part 3: The Search for Meaning in the Private Realm8. Painful Love: The Suffering of Stigmatics in Early Twentieth-Century Germany and Belgium
Tine Van Osselaer9. Grieving at the Crossroads of Heaven and Earth: Anna Bauer's Youthful Diary and Nineteenth-Century Jewish Prayerbooks as Emotional Scripts
Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker and Sarah Wobick-Segev10. Emotion, Devotion, and the Sacred Heart: Women's Narratives of Belief and Thanksgiving in the
Irish Messenger, 1920s-1950s
Síle de Cléir Notes on the Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Index
