Book Review: A New Gospel for Women by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Kristin Kobes Du Mez. A New Gospel for Women: Katharine Bushnell and the Challenge of Christian Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Katharine Bushnell (1855–1946) was once, as Kristin Kobes Du Mez notes, a "household word" in Anglo-American reform circles; today she is all but forgotten. In A New Gospel for Women, Du Mez recovers Bushnell's remarkable career as medical missionary, temperance organizer, international social purity activist, and, most significantly, feminist theologian. In this review, I will argue that the book's achievement exceeds recovery: Du Mez uses Bushnell's life to illuminate a critical and largely vanished moment when Christianity and feminism "were more closely aligned than at any other time in American history," and she shows why that alignment came apart. The eclipse of Bushnell, not the career itself, carries the argument.

The book's structure reflects its dual ambitions. The first four chapters situate Bushnell historically: her formation in Evanston's Methodist milieu under Frances Willard's shadow, her medical mission to China (1879–1882), her work with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, her exposé of forced prostitution in Wisconsin lumber camps, and her investigations, with Elizabeth Andrew and at Josephine Butler's urging, of the British military's regulation of prostitution in colonial India. The later chapters turn to Bushnell's theology, culminating in God's Word to Women (1916), her collection of "startling reinterpretations" of Christian Scripture. Bushnell's crucial insight, first glimpsed when she encountered a sex-biased translation in China, was that the crime was "the fruit of the theology": centuries of masculinist biblical translation and interpretation underwrote male violence against women. Drawing on her knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, she argued that a rightly translated Bible taught women's full equality; patriarchy was a corruption of the gospel rather than its content, a "reform against nature." Du Mez traces this exegetical project through Bushnell's rereadings of Genesis and the curse, the pericope de adultera (the passage of the woman taken in adultery), and the contested Pauline passages on headship and women's silence. What set Bushnell apart from contemporaries who saw Christianity as elevating women was her conviction that Christianity itself required a feminist corrective "in order to re-establish an authentic Christian faith."

Du Mez's central argument transcends biography. Bushnell's eclipse, she contends, was not accidental but symptomatic: the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, the "masculinization" of American Protestantism, and the sexual revolution's displacement of purity discourse by a secular "new morality" dismantled the cultural space in which Christian feminism had flourished. By Bushnell's death, it had come to seem "difficult, if not impossible, to be both feminist and Christian." The conclusion presses this analysis forward, suggesting that Bushnell "defies simple categorization" (at once "liberal and conservative, orthodox and radical, feminist and Christian") and that her story exposes the contingency of the categories through which we still narrate religion and gender in "America."

The book's strengths are considerable. Du Mez writes with clarity and narrative verve, rendering dense theological material accessible without condescension, and she does so by design, since she crafts the book for theologians, historians of sexuality and American religion, and general readers alike. Her archival recovery impresses given Bushnell's scattered paper trail, and her contextual chapters make shrewd use of scholarship on gender, missions, and empire. Particularly valuable is her refusal to sanitize her subject: Bushnell's purity feminism trafficked in the era's civilizational hierarchies, and Du Mez shows how the rhetoric of "heathen slaves and Christian rulers" both empowered Anglo-American women reformers and entangled them in imperial logics (empowerment and entanglement, flip sides of the same coin). Equally welcome is her methodological candor. She warns explicitly against the temptation, common among contemporary Christian feminists, "to pluck examples of biblical feminism from the past" for present use, insisting instead that Bushnell's location "both shaped and constrained her theology."

Some limitations remain. The ambition to serve multiple audiences occasionally produces unevenness: specialists in biblical hermeneutics may wish for deeper engagement with the philological merits of Bushnell's exegesis, while historians may find the theological chapters slow the narrative momentum of the reform chapters. Du Mez's account of Christian feminism's decline, though persuasive, leans heavily on the American Protestant mainstream; fuller attention to Catholic, Black church, and Pentecostal trajectories might complicate the declension narrative. And the conclusion's gesture toward women of the "two-thirds world" reshaping the conversation, while suggestive, remains undeveloped.

These are quibbles about a book that succeeds admirably at its central task. A New Gospel for Women restores a significant figure to the historiography of American religion and, more importantly, uses her to reframe how we understand the fraught genealogy of Christianity and feminism. It deserves a wide readership among historians of American religion, gender, and reform, and it has proven prescient, anticipating themes Du Mez would pursue in her later work on evangelicalism and gender. Bushnell's question, whether Christianity requires feminism to be true to itself, remains, as Du Mez demonstrates, very much alive.