Upcoming Event with the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW): Missionary Women and the Imperial Roots of White Evangelical Feminism

Missionary Women and the Imperial Roots of White Evangelical Feminism

Gale Kenny, author of Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire

April 22, 2025 

Lunchtime Lecture

12-1pm, BCRW Conference Room (Milstein 614)

Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism.
Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant world view that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.

Bio: Gale Kenny is an associate professor in the Religion Department at Barnard College. Her research and teaching focuses on gender, race, and American religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of two books, Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica (University of Georgia Press) and Christian Imperial Feminism: White Protestant Women and the Consecration of Empire (NYU Press). She is currently working on a new project about race and spirituality through a history of Theosophist Katherine Tingley and her early twentieth-century Southern California commune, Lomaland. 

Open to BC/CU ID holders, BCRW’s lunchtime lecture series offers scholars and writers an intimate space to discuss new works and works in progress with colleagues and students. Lunch will be provided.