Life in Language

Texte du rabat

"'Let your women keep silence,' the New Testament says, and since that declaration, the combination of women and words has often proved problematic in Christian groups. And yet, when some Lutheran women in early-twentieth-century Norway were inspired to advocate for the status of women in Christian mission organizations, they did so precisely by turning to language. Life in Language examines the new ways mission feminists in Norway employed language to raise their status within Protestant circles. Through a fragmentary linguistic biography of one of the mission feminists' leaders, Henny Dons, Life in Language analyzes how mission feminists experimented with new ways of speaking, listening, reading, and writing to successfully campaign for voting rights, electability, and paid positions within their organization. The mission feminists' new language use included gathering in all-female meetings to listen to a woman lecture, distributing new prayer cards, publishing Bible studies, and encouraging women to read aloud. These actions, Ingie Hovland shows, constitute a microcosm of how the histories of empire, Protestantism, a sense of globalism, and feminism have mutually constituted each other in the North Atlantic world"