Life in Language - (Class 200: New Studies in Religion) by Ingie Hovland (Hardcover)

About the Book

"'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"

Book Synopsis

A new anthropology of Protestant feminism, anchored by the language experiments of one Lutheran community.

The language of the Bible is a powerful lens through which many Protestants understand themselves and their world, and its prohibitions on women's speech pose complicated challenges to women. Nevertheless, women frequently serve as vocal leaders in Protestant organizations, including the early twentieth-century Norwegian Mission Society. In Life in Language, Ingie Hovland offers a unique biography of Henny Dons, a leader of the society's so-called mission feminists, that grapples with ways Protestant women crafted innovative, expansive self-understandings through Christian language. More than their male peers, the mission feminists turned to religious speech to express material, as well as heavenly, desires for paid work, voting rights, and more, and Hovland argues that these experiments in women speaking, reading, writing, and listening paved the way for a new way of being in the world.

Review Quotes

"Hovland's Life in Language is one of those books that manages to challenge convention through careful attention. In her portrait of Henny Dons, a mission feminist from Norway, Hovland gives us a new way to understand Protestantism as a religious tradition, one in which the body--the material--matters much more than often claimed. A must-read for all serious students of Christianity, gender, language, and things."--Matthew Engelke, Columbia University

"Hovland's brilliant book is both a biography and a reflection on the work that language does in making and not just describing lives. The result is an illuminating and important reflection on feminism, materialism, and the multiple ways in which anthropologists must rethink their understandings of the links between Protestantism, interiority, and modernity."--Simon Coleman, University of Toronto

About the Author

Ingie Hovland is assistant professor of religion and women's studies at the University of Georgia and author of Mission Station Christianity: Norwegian Missionaries in Colonial Natal and Zululand, Southern Africa 1850-1890.