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Disorderly Women: Sexual Politics & Evangelicalism in Revolutionary New England. By Susan Juster. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiv, 224 pp. $32.95, ISBN 0-8014-2732-0.)1
Susan Juster's Disorderly Women makes gender central to understanding revolutionary-era evangelicalism. Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of the records of over twenty New England Separate Baptist congregations, Disorderly Women outlines the process by which congregations created during the Great Awakening moved from radical marginality to respectability.
Those who joined a Separatist congregation during the Awakening separated not only from the established church but also from their communities and families. Lay men and women shared an emotional language that seemed disorderly. Because Separatist theological metaphors for church and laity included women, women participated in church decisions and could exhort. This further disrupted community order. Separatist congregations originally struggled to limit...