Feminising Faith: A Reflection on Personal and Academic Journeys

Abstract

Written in response to the conference organisers’ explicit invitation, this paper combines personalised reflection on a scholarly journey with a broader historiographical overview. The 1970s seemed unpropitious times for researching women of faith in South Africa. Neo-Marxist concerns with rural political economy and urban workers’ struggles with capital gave little space or validity to female spirituality in the mission encounter. What wider perspectives, changing trends and scholarly networks over the ensuing decades have sustained my own research and that of others in related fields? First, anthropology threw light on African religious and social developments, while historians like Richard Gray focused on African Christian agency. By the 1980s, feminist analyses and a new social history were enriching South African scholarship. In the 1990s, the Comaroffs gave mission history fresh cachet, while others – often at odds with them – developed new academic collaborations on Christianity. Meanwhile, gender research and advocacy acquired a higher profile in South Africa’s nascent democracy. Further advances after 2000 suggest that both mission history and female religiosity – certainly from a UK perspective – now have a much stronger standing in the academy.