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Illuminates how white American Protestant women embraced a racially specific version of social
inclusiveness that centered themselves as the norm
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.
— Emily Conroy Krutz, Christian Imperialism: Converting the World in the Early American Republic
"Expertly written…. Will be of most interest to historians, particularly those working on missions, Christian women, and US Christianity in the twentieth century."
— Hillary Kaell, author of Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrimage
"[Christian Imperial Feminism] expands feminist theory, which often focuses on secular feminism, by showing how Christian feminism shaped global women’s rights movements. With its very detailed analysis and academic focus, the main audience for the book includes historians and scholars of religion, feminism and gender studies, postcolonial studies, and American studies, but the book, especially chapters four and five, could be of great interest to those in the field of social work."
"As part of a growing field at the intersection of American religious studies and interdisciplinary studies of US empire, Christian Imperial Feminism refocuses the spotlight on the continuities from the missionary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the US to the advancement of liberal ecumenicalism."
"Kenny’s book joins the freshest voices of the scholarly conversation reconsidering the intersections of religion and empire in the early decades of the twentieth century."
"Christian Imperial Feminism asks: who gets to decide what world we collectively inhabit? ...Ultimately demonstrates the scaled reverberations of the imbrication between Christianity and US empire."
"Where other scholars have noted discontinuities in this institutional history — a shift from emphasis on evangelism to more of a social work orientation, or the addition of a few Black leaders — Kenny highlights continuities."
"Gale L. Kenny’s Christian Imperial Feminism is an exemplary contribution to a more expansive understanding of missions history that historians studying religion, gender, and culture in the twentieth-century United States will not want to miss."