Abstract
For decades, feminist scholars have sought to make sense of women’s participation in conservative religions by asking why they belong to communities that perpetuate their own subordination. Most of this work has studied married women that, as it turns out, may not see themselves as oppressed. Instead, they articulate ways that their relationships are no more hierarchical than other marriages and identify their faith communities as supporting their roles as wives and mothers. Katie Gaddini’s The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church shifts the locus onto a population of women who do feel that their belonging is contested. Drawing on ethnographic observations of single evangelical women as they navigate their churches, friendships, and dating lives, she provides a rich account of what it means to feel drawn to a community that renders one’s experiences invisible. The tension between religion and feminism, thus, emerged directly from the women Gaddini studied who live with, embody, and ponder this dilemma in their own lives. By asking, “Why do women stay in a religion they consider oppressive?” (p. x), she avoids the quandary of false consciousness that has been part of the debates on religious women’s agency to instead pose a question that emerges from lived tensions.
To answer the question of why women are willing to remain in evangelicalism despite being aware of the constraints it places on their lives, Gaddini offers an analysis that unfolds as engrossing narrative. Readers of social scientific research may be surprised by the structure and writing of the book. The Struggle to Stay reads more like compelling literature or a personal memoir than a typical sociological study. The book is structured as a slow burn which builds methodically toward revealing underlying tensions in the world of single, evangelical women. The first three chapters—“Homecoming,” “Without You, I am Nothing,” and “In the World”—reveal what it means to be evangelical and how people find meaning in the shared stories and intimacy in religious community. After providing a lived and emotionally rich explanation for why women participate, Gaddini next exposes the fractures and constraints that single evangelical women uniquely encounter.
In the chapters “Purity Culture” and “The Ideal Woman,” it becomes clear how not being married results in specific demands on single women, like being the guardians of abstinence, which grow into constant and weighty expectations on them. The chapters are rife with the women’s frustrations that singleness is treated as a liminal life stage that they are expected to outgrow and how this creates pressurized settings for dating. Evangelicalism’s ambivalence over singleness also limits their ability to participate in their churches as they report finding few sanctioned spaces for them and encountering a general wariness about placing whether they can hold leadership positions.
It is not until the reasons to stay and the pressures to go have been fully showcased that the question of leaving is breached in the last three chapters—“Wounds that Never Heal,” “Reprisals,” and “The Struggle to Stay.” By following these women chronologically, Gaddini illustrates the cumulative effect of years of silence and inaction that their faith communities have wrought on their optimism that churches would hear and create space for them to belong as full members.
The Struggle to Stay is a beautifully written book that evocatively draws the reader into the lives of single, evangelical women as they negotiate what it means to thrive on community while also experiencing a keen sense of separation for being outside the norm. In addition to giving voice to an understudied population, scholars interested in religion will find a laudatory example of lived religion scholarship that highlights how faith is malleable and not bound to congregational settings. By following groups of single women socially, Gaddini reveals how being evangelical requires a constant negotiation of aligning one’s actions, bodies, and feelings in a manner that works in secular society while also maintains religious commitment. Drawing on her own journey out of evangelicalism which she interweaves with the women’s narratives, Gaddini offers vivid descriptions of the gendered emotion work involved in being religious. While the book focuses exclusively on the case of evangelical women, it is easy to draw parallels to other spaces where people must navigate social institutions that marginalize dimensions of their identity. In particular, the careful attention to how gender regimes structure women’s personal and professional lives will be helpful for feminist scholars studying a variety of settings. The accessible narrative that emerges from rich qualitative data would make this book a helpful addition to several courses, including gender, religion, and research methods.