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While Puritan divinity hewed closely to contemporary limitations on women's public roles, its promoters took seriously the spiritual needs of female parishioners and incorporated the feminine into their discourse. Marriage, if not theoretically between absolute equals, was based upon mutual affection, and it is clear that ministers were emotionally bound to their beloved spouses and took ‘godly’ women seriously as advisers. But women, while the weaker sex, retained the power to subvert the stronger sex, and so must behave modestly. Men who beat their wives behaved badly and were liable to censure. Women did take part in religious life in the home and were frequent participants when religion controversy went into the streets.

This chapter provides an introduction to the current conversation in American religious congregations about women’s ordination. It describes a series of vignettes about controversies over the role of women and leadership in a variety of different religious traditions and denominations over the past several years. It also places the conversation about women’s ordination within the wider discourse on women’s equality in the social, economic, and political spheres. It then explains why a new perspective on women’s ordination is needed and how the book will contribute to the conversation. The chapter finishes with a preview of the content of the book’s chapters.

This chapter focuses on why some people support women’s ordination while others oppose it. It takes a deep dive into face-to-face personal narrative interviews to uncover the common themes and patterns of explanations that people give to justify their positions. It uncovers a few key themes that are common to individuals in a variety of religious traditions, including scriptural authority, personal experiences, and gender stereotypes about the gifts and talents that men and women possess. It is striking that despite interviewees’ reasons for supporting or opposing women’s ordination, many indicated they would gladly change their position if their congregation changed its policy. Middle-aged and older women, however, seem to have the most difficulty overall accepting women as pastors.

This richly illustrated chapter explores myths, folkways, and rituals involving the abduction of children, either in infancy or in utero, by female spirit beings, most often called “fairies” in Europe and mātṛs (“mothers”) or yakṣīs in India. In nearly all cases, these rites are performed or officiated by women. In Europe, it is thought that the abducted infant has been replaced in its cradle by an infant spirit being, called a changeling. In India, it is generally a fetus that is abducted and replaced in its mother’s womb, resulting in the birth of a sickly demon child. In both cases, protective fertility dæmons are called upon to aid in the recovery of the child. Attested with greatest frequency in western Europe (France, Belgium, England, Ireland, Wales) and western India (Rajasthan, Gujarat), rituals for the recovery of infant abductees generally comprise the following: the hanging of swaddling clothes at a dæmon’s forest shrine, in order to petition its intervention; the use of a cradle, basket or pouch as a ritual template for the return of the infant by its abductress; and the confirmation that the true infant has been returned by plunging it into the waters of a river.

This concluding chapter returns to the themes adumbrated in chapter one, highlighting examples from chapters two through six to reaffirm the book’s principal arguments: that vernacular religion (often the purview of women) always precedes, subverts, and overflows the boundaries and claims of male-dominated official religion; and that a connected histories approach to religious phenomena is preferable to that of the comparative historian. The chapter concludes by cautioning against the tendency on the part of humanities scholars to seek to emulate the methodological rigor and non-falsifiability claims of the so-called exact sciences. Like theoretical physicists sifting through traces left by the collisions of subatomic particles to make sense of the universe, historians attempt to make sense of the past by reading the traces left by the words and deeds of countless human actors lost to memory; and like theoretic physicists, historians cannot do better than to rely on the most powerful tools they have at their disposal to decipher those traces: their imaginations.