In this volume, Keller and Ruether recover the historical contributions of women to American religion, including primary source documents from diaries, letters, speeches, sermons, essays, and books by women from seventeenth-century colonial settlements in North America to today. Extensive sources include selections from Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish women; African American women, evangelical women, women in social reform movements, women in traditions of preaching and ordination, and women in utopian and communitarian traditions; and Native American, Muslim, and Buddhist women. These are only a few of the stories told by women in their own voices in this book. Gender and multiculturalism intersect in every chapter, with accounts of women trying to gain their full and equal stature as persons before God and their sisters and brothers. This book serves as a metaphor of women's efforts to speak and act as persons with authority in their own right.
