Psychosocial Dimensions of Religious Founding
Keywords:
Religion, PsychologyAbstract
In her massive historical survey of notable American women, which spans the time from the colonial period up to and around 1920, editor Janet Wilson James has catalogued no fewer than thirty-eight women as "religious founders." I Not only does she include the most notable women founders like Mary Baker Eddv, who in 1866 slipped on some ice, was placed in bed, and then arose from her bed, as she put it later, "on the third day," and went on to found the Christian Science movement. James also gives places of prominence to lesser known figures like Ann Ayres, founder of the first monastic order for women of the Episcopal Church in America in 1852. Much of the field of women's religious history still is unexplored. However, the biographies accumulated and catalogued by Janet James offer enough information about the activities and concerns of American women in the world of affairs to make possible an attempt at synthesis. At least, it is important to begin.
References
Janet Wilson James, ed. Notable American Women 3 Vols. (Cambridge : Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1971).
Erik H. Erikson, "Play and Actuality" in Explorations in Psychohistory, edited by Robert Jay Lifton with Eric Olson, (New York : Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. I l l .
Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi's Truth (New York W. W. Norton, 1968) pp. 393-448.
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston : Beacon, 1955), p. 18 and Adolf E. Jensen, Myth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 41.
Michael Maccoby, The Gamesman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).
Millar Burrows, Founders of Great Religions (New York: Scribner's, 931).
Erik H. Erikson, Dimensions of a New Identity (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), pp. 1 1-60,
Gandhi's Truth (New York: W W. Norton, 1968), pp. 393-448;
Herbert Stroup, Founders of Living Religions (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), pp. 13-30; and Joachim Wach, Sociology of Religion, (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 130-145, 341-344.
Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), Il, p. 650
Erik H. Erikson, ''The Development of Ritualization," in The Religious Siiuation, 1968, edited by Donald Cutler (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 713-719.
Paul Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (De Kalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971).
Eli Sagan, Canabalism: Aggression and Cultural Form, (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 86.
Anthony Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 30-39, 157-66, 209-15.
Orestes Brownson, "Literature, Love, and Marriage" in Works Vol. 14, p. 21.
Beatrice Whiting, "Sex Identity Conflict and Physical Violence: A Comparative Study.' American Anthropologist, Part 2, 67, no. 6 (December, 1965): 126-27.
Roy D' Andrade, "Father-Absence and Cross-Sex Identification." Ph.D dissertation, Howard University, 1962;
Antonia Ridington, "The Relation of Household Structure to Child-Rearing Practices in St. Christopher, Barbados," Senior Honors Thesis, Radcliffe College, 1964.
Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 142-44
Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963). pp. 255-258
