Christel Manning

What does it mean to be a religious conservative, particularly for a woman, in America today? Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities, Christel Manning explores the diversity of views among women who have returned to tradition. Arguing that America has undergone profound cultural and economic changes in the last thirty years--changes that have created tension between women's lives and traditional gender roles--she demonstrates that conservative Catholics, Evangelical Protestants, and Orthodox Jews negotiate those tensions in a variety of ways.