Evangelical religion supplied shared values enabling interracial women’s cooperation

Evidence

That black and white women found common cause around which to work and communicate during an era of severely restricted racial contact testifies to the possibility of cooperation that evangelical religion and women’s missions created. Interracial contact not only occurred inside schools of higher learning but also took place throughout the South in churches, homes, and other organizational settings. Indeed interracial cooperation was premised upon shared values, which social scientists label variously as Yankee, neo-Puritan, Victorian, or middle-class. Together these values represented normative standards for gender roles and conventions—which meant sexual purity and other “ladylike” or “gentlemanly” manners—and they also prescribed the dominant society’s ethic of hard work, frugality, temperance, punctuality, neatness, and piety. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 452

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Women’s missionary societies uniquely preserved interracial cooperation through the nadir — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 557; White and black Baptist women’s missionary work created cross-racial sisterhoods — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 430; Different racial classifications converge through shared religious identity — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 82

Broader Connections

• White and black Baptist women’s missionary work created cross-racial sisterhoods #exemplifies (0.92) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 430
• Women’s missionary societies uniquely preserved interracial cooperation through the nadir #exemplifies (0.85) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 557
• Different racial classifications converge through shared religious identity #expands (0.75) — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 82