A Messy Mix: Religion, Feminism and Pentecostals

Abstract

Scholars of Canadian history have been remiss in overlooking conservative religious women, especially when such women claimed to be feminists. Given the commonly shared assumption that second-wave feminism was tied to secularism, the idea that religious women could be committed feminists seems implausible. However, some conservative Christian women, including evangelicals and Pentecostals, considered themselves to be feminists, even as they actively opposed abortion. The Rev. Bernice Gerard was a Pentecostal pastor, a media personality and a municipal politician in Vancouver from 1977 to 1980. Researching her life through using her own life writing provides a case study for grappling with larger questions about conservativism and feminism. In 2000, Gerard, the self-proclaimed feminist, was named as the most significant spiritual figure in British Columbia in the twentieth century. My biographical work about her pays particular attention to her provocative and seemingly contradictory convictions and points to how she resolved the conceptual tensions that framed her religiosity using a process of 'self-authoring'. Theoretical frameworks from the sociology of religion challenge Western feminism's implicit biases and provide useful ways to frame the complexities and paradoxes that arise in the lives of conservative women.