Feminist Inquiry in the Sociology of Religion 291
In Church and Community. Gilkes notes in the introduction that, “understanding the
importance of women to the institutions of African American life and culture required
immersion in the social worlds of black women” (2000: 1). Gilkes’s lifelong immersion
in the worlds of black women community activists and church women is reflected
in how she captures the constraints the women she studied face and their resistance
against it in an account that is both celebratory and critical.
Several essays come from her research on gender relations within COGIC (Church of
God in Christ). It is worth noting that this is not Gilkes’s own denomination. Gilkes’s
experiences connect her to the women she studies, and her writing moves between
locations using fully what she knows from listening to others, and what she knows
from her own experiences. In these essays, she explores the relative autonomy of the
women, and posits a “dual sex” political system within the black Holiness and Pente-
costal churches. Although women could not be ordained, “community mothers” had
power and authority. Gilkes notes that white and black women have different experi-
ences in their churches which leads to different understandings of the problems. White
women experience exclusion, tokenism, and isolation. Black women share with black
men the experience of invisibility in a racialized society, but, in their churches, they
are visible, coproducers of the black community.
In a chapter called “Some Mother’s Son and Some Father’s Daughter: Issues of
Gender, Biblical Language and Worship,” Gilkes shows how churched and unchurched
black women experience the sustaining power of their religious tradition. Gilkes
asks, “What is the relationship between the importance of black women to the
social construction of black religious knowledge and the ambivalent response of
black women to white feminist movements?” (2000: 125). Her analysis of oral tra-
dition and Afro-Christian practices explicates how preaching as a male discourse ex-
ists in interdependence with the response to the call. Women’s roles as prayer war-
riors, singers, and givers-of-testimony transform “private troubles” to “public issues”
within a covenant community, and establishes their ownership in their churches and
traditions.
Several of these essays show African-American women as cultural workers within
their own communities. Yet the essays also reveal Gilkes’s concerns about the degree
to which the historically black churches fail women, by refusing to ordain women and
support them, and by failing to address the issue of cultural humiliation. Gilkes calls
for an affirmation of life (2000: 194), which values black women. For Gilkes, speaking
out of the African-American tradition, sacred centers are power centers organizing an
alternative center of power against the relations of ruling. Gilkes is not uncritical of
black churches, but she stands within the churches and speaks from the inside out.
Milagros Pe ̃na:Border Crossings
The blurring of the boundaries between religious and nonreligious institutions, public
and private, sacred and secular, and between grassroots politics and the politics of
everyday life that we see in the works of Nason-Clark and Gilkes takes on an added
dimension in the work of Milagros Pena (see Pe ̃ na, Chapter 27, this volume). Focusing ̃
on a Woman’s Alliance that emerged among Anglos and Latinas on both sides of the
border between Mexico and the United States, Pena shows that religious women and ̃
lay women found commonalities on women’s issues, despite the fact that they were