The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution was to have been the next prize for women after winning the vote in 1920. This agenda—first set in 1923—was not accepted by many women or most members of the U.S. Congress until 1972. During the long generation that separated the conception and birth of the ERA, there came also the gestation of modern feminism, which differed from the earlier suffragist ideology in its understanding of gender. Suffragists, for the most part, worked within traditional definitions, insisting that complex and vexing social issues required a woman's touch; women's uniquely gendered experiences should be added to those of men to solve modern problems.

An “enormous mob” marching, protesting, and burning the governor in effigy does not sound like a typical description of late nineteenth-century southern religion. It more than likely conjures images of campus and urban riots of recent times. Surprisingly, such an event occurred in traditionally staid north Alabama over 100 years ago. On February 25,1891, outraged Limestone County farmers marched on the town square in Athens and demonstrated in front of the county courthouse. Across the street from the courthouse stood Theophilus West-moreland's drugstore. Here an effigy of Governor Thomas Goode Jones, with a noose around its neck, was thrown from a second floor window and set aflame, much to the mob's delight. After the governor was taken care of, Westmoreland's brother-in-law and president of the Limestone County Farmers' Alliance, Hector D. Lane, addressed the mob, stoking the passions of the Alliance's “wool hat boys and sun bonnet girls.”

In 1976, a young theologian named Donald Dayton wrote an influential book that sought to put asunder what he saw as an unholy marriage between evangelical religion and conservative politics in America. In Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, Dayton showed how revivalistic Protestantism had, in the nineteenth century, been wedded firmly to progressive political causes. Dayton began his book by frankly admitting that his own political views had been heavily influenced by the student movements—antiwar, civil rights, equal rights— of the 1960's. Separate chapters linked evangelical religion to nineteenth-century movements for racial equality, economic justice, and feminism. In his final chapter, Dayton argued that twentieth-century evangelicalism had abandoned its heritage of radical social reform under the dual influence of premillennialism imported from England and ideas about biblical inerrancy formulated at Princeton Seminary.

The status reversal ritual that American religious historiography has undergone in the last two decades has done much to “mainstream” previously taboo topics within the field. Many religious groups once dismissed as odd and insignificant “cults” are now seen as “new religious movements” worthy of serious scrutiny. One subject that has benefited from this reversal of fortunes is theosophy. Thanks to the work of scholars such as Robert Ellwood and Carl Jackson, theosophists are now part of the story of American religion. Exactly what part they are to play in that story remains, however, unclear.