Subtitle: Gender Negotiation in Evangelical Families
Author: John P. Bartkowski
Subject: Sociology/Religion
Paper ISBN 0-8135-2919-0
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2918-2
Pages: 210 pp.

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Description: An examination of marital and gender relations among evangelical Protestant husbands and wives.

"Bartkowski draws from a treasure trove of stories to make evangelicals understandable and alive. Like everyone else, they struggle to create workable ways of being men, women, and families in a changing world."--Nancy Tatom Ammerman, author of Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World

"Bartkowski very nicely mixes methods--combining an analysis of evangelical advice manuals, an ethnography of an evangelical congregation, and in-depth interviews with married evangelical couples--to produce an important contribution to our growing understanding of the complexity, ambivalence, and diversity within American evangelicalism."--Christian Smith, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

"Using a deft combination of historical material, textual analysis, interviews and ethnographic observation, Bartkowski unpacks the multiple discourses about, and practices within, marriage and families among evangelical Protestants."--Rhys H. Williams, editor of Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality

John P. Bartkowski investigates the debates over gender and the family as they are manifested within contemporary evangelicalism. The author asks: Have debates over relations between husband and wife been altered by the emergence of new evangelical movements such as the Promise Keepers? And given the fact that leading evangelicals advance competing visions of godly family life, how do conservative religious spouses make sense of their own family relationships and gender identities?

Through in-depth interviews with evangelical married couples, Bartkowski reveals how these men and women jointly negotiate gender roles within their families and selectively appropriate values of the larger culture even as they attempt to cope with the conflicting messages of their own faith.

John P. Bartkowski is an assistant professor in the department of sociology, anthropology, and social work at Mississippi State University.