Women in Church.

Eighty years before the American Revolution began, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather observed that "there are far more godly women in the world than there are godly men." Mather's statement is one of the basic facts of the social history of American religion. In every religion, in almost every time and place, women outnumber men as church members. The support of women for organized religion in the revolutionary period was crucial even though they rarely had public roles to play. During this period women made up an increasingly large proportion of church members. Membership patterns in the Congregational churches of New England demonstrate this. During the entire revolutionary era women consistently made up more than half of most congregations. From 1730 to 1770 an average of 59 percent of all new church members were women. From 1770 to 1800 that number rose to 64 percent, and...